Legal Commentary

A couple months back, against all odds and in spite of my own skepticism that it would ever happen, I sent out a batch of article reprints.  They were so dusty from sitting in a distant corner of my office that my poor RAs had to wipe the dust off the copies before sending them on their way.  As I was endeavoring to finally get this done, a colleague noted that in the future, she is going to send out her next set of reprints in digital form.  This means writing a nice personal email to the recipients (not a mass email) and appending a .pdf file of the final version of the article along with each one.

In retrospect, it does seem strange that in a world where everything that can be done digitally is, we still stick to analog formats when it comes to reprints (at least I think we do?I clearly just did, and I get plenty of reprints in analog form but none digitally).  The more I thought about this, the more reasons I came up with that e-reprints may be the best way to go.  They?re cheaper (no postage), faster (no snail-mail delay), and less wasteful (countless trees saved via e-delivery).  It may even be easier for users to have an e-copy to file right into their hard drive, so they can read it on their computer or Kindle (and possibly cut and paste the text of block quotations into forthcoming work), rather than having to keep track of countless little reprint pamphlets.

I can think of a few reservations people might have about electronic reprints.  One may be that sending out e-reprints seems a lot like spamming people, and may be exactly like spamming people, if it?s done the wrong way.  Part of the charm of getting reprints is that it?s a personal touch.  I may be in the minority on this one, but I really appreciate when someone?s thought to include me on their reprint list, even if the article isn?t really related to my work.  Mass email sends just the opposite message (impersonal rather than personal), but I don?t think e-reprints have to have this quality if they?re done with the appropriate personal touch in the body of the email.  There?s also something nice about having a physical copy of an article to read, but this is entirely a matter of taste, and I think increasingly people prefer to start with an e-copy of a file, which can always be printed if the reader so chooses.

So, are e-reprints really superior, or are there problems with them that I?m overlooking?  And if they really are the way to go, why hasn?t the practice caught on?