At 3:58 PM +0100 11/6/02, Otto Spaniol wrote:
Hello,
Lyman Chapin wrote (and was in line with Harry Rudin and Guy Leduc):
I agree with Guy - it doesn't matter what happens to any of the various print publishers, because the printed books are irrelevant. IFIP and TC6 must move very quickly in the direction of on-line publication; if they do not, they will also become irrelevant.
Hmmm. I cannot fully agree on that. Of course a CD-Rom or another electronic medium is nice, cheap and maybe unavoidable for the future. But a book is something else: from a useability aspect, from a cultural point of view,.....
Otto,
I agree with you on this; it would be terrible to do away with printed books entirely. Conference proceedings, however, are much more useful in electronic form than in printed (book) form - they are more readily accessible, they are searchable, and they can be easily referenced. The vast majority of conference papers are of no interest to anyone (other than the authors, and perhaps their academic tenure and promotion review commitees :-)) soon after they are published; a small minority continue to be of interest, and a very small minority of those become essential reference points for future work. Papers in the first category make a more valuable (if brief) contribution if they are available electronically; by the time they appear in book form, much of their (limited) usefulness has disappeared. Papers in the second and third category should appear first in electronic form (timeliness), but should also be published in printed (book or printed journal) form, as they have genuine long-term reference and archival value - and we all know how reliably "archival" electronic media are!
The major negative aspect of books is the time needed to print them and the price (which becomes higher and higher and even unaffordable if not enough books can be sold any more). My feeling is that we still need books for a while (and "for a while" could mean "for many years") in addition to electronically available material.
I think we need books for a very long while - many, many years, at least until someone has found a way for an electronic version of a paper to remain "readable" for hundreds or thousands of years. But printed books cannot be the first or only place in which research is reported. It is literally true that a paper that is not available in electronic form does not exist for most (maybe all) of the researchers who might be interested in it. That does not mean that the paper *should not* appear in printed form - only that if it does not appear in electronic form, then it doesn't matter whether it appears in printed form or not. That's what I meant by "the printed books are irrelevant" in my original message.
- Lyman