Print problems

A great piece by Matt McAdam on why it's a problem that deans love books:

[B]y clinging to the outdated notion that scholarship must be published in print, deans and scholars hurt university presses. They tie the legitimate responsibility of determining and distributing quality scholarship to a costly, inefficient, inflexible, and unsustainable publishing model. By insisting that print is a necessary condition for scholarly quality, deans and scholars make it more difficult for university presses to stay in business, thereby making it more difficult for them to publish print books! At the same time, scholars insist on having their own work published in print while they increasingly engage the work of others online. And deans demand that scholars publish print books while not giving their libraries enough money to buy them. They insist on print while undermining the demand for it.