Comments on: Two-Up Publishing & the Erosion of Print

By: A Decade of “Crossing the Chasm” — The Mountain Has Moved « The Scholarly Kitchen

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:34:35 +0000

[...] A sense of the land crumbling away beneath our feet comes when you read announcements of journals shrinking their page counts due to the economic climate. And the American Chemical Society is shedding print slowly but surely in order to complete their leap across the chasm. [...]

By: Sue Cardinal

Sue Cardinal — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:57:55 +0000

Most libraries won’t be able to pay the many thousands that an 85% increase for print will cost so the end of print seems close. Even individual ACS members are being “encouraged” to embrace the online. I have encouraged ACS Publications to strengthen their post cancellation program as electronic archives haven’t been able to compete with paper yet.

By: Carol Anne Meyer

Carol Anne Meyer — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 02:45:11 +0000

I’m thinking the production people at ACS are under 40.

I’m wondering if most of the print readers of ACS pubs are over 40.

Seems like a little market research would have been in order here. Unless, as speculated, the idea is to hurry the demise of print.

I used to print landscape too, but not anymore.

By: John Sack

John Sack — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:40:39 +0000

For those of us who have great vision or very good glasses, this is brilliant. And at least for the reader who is skimming a print issue, it should work well. (As well, you could say the pages are just a little *smaller* than the Kindle DX.) As Kent suggests, some of us have printed documents this way for a while (I tell people it makes the printing go faster, and most people get it after a second or two.)

ACS probably isn’t the first publisher to do this in the scholarly market. I’m not sure who the first is, but this idea reminds me of the OED “compact edition” that was published in two volumes back in the 1970s (it was a selection of the Book of the Month club at the time — hard to imagine that now): the 20-volume OED was condensed into two large thick volumes by printing pages 4-up. The boxed set came with a magnifying glass in a little drawer.

Now of course I have the OED online (HighWire built the OED online for OUP). But I haven’t given away my compact OED!

John

By: Commentarius

Commentarius — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:21:51 +0000

This isn’t the entire story. What isn’t mentioned above is that ACS is eliminating the “deep discount program” that allowed libraries that subscribe to the web versions to keep print for “only” 15% of the journal’s price, i.e. pay 115% for both formats. I can’t imagine any library that’s paying attention will want to keep print for double the cost, and indeed that seems to be ACS’ intent. They are even offering libraries credit rebates for cancelling early in 2009. Individual members also will no longer have discounted personal subscriptions.

The half-size format is clearly just to bridge the gap before ceasing print entirely, which is a long overdue move on the part of publishers, and might actually help library bottom lines. I applaud ACS for seeming to be the first penguin off the ice floe; although they haven’t quite dived in yet, their toes are now over the edge.

PRINT IS DEAD, at least for journals. It’s high time that all stakeholders come out and admit this, and allow everyone to move on. Readers have had almost 15 years to adjust to this notion. Time’s up.