Shelly Warwick <swarwick[_at_]way.com> wrote:
>
> While electronic publishing may well be economically feasible,
> especially for small run items, what it actually does is transfer the
> printing cost to the buyer of the work. While most of us will read or
> a page or two or maybe more on the screen, I don't of anyone who would
> choose this method read a long work (say a novel or a scholarly
> monograph) so we print. This could be considered an other instance of
> unbundling of benefits and services (like selling software and hardware
> separately, or pants and jackets, at a price that if both are bought,
> they cost more than they would have when both were sold together).
Personally, I hunt for electronic versions of things I have on paper, so I can search and even index them... but, for many users, yes...
> Another issue in electronic publishing is bibliographic control. How
> long will any URL be good for? What about scholarly access? What
> about indexing? How to know which version or update is cited?
I'm involved in a number of lively discussions about this among UK librarians... and the World-Wide Web Coalition (W3C) is involved in proposing standards towards meeting these concerns.
> Perhaps the Library of Congress will have to provide for electronic
> deposit of materials and become the site of record.
Yes. It will.
> Also, what happens when
> software changes radically? What happens when over generations of
> upgrades browers are no longer totally downwardly compatible and older
> documents can't be read? Even if some provision was made for updating
> of code, would it still be the original work? Or would the change in
> code change the expression? Will future scholars first need to get
> copies of outdated browsers to access works?
That's why I believe W3C are the good guys and N*tsc*p* and M*cr*s*ft are the bad guys in the "standards" field: W3C are extremely concerned to ensure that everything will be backwardly-compatible. SGML (of which HTML is a tiny sub-set) is expressive enough that there's no reason everything shouldn't be.
> Its easy to publish on the Web - but hard to keep a continuity to the
> literature.
Yup...
Mike
Mike Holderness
<mch[_at_]cix.compulink.co.uk>
Received on Thu Apr 25 1996 - 05:27:19 GMT
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