The changing world of scholarship

I got a box of books in the mail yesterday. This book to be exact

I’m not really interested in reading it, as I assume I already know what’s in it. I always hate looking at my own work, since it alway seems so dead, and in the past, (I was done with the final edits well over a year ago) and inadequate. The only think that I find at all interesting about the book is the marketing.

Some of you of may want to buy it to drive up my Amazon numbers. Of course some of you may also want to read it. Actually,  if you do want to read it I’m not sure you need to buy it. Chapter one is available for free from the publisher. There is also a Google books link, and although it is
not up yet I assume soon you will be able to Google the whole thing. My old book is already up on Google, so there is no reason to buy that one. You can already read the table of contents on World Cat and I assume soon on Amazon. There are already used bookseller selling it on Amazon marketplace, although at a mark-up rather than
a discount. There has been a lot of talk about the decline of the book as a form of scholarship, and we seem to be reaching the point where the actual physical book is less important than the electrons that surround it. Of course it was electrons to begin with. When will we start to skip the printing part?