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