Inside Higher Ed published an article by Scott McLemee today that summarizes an article by Sandy Thatcher in Against the Grain, a library newsletter that is not yet available online. McLemee says that Against the Grain isn't "well-known," but I don't think that's true, at least in my library. McLemee is correct, however, when he describes the newsletter as offering "a running colloquy for far-sighted discussion among librarians, publishers, and others in the more scholarly reaches of the book trade."
McLemee's purpose is to summarize an article published by Sandy Thatcher entitled, "The Hidden Digital Revolution in Scholarly Publishing: POD, SRDP, the 'Long Tail," and Open Access." Thatcher argues that
[T]he peculiar challenges faced by university presses have given them an incentive to uses digital resources in ways that put them somewhat ahead of their peers in the world of trade or mass-market publishing. Given the small market for most scholarly titles, academic publishers were in a unique position to benefit from short-run digital publishing (SRDP) and print-on-demand technologies. 'The bane of the entire publishing industry for centuries ... has 'been the need ... to make guesses up front about the lifetime sales potential of each book. ...The quest for economies of scale led to big inventories of unsold books ...'Digital publishing offers a solution to this problem, according to Thatcher, because "the unit cost for digital printing is flat ... and you don't have unsold inventory piling up. With a monograph prepared in digital format, it is possible to issue it, as the demand dictates, through short-run or on-demand publishing." Positive effects include less damage to the environment, better cash flow, and more willingness of publishers to take a chance on marginal titles. Certainly this would benefit authors and the free flow of information in the long run. Thatcher calls this a "hidden revolution." Further, he believes that "publication of a work in digital format does not preempt its existence as a paper-and-ink artifact, but rather enables it." The biggest problem at present with digital publishing is illustrated books, particularly books on art history, where the quality of the illustrations is crucial. Thatcher is confident that this problem can be overcome, however. McLemee concludes his interesting discussion of Thatcher's article by pointing out that some books belong on your shelves because they "shape your life, or shake it--and you will always want a copy of those around." Others books you read for the information they contain and move on; a digital version of such books is adequate. As McLemee puts it, "some of the less ravishing moments in your readerly experience may involve a handheld screen" and not a physical book.