ON THE SPEED OF ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING

Thank you for mentioning my CoinWeek article, Why Do We Want this Stuff?: 8 Views on the Psychology of Collecting. Not counting your email newsletter and my own email newsletter Sample Slab Update, this was my first work for the Web. What stood out most was the speed of publishing. I sent CoinWeek two articles on Saturday 1/14. They ran the first on Tuesday 1/17 and the second on Monday 1/23. It took only a few days to edit, add photos, and design the articles with attractive custom graphics, all without the need for my input. In contrast, monthly magazines sometimes take more than a year to run my submissions.

One of my reasons for starting The E-Sylum was my hatred of the sheer drudgery of page layout. I can do it, but it's just not my cup of tea - I don't have that much patience or time. Online I can work fast, often getting new contributions Sunday afternoon and publishing them that evening.

In addition to layout, many print periodicals have other chores which often include fleshing out references, obtaining images, getting permissions and fact-checking, all of which are well worth waiting and paying for. Books have even higher standards and longer timeframes, but again are worth the wait and cost.

We're the McDonald's of numismatic publishing - plentiful, fast and cheap. Our print brethren are the sit-down restaurants with china and tablecloths. Paid publications and their able staffs play a key role, and all of us must continue supporting them with our dollars and contributions.

The lines are blurring though, as more publications have an online component. When we went to HTML and could include pictures and nicer fonts we acquired the LOOK of a professional journal, and people sometimes mistake The E-Sylum for a refereed journal, which it never was. Rather, it's a conversation among writers and readers, with an editor to keep things orderly and civil. Keep those virtual cards and letters coming, folks. -Editor

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF COLLECTING (www.coinbooks.org/v20/esylum_v20n04a16.html)