Historian Thinks E-books Might Be Good for Monographs

Staff -- Library Journal, 3/8/1999

"If the future brings newspapers without news, journals without pages, and libraries without walls, what will become of the traditional book?" writes historian Robert Darnton in The New York Review of Books. He sees a role for electronic books in cases where libraries devote increasing dollars to journals. "The best case to be made for e-books concerns scholarly publishing, not in all fields, but in large stretches of the humanities and social sciences where conventional monographs... have become prohibitively expensive to produce." He adds: "An e-dissertation could contain virtually unlimited appendices and databases. It could be linked to other publications in a manner that would permit readers to find new paths through old material."