My colleague Deborah Wieseman emailed me with this sobering news from Insidehigereducation.com: the University of Michigan Press is shifting to a model of primarily publishing its monographs electronically, rather than in print. This is huge news, I think, for a press of the prestige and importance of Michigan to go in this direction is very significant. I'm very busy this morning, but hope to have some more thoughts on this shortly. A couple of initial reactions: this is going to lead others to take more seriously this possibility; it may lend credibility to electronically published books; it may signal a shift towards electronic publication for journals as well.
Update: Here's the University of Michigan Press' statement from their blog.
Ugh, I feared this would happen, though I don't like it one bit. I read somewhere that we read 30-40% slower from a computer screen - though for me I'd say its a 70% slowdown!
And after 20 minutes, it just plain hurts!!
Posted by: Kathleen Bergin | March 23, 2009 at 06:01 PM