A very good debate, with a number of points raised for further discussion.
I am a bit busy (proofreading the new book and working at the printing
company to finish it) to say much at the moment, but here are a few initial
reactions :
Web publishing is undoubtedly a good idea for books which are 'out of
print'. This odd phrase is a bit ambiguous; it refers to works whose
publishers have no intention of further reprinting them, and of which there
is no more stock at booksellers. Ascertaining the former is a matter of a
simple letter to the publisher, but the latter is harder to establish. It's
all too easy to say 'well it's out of print so I can't get it', but in fact
stocks of all kinds of books linger in the most unlikely places. The truth
is, of course, that most people will take their favourite bookseller's word
for it that a particular work is 'out of print' and won't bother writing to
the publisher. I wonder how many such letters it would take for a publisher
to consider doing another run. It might be a good idea for COA to get up a
'hot list' of desirable works and have their members sign petitions for
their republication.
The publishing of journals on CD ROM is, as several people have pointed
out, perhaps the only way for some of the bigger and more obscure ones to
survive. The cost of printing and shipping the Zoological Record, for
example, is prohibitive (though they don't help reduce the number of pages
with their repetitious format and extravagant layout either). I don't
dispute this - but I am talking about shell books for collectors and
curators.
Most of the contributors over the last days have been in favour of
copyright laws, and have supported authors' and publishers' right to
control as far as possible the re-use of their work. It would be nice to
see publishers admit when they have given up persisting with a work and
pass the contents into the public domain via the web, but that is only
likely to happen in return for some sort of one-off payment for the rights.
A truly altruistic act, therefore, would be for a person or organisation
(COA?) to buy the rights to, say, Weaver and Dupont's Volute book and
construct a website where the book could be freely viewed and copied. How
much would that cost, I wonder?
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