Relative Costs of Print and Online Documents

["George F. Hayhoe" <george -at- GHAYHOE -dot- COM>]

Bill Sullivan responded to my posting yesterday that online publication via
the Web would be a much cheaper way to get STC conference proceedings to
readers.

I don't know what the experiences of others are--and I'd like to hear
them--but in the context of publishing an online version of _Technical
communication_, I'm finding that while Web-based publication avoids the
press and paper costs of paper publication, it adds other costs.

HTML code (even if automatically generated from an SGML-based typesetting
system) must be checked. Links must be embedded and tested. Graphics must be
converted to Web formats and color palettes must be adjusted. These tasks
are labor intensive and nontrivial.

In addition, assuming that we're going to offer both paper and online
versions (and I think we must, at least for archival publications like
journals and conference proceedings, and perhaps for other types of
documents for some readers), we must allocate editing and relevant portions
of prepress costs between the print and the online versions.

Finally, we must factor in the costs of Web hosting (server space,
maintenance, etc.), subscription access control (we're not going to give
away the information--at least not the full text), the cost of licensing
high-quality search tools, additional costs of indexing for online
retrieval, and so forth.

Web-based publishing is less expensive, but from what I've seen to date, it
is not as inexpensive as we may assume. Indeed, when both print and online
are required, it represents additional cost.

--George Hayhoe (george -at- ghayhoe -dot- com)
  Editor, _Technical communication_