If you check out the bibliography of scholarly books, you would find several references to websites that supplement the print literature on the subject. Computers have become an essential tool for communication, learning and reference. The question is what implications does this have for upmarket publishing of specialized books that cater to a small segment of the market? Does this mean that websites will replace scholarly books and, if this is so, how would it impact the researcher or the reader?

There has been a severe cutback for scholarly books with upmarket publishers, with the emphasis shifting to mass-market books that have a much wider market base. The process is called ?dumbing down?, that is, to simplify or reduce the intellectual contents of a subject to make it accessible to a wider market. The reasons for web postings replacing or supplementing print material are obvious. The institutional market has not grown because library grants have not kept up with book prices. The cost of sales have gone up too. Besides, publishers argue that if the cost of editorial inputs for a book with a print run of 500 copies is the same as a book with a sales potential of 5000 copies, wouldn?t it be advisable to go for the book which has a larger market share?

After all, the notion that publishers should cater to improve public sensitivities has been tossed aside as too antiquated. Success is what counts; and success means money. Publishing is a three-way collaboration between the publisher, author and retailer. If the publisher and the retailer don?t see any incentives in scholarly books, they have little choice except to go for books that keep them afloat. But there is a problem that publishers and booksellers face: the lack of physical space. Warehousing costs have gone up enormously which has been compounded by a large number of titles published every year. What this means is that good books get buried under the glitz-sex-romance-celeb stuff because that sells. In cyberspace, there?s no such problem: you can post whatever you wish to. Wordage doesn?t matter.

Does the author have any say or is he really and truly dead? For authors of specialized studies, faced with the prospect of endless ?rejection slips?, there is nothing that can be done except to post their studies on the net. There is an ego problem here because ?posting? isn?t the same thing as a book but it is better than being blanked out all together. Some authors have argued that the true value of a scholarly work can be assessed only by the number of times it is cited in other such studies but this problem has been solved by recording the number of ?hits? a web site gets over a period of time.

That websites have now become part and parcel of the book world can be seen by the number of reviews carried by top-end journals and newspapers. Websites will increasingly supplement books and the reader. It would be better to accept them as an essential tool of learning.