publication of IASS papers on CDROM

[Dominik Wujastyk]

As those of you who attended the Torino WSC will know, the conference
organisers are proposing to publish the conference proceedings as a CDROM,
not a printed book.

Personally, I am not happy with a CDROM publication for my own paper.  It
really needs to be in print or not at all, I think, and for several
reasons.

It is a fact, perhaps unfortunate, perhaps not, that the system of
academic credit is still narrowly focussed on printed publication.

There are also all sorts of other, technical reasons why a CDROM is
unsuitable, in my view.  It will almost certainly be unreadable in ten or
twenty years, whereas a book will still be no problem.  The computer
screen is no medium for serious reading.  Will special characters be
elegantly and appropriately handled?  And so on.

There are also all the issues that have been so elegantly raised by
Willard Mccarty in several papers, including:
  http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/essays/Challenges/
and
  http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/essays/potency0.html
and others on the same website.

I know, because people have written to me, that I am not alone in being
very unhappy at the idea of CDROM-only proceedings.

May I start a discussion here about this topic, and if a consensus emerges
that the CDROM is a mistake, then perhaps some of us should send a
petition along to Torino and to the IASS board and request the parties
concerned kindly to consider a change of policy on this issue.

Best wishes,
Dominik Wujastyk