Dear Otto,
A (At) 15:58 6/11/02, Otto Spaniol ecrivait (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,..... 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.
This is true for real books (which I personally like too), but not for proceedings of conferences, I'm afraid. When you buy a real book, usually you read (almost) all of it. When you buy (very costly) proceedings, you read almost nothing. Maybe only a couple of papers.
That's the reason why the business model for conferences should be a per-paper cost, not a per-book cost. And a digital library is exactly what you need for that purpose. Of course, some complementary and cheap paper copies for conference attendees is nice. And an additional CD-ROM too. But the real visibility of a conference paper definitely comes first from its presence in a DL and second from the cost to get it as a single paper. If I have to buy a whole costly book to get a single paper, I just forget about it or I get in touch with the author to get an electronic copy of it for free.
Best regards Otto
Best regards, Guy
________________________________________________________________________ Prof. Guy Leduc Tel : +32 4 366 26 98 Université de Liège Secr : +32 4 366 26 91 Réseaux Informatiques Fax : +32 4 366 29 89 Research Unit in Networking (RUN) Guy.Leduc@ulg.ac.be EECS Department, Institut Montefiore, B 28, B-4000 LIEGE 1, BELGIUM http://www.run.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/People/GuyLeduc/