Looking Back: Stinson's "The Digital Incunable Era" (Oct 2013 - What are new insights into digital publishing?)

Now, this is an interesting survey question to revisit: "What are new insights into digital publishing?" 

Timothy Stinson responded in an article titled "The Digital Incunalbe Era." Beginning with a discussion of early printing, Stinson segues into talking about digital publishing, emphasizing the inherent labor of such work and the transactional, monetized nature of academic publishing : "The contemporary digital scholar often edits, translates, annotates, publishes, negotiates rights for, design interfaces for, and distributes her scholarly work. The many technological, social, political, and financial problems inherent in such work are burdensome, but this is clearly a direction in which we must move and many have taken up the call. On top of these challenges, however, many scholars are for the first time being asked that their work be self-sustaining, or even revenue generating." 

He goes further to state that "somehow the move to digital publishing has brought with it frequent expectations of profitability and self-sustainability that were not part of the print model of scholarship; the scaffolding of subsidized support has been pulled from beneath the scholar at the time of greatest need."

How have you seen the conversation and practices surrounding digital publishing evolve or stay the same? Thoughts about the labor of digital publishing? In what ways is this a greater or lesser issue three years since this post?

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