RE: digital-copyright Digest 27 Sep 2004 15:00:00 -0000 Issue 425

["Downes, Stephen" <Stephen.Downes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hiya, 

From: "Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

> It won't be negotiable for long.  Interlibrary loans of digital
> materials (not hardcopy) raise the specter of a publisher only being
> able to sell a single copy of a publication, with other copies being
> disseminated free of charge.

The flip side, of course, is that the same technology allows publishers to
make one copy of a resource, and then to sell it many times to multiple
resources with virtually no additional expenses. 

>  I don't know of any institutions that would be willing to
> shoulder the cost (500x?  2,000x?) of providing a subscription for the
> the entire library community.  Widespread interlibrary loan will
> simply mean that many things simply won't get published.

I don't know of many institutions that think it is reasonable to continue
paying print-based prices for resources that cost much less to produce than
the books and journals of old. It makes more sense to simply post resources
on institutional websites, bypassing the publishers completely, and
incidentally, also, the cumbersome mechanics of interlibrary loans.

-- Stephen Downes