Tom Berquist, the newly anointed editor of the American Journal of Roentgenology , in his October editorial, posed the question of when and how and why or why not should AJR go electronic. He published some of the answers in the January issue. To no surprise, there were strongly worded differences of opinion. He did not indicate how those differences related to the age of the respondents.
I did not answer the question, though as a reader and occasional contributor to AJR , I thought about the subject. I think about it for other publications I write or edit and have the responsibility of circulating. My lifelong preference is for ink on paper. I grew up working on my local newspaper, which was also the town printing shop. I learned how to set type, how to assemble the type into pages, and how to prepare the daily issue of the paper, plus handbills, invoices, calling cards, brochures, and any other printing job. By the time I finished high school, what I wanted was to write publications, and not to print them.
About the end of World War II, printing processes began to change. Casting type from hot metal disappeared in favor of composition on electric typewriters and printing from offset plates. The changes were good, quicker, cleaner, easier to learn, less expensive. But the products were still ink on paper, sometimes in four colors, off of presses that folded and assembled each publication. In one sense, the changes were as acceptable as the automatic gear shifts for our cars.
I still composed on the manual typewriters I had been using for half a century. My copy was then transmuted into electronics, put into an electronic printing process, and still emerged as ink on paper.
Soon, computer uses were spreading as rapidly as the common cold. My children took to computer uses as my wife and I had taken to typewriters. Then, websites and e-mail. One of my daughter’s professors required her to send papers to him electronically. He would respond the same way. A few years later, publication editors began to require manuscript submission via the same process.
A dozen years ago, I made the leap to composing on the same computer I still use. The writing is not faster. The editing and corrections are far easier. And, with a bit of help for the process, my words are wafted through cyberspace to their target. In managing the International Society of Radiology, I can compose a note to my executive committee and send it around the world in minutes.
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