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Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

(disclosure, I'm an ACM member, and a IEEE/Usenix/SAGE/LOPSA member as well)

Professional organizations have trouble with their revenue models.

The journal publishing business that the ACM and IEEE are in isn't sustainable long term, and drives people away or causes perverse benefit schemes, similar to how newspaper's business models fell apart in the last 10 years.

A better method would be to focus on conferences and community, which is more of the way that Usenix and LOPSA work.

That said, there's some solid stuff in the ACM journals, and their membership fees aren't all that crazy.

I can't wait until the dead tree editions of their publications go away.

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I'm going to disagree - I love having the dead tree edition. I'm also a member (granted, at a student rate), but love having a physical copy of something to read when I don't feel like pulling out my laptop just to read some articles. Plus typically, if I pull out my laptop, I have work that needs to be done.

Students are given the option of buying the print magazine though - I think they just need to extend this policy to everyone, rather than making it a print or nothing affair.

Print out the articles you want to read. I don't know anyone who reads ACM proceedings and journals cover to cover, and it wastes a lot of resources.

And now you know someone who does read his monthly copy of CACM from cover to cover. And I pay extra for it (again, student pricing doesn't include physical copies -- something I think they should extend to professional members).

So are you suggesting that I should have to print it out because people shouldn't be forced to pay for it? Or because I'm using some dead trees? Because if it's the second, there about a million more useful places you could recommend people cut down consumption, than on my monthly magazine with about 100 pages, that, again, I pay for.

I think you're talking about different things-- there's the monthly CACM magazine, and then there are the huge books of conference proceedings and journals.

I have enough SIGOPS conference proceedings to make a nice coffee table ;p They are quite ridiculous in size and 95% of it I don't usually read.

Perhaps. I'll agree that the huge conference books are pretty useless (though I can see why university libraries want them), and not something I'd ever purchase. Those papers I _do_ print out. But I did specify monthly magazine in my original comment.

CACM always seemed like a waste. In the 80s every other issue seemed to be full of "women in computing" and "minorities in computing," and while that's a worthy cause, I got mighty sick of it.

Most of the CACM articles were technically weak or about subjects I had no interest in. I would have been happy to not receive it (better, get some other SIG newsletter instead).

In the era of digital distribution, I just print out the stuff I want on dead trees and leave the rest as bits.

CACM was reformed a couple of years ago. In one issue, it became vastly better and it has sustained its quality since that time pretty well. There are always two journal articles with nice introductions for those of us who don't follow their respective fields regularly.

The rest of the articles tend to be pretty solid too; there's very little IT drivel or academic navel-gazing left. It probably doesn't hurt to have some awareness of what's going on in academia even for those of us who work in industry anyway.

Not that any of this really refutes your main point that digital distribution is inherently more personalizable.

1. CACM is more of a magazine than a journal or conference proceeding.

2. You aren't paying for all the externalities associated with your choices, so I wouldn't be so sure you are truly paying for your 100 odd pages. Maybe you could look into a KindleDX or something similar for your mobile reading pleasure?

> I love having the dead tree edition. I'm ... a student

The novelty of getting science in the mail will fade. I am now completely addicted to Mendeley: I have it on my ipad, iphone, mac, and windows box at work.

The problem with dead trees is retrieving that article you read 7 years ago becomes a real bear. What journal was it in? Something about venules and tylenol .... crap. Mendeley is like having Gmail for your journal articles. Even the highlighting and notes are in the cloud. Love it.

Transfer of copyright ownership sounds harsh. It should at least be copyright sharing. There must be some huge benefit involved for people to transfer their ownership.

Unfortunately, transfer of copyright seems more the norm than the exception in the world of journals. The open access movement seems to have eroded this somewhat.

In an academia of "publish&perish" the benefit of transferring your copyright is that you get published and add another point to your tenure-track bonus list.

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