Library in Transition

"'E-journals: their use, value and impact' takes an in-depth look at how researchers in the UK use electronic journals, the value they bring to universities and research institutions and the contribution they make to research productivity, quality and outcomes. Journal publishers began to provide online access to full-text scholarly articles in the late 1990s, triggering a revolution in the scholarly communications process. A very high proportion of journal articles are now available online - 96 per cent of journal titles in science, technology and medicine, and 86 per cent of titles in the arts, humanities and social sciences. "

The Justice department has opened up an inquiry into the antitrust implications of Google's settlement.

Main point: the book needs to be re-engineered for the web, taking advantage of the network (cf IfBook) Interesting point: "As wikipedia has demonstrated, collaboration is easiest when documents are constructed using a modular architecture." Favorite comment: "(Incidentally, I hate the word "ebook". It's like calling a car a "gashorse".)"

It's clear that the recession is accelerating the shift to digital publishing. "With the economy shaping up as it seems to be," one astute observer of trends in the university press world told me last summer, "we're going to see a 15 year leap in publishing in the next two years." And that was well before trillions of dollars started vanishing into the ether.

Books are essential to American life, and if publishing perishes, Stephen L. Carter argues, democracy itself will soon follow.

MIT is going to start publishing faculty papers in their own online repository, bypassing commercial publishers altogether.

"Earlier this week the University of Michigan Press announced it is shifting its center of gravity from print to digital publishing, at least for monographs -- a change that will be reflected in its catalog within two years. It is the shape of things to come. Or rather (given what I've heard at the annual meetings of the Association of American University Presses over the past few years) the shape of what everyone has known is coming for some time now, without quite relishing the prospect."

O'Reilly experience w/ digital publishing