RE: Electronic or print?

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

And the lesson from Gutenberg-e was that, unless the authors 
could produce a print version of their "enhanced" dissertations, 
journals in their field would not review them and they would not 
get the credit they needed to win tenure and promotion. Any print 
version, of course, could not represent the full content of the 
electronic version as they were "multi-dimensional" works of 
scholarship. As all of us know who have inhabited the academy for 
a long time, old habits die hard!

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


> I have long thought of what we are doing not as electronic
> publishing, but as distributed print publishing...
>
> And as long as the articles we produce are artificially limited
> by the 2-dimensional nature of paper, and the resultant narrative
> structure, I suspect it will stay that way.
>
> If/when publishers (and, of course, their authors) start to think
> of presenting information in more useful ways that are enabled by
> the multi-dimensional Web, then printing them out will become an
> impossibility.
>
> Sally Morris
> Email: sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk