The Role of the Publisher in the Electronic Age

[JOSEPH MAXIMILLIAN MURPHY]

I think there are two ways we're going to see "publishing" change over the
Internet. Publishing companies exist to make money, and they have every right
to. And therefore, we should assume that their electronic publishing will be,
as Milan Roeterink just said, geared toward making more money. I know there are
a lot of things I'd like to see happen with this, although I don't know enough
about business to say it _will_ happen. I think there might be a market for
per-chapter charges to read new books online, as long as it ended up costing
less than a new hardcover. I think we'll see more and more online bookstores,
some of which may be run directly by publishers. I'd love to see just-in-time 
printing (possibly linked to those online catalogs) do away with 
"out-of-print" books. The question for the publishers, of course, is whether
they can offer any or all of these services at a greater profit than what
they're doing now. From a library collection standpoint, some of these could be
helpful, and some wouldn't, and how we spend our acquisition budgets will tell 
the publishers what we think.

On the other hand, there are a lot of organizations out there which create,
collect, organize, and distribute information without a profit motive.
Electronic "publishing" allows these organizations the option of making this
information freely available over the Internet. With youthful idealism, I'll
claim that governments are one of these organizations. If the government looks
at charging for print materials as something it does to control costs rather
than create revenue, then giving it away over the Internet might actually
increase access while decreasing overhead. Newt Gingrich in the U.S. seems to
agree with me; there have been some rules imposed on the Government Printing
Office to try to accomplish just that. 

Similarly, I've been working on a theatre website where we're trying to put the
archives online. I have 2 goals: first, to provide synopses and other
information about the shows we've done, specifically to increase the amount of
useful theatrical information on the Web, and second, to get some "spillover
hits" from the archives to the rest of the site, and hopefully increase theatre
members, donors, and audience. You can give away information with an ulterior
profit motive, after all. <grin> (Shameless Plug: That site, by the way, is
http://www.wst.org.)

And, of course, there are plenty of libraries in just that situation. There's a
treasure trove of public domain material that could go on the Internet. While 
getting libraries more involved with Project Gutenberg would be a good thing, 
I'm thinking even more of the archival and special collections material, which
could really revolutionize research in many areas if researchers didn't have to
travel to use it. There were also some great articles about two years ago, I
think in _American Libraries_ (do they run the "White Paper" column?), that 
talked about academic libraries running free electronic journals specifically 
to hold down serials costs. As I remember the argument (and I wish I could
remember the author), it said that universities already pay scholars to
generate information, then they give it to publishers, and then they pay the
publishers to buy that information back. (In some fields, you even have to pay
the publishers to get published.) This is silly, and economically wasteful.
Higher education libraries and computer centers are in a position to facilitate
peer-reviewed electronic journals which can give that information away while
still establishing primacy of publication and ensuring quality. Seems to make
sense to me; it just entails getting the faculty (and the indexing companies)
to take the plunge too.

Of course, this is all dependent on the money falling out of the sky to fund
these projects. Ay, there's the rub... money's _always_ the rub...

-Joe Murphy            "Sometimes you just have to look reality in the face
murphyj at cua.edu         and deny it."
                           -- Garrison Keillor