A few years ago, one of SME’s publications went paperless in an effort to streamline costs and deliver the product in a form that was easier to use. That move has not been entirely successful, a disappointment that has illustrated both the actual costs of producing good information and the perils of a changing world of publishing.
The zeitgeist states that the future of print is electronic, and that companies that drag their feet on the way to this brave new world will be left on the remainder table. Libraries are redesigning themselves and going paperless; even the definition of a book and what constitutes reading is under fire. Go paperless or go bust has been the rallying cry of many publishers, and many have leapt into the fray without truly examining what they’re throwing off the side.
On paper (pardon the pun), moving the long and low-selling annual SME Transactions volume to our new e-book format seemed like a sound idea. At over 500 pages and a distribution list in the double digits, this traditional compendium of SME peer-reviewed articles cost more to print than we could charge per volume. Moving to paperless would eliminate an easily quantifiable cost. After all, we received the content of the articles for free. Wasn’t the publications department being excessively prissy in insisting on reformatting and editing the papers for publication – couldn’t the peer-reviewed material just be turned around as is? And why bother with the expensive middleman of paper and ink, when most researchers download articles and print them singly anyway?
Well. In the first place, even the volunteer-staffed peer review process was not entirely free. There is a small but substantial annual charge for the online service where authors can submit their papers, editors and peer reviewers can be put in touch, and emails exchanged within a relatively simple and headache-free framework. In the bad old days, peer review cost a fortune in mailing and photocopying, as each paper had to be individually sent to each reviewer (often multiple times), returned, sent to the editorial associate in charge of deciding its fate, and finally returned to the author. Even in the age of email, however, SME must dedicate part of a staff member’s salary to organizing and running the software, keeping tabs on the papers, making sure that editors and reviewers and authors get prodded and helping all users troubleshoot problems.
Once the paper has gone through peer review and been accepted, there is another set of expenses: the editing. I have written elsewhere about some of the services performed by a careful editing; while being a member of that rather archaic profession makes me somewhat biased, it seems that most users expect and appreciate a certain predictability of formatting and freedom from error. The cost in time, software and infrastructure to provide such formatting and editing is easily the largest expense of producing Transactions, even when it was a bound volume.
Finally, there is the cost of distribution. This is where the transition to electronic erred most significantly. While a hardbound volume of specialized articles on mine topics may not be exactly easy to sell, it has the advantage of being a familiar object that can be transferred in a familiar way. Once you change the format and create an entity that is neither quite familiar nor unfamiliar enough to be interesting, selling it becomes a more challenging prospect. A book of articles is going to be read much differently than the newest Stephen King novel: even the most dedicated reader is going to pick and choose, skimming some articles and skipping others altogether, while focusing only on the graphs or methods section of others. Selling a book in this format forces the reader, the bookseller, the librarian and, ultimately, the publisher to revisit the question of what a book is and why it exists as a book at all and not, say, a series of links on a website. If a reader is only interested in 32 of a book’s 516 pages, what sort of argument is necessary to convince him to buy the whole thing?
In summary, what at first seemed like a simple proposition, remove expense A from the equation and achieve profits in the amount of Former Net Gain Plus A, turned out to be much more complicated, with the elimination of print charges leading to additional costs elsewhere, plus a decline in the ability to sell the product - and legitimate questions raised about whether the traditional format of a historical publication is the best format for its future.
The final lesson of this transition to electronic publication might very well be that SME Transactions, published since 1871, is ready to be delivered to its readers in an entirely new way.
Emily Wortman-Wunder is the technical editor of peer reviewed publications at SME, including all Mining Engineering technical papers, Minerals & Metallurgical Processing, and SME Transactions.