publishing [2]

[Beard Robert E]

        With all due respect to Chuck Gribble, I don't think multimedia
formats are 20 years away and 10 years seem like 2 at my age. I'm not
sure about the physical longevity of CDs but I also don't know of
anything which could degenerate on them.  They operate on physical
imprints read by laser beams. I suppose that checking them out to
undergraduates runs more of a risk than checking out books, but then they
won't need to be checked out, simply browsed in the library.  Instead of
taking notes, useful sections may be simple transferred to a floppy disk
or directly to the reader's hard disk by remote control.  All the
technology is available now.
        Also, I'm not quite sure what Chuck is comparing the $5 cost of a
CD with.  I got that figure from my neice, who just made a tape of the
musical group she performs with.  They decided to buy tapes at $4 but
were offered CDs for a dollar more.  I assume that reflects production
costs and profit. My first book sold for $50.  My latest endeavor will
run about the same, although there will be a $30 paperback available this
time.  I can't imagine that shipping a CD compares in any way with
shipping a 1 lb. book.  And production costs rise precipitously with the
addition of color photographs in a book; on a CD its all digital and each
digit costs the same regardless of what it generated on the screen:
words, photos, motion pictures, sound.
        I have mixed emotions about refereeing.  The decision as to which
issues should be argued in the editorial office and which, in the
journals can be a matter of emotion proportionate to the importance of
the issue in question.  Although I appreciate the rise in quality of the
thinking in current journals as a result of more penetrating refereeing;
I also find myself spending about as much time reading LINGUIST as the
journals.  Indeed, I find Julie Auger's evidence on clitics much more
convincing than that of Maria-Luisa Riviero; yet, while the work of the
latter is in all the refereed journals, I only discovered Auger's work on
the internet.  Is it a wise decision to keep the DEBATE ITSELF, whether
clitics are morphological or syntactic phenomena, out of the journals?
Since the internet simplifies distribution, why is it a bad idea to allow
everyone access to all ideas in our discipline and judge for ourselves
what works and what doesn't?
        I really don't know what drives the costs of books up.  Referees
seldom get more than $200 for refereeing a book-length ms.  and there is
no longer any need for typesetting.  SUNY simply used my diskettes to
generate the typecopy of my latest book.  All they had to do was convert
my aschii code to theirs so that the special characters matched.  They
missed only one character.  Not only did I to the typesetting as I typed
the ms., I provided the artwork since it was already in the MS Word
document.  I simply copied the tables and figures to a separate file,
replaced my font with the one they are using, and reduced the the size.
It took me about 2 hours.  And what does ad copy in Language cost?  I can
do everything but the physical binding at my desk and Bucknell's
duplicating services can do that. Yet prices continue to rise and small
publishers fade.
        As you can tell, I see a publishing world working much more
directly with authors in the future.  Indeed, I see authors working more
directly with each other.  I'm in the process of setting up a WWW homepage
which will explain Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology in words, pictures, and
sound, provide bibliographies, off-prints of published articles, and
manuscripts of articles in preparation.  It will eventually include a
drop-box for further questions and requests.  As much as I have enjoyed
and profitted from Slavica's publications in the past--and I will continue
to do so in the (near) future, it seems to me that it's future is in
providing for means of scholars to exchange the fruits of their research
on internet: providing a central WWW server with Slavic archives and an
electronic journal for each of the subdisciplines.  I would be willing to
pay $20 a month for such a service if it were active and vital.
        Anyway, don't strain your eyes: the future is not as far away as
it used to be.  --Bob