Steve Long writes,
"Once the material is on the Web, only a small percentage of people will
continue to pay for the printed material even IF it is still available in
paper form.  At the same time, printing and postage costs escalate.  Web
site production and maintenance are also expensive."
 
Very true. I am one of two coeditors of the Ichnology Newsletter, an
annual, book-length publication on trace fossils that is produced at a
small loss. The main function of the Newsletter is to increase contacts
among specialists on trace fossils, and of course this also helps the
careers of the coeditors. Profit is not the main motive here, and the
Website is donated by Emory University, so the entire Newsletter is posted
on the Web a year after being published on paper. I would like to do away
with publishing it on paper altogether, because the finances of publication
can be a royal pain:
 
(1) Banks often charge high fees on international checks and wire
transfers. For some of our subscribers, the fees are twice as high as the
subscription. My own bank requires a flat rate of USD 30 to send an
international wire transfer.
 
(2) If someone sends you a check and it bounces, the banks charge a fee to
BOTH of you. The amount is high enough to be annoying, but too low to
bother with because of (1).
 
(3) People being people, they make mistakes. Some of them send too little,
some too much, one person paid twice, and another sent a valid check with
no name on it but the bank's (and we have two correspondents in that city
and are still trying to figure out which one to send the Newsletter to,
since one of them can't remember and the other hasn't replied). The number
of mistakes is surprisingly high and it requires accurate bookkeeping and a
lot of time-consuming correspondence to straighten out. Mostly I just
absorb mistakes made in subscribers' favor, because it is not worth my time
or bank fees to straighten out. But most people are fussy about money and
will remember YOUR mistakes for years!
 
(4) The large majority of people--not just a large fraction, the
MAJORITY--prefers to procrastinate. When you are trying to publish a serial
that includes announcements of meetings in a timely fashion, it can be
troublesome to have to write to subscribers repeatedly to remind them to
send their articles, notes on current research, events, bibliography, and,
oh yes, payment. But no one imagines that it is their fault when YOU are
late getting the publication to them.
 
I had no idea that scientists, of all people, were so impractical when it
came to financial matters. Hmm, now that I have it written down, it seems
obvious, even a cliche'. And I have to admit, I'm right in there with the
best of them when it comes to procrastination.
 
It would help a lot if we didn't have to transfer money, but as long as we
publish on paper, we will need money. And we can't stop publishing on paper
yet, because about one-third of our subscribers are not connected to the
Internet. Those subscribers are precisely the ones who are already laboring
under many other difficulties (isolation, financial constraints, small
libraries, etc.). We don't want to make things more difficult for them.
Some subscribers actually pay for other people's subscriptions, to make
sure that a brilliant but poor scholar is not cut off from the rest of the
community.
 
What is the positive side? Well, it works! First and foremost, I like to
think that we are partly responsible for stepping up the pace of research
in ichnology. I get to correspond almost daily with a brilliant scientist
on the other side of the world, coeditor Alfred Uchman of the Jagiellonian
University in Cracow, Poland. We lose a little money on the Newsletter, and
it takes a lot of time, but we hear about new events months before other
scientists do, and of course a lot of the work we do is interesting to us.
People send us reprints and even books for announcements and keywording in
the bibliography. We correspond regularly with a large number of
specialists in our own field, and they get to know us, so we have become
better known in the field. This is good for our careers and self-esteem, so
ultimately we come out well ahead.
 
So of course I would like people to download the Newsletter for free from
the Web. Many more people could afford to read it that way. Of course, to
prevent abuses of our hospitality, the entire Newsletter is copyrighted,
though in this case every article is copyrighted in the name of the
authors, not the editors. This is a selling point when you're asking people
to contribute articles for no pay to a small audience. Their work remains
their own.
 
I suspect that publishers of shell books feel much the same way, though the
details must be different for each person. Thanks to all for a very
interesting discussion!
 
Andrew K. Rindsberg
Geological Survey of Alabama