Bridging the Divide: Ease of Distribution

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Digital writing further substantiates the value of the humanities through its ease of reproduction and dissemination. Historically, the sphere of academic publication has been one dominated by scarcity. Publishers want to publish books, and scholars want to share their ideas, but at the end of the day, printing is costly, and there is only so much money to go around. That means that scholarly monographs and journals are limited not only in the number of physical copies that can be profitably produced but also in the overall form--the font size, margin spacing, and use of graphics.

With the onset of digital publication, however, academia has entered an abundance economy. In the past, even integrating black and white images or graphics into a text substantially increased the cost of publication, and widespread distribution of scholarly texts was prohibitively expensive. Modern digital technology has made it possible to easily and inexpensively incorporate not only pictures but music, video clips, surveys, and other forms of interactive media into scholarly and non-scholarly works. In addition, [long tail] dynamics have made it possible for even hyper-specialized works of scholarship to reach broad audiences in a number of different disciplines and on a much more global scale. Works that previously justified no more than five hundred print copies are being downloaded and utilized thousands and thousands of times thanks to online repositories and recent digitization efforts. These efforts are making knowledge more accessible for millions of users throughout the world, thus demonstrating to a broad audience the value of the humanities within a modern context.