Greg Tananbaum drawed the following conclusions from the lis-medical debate about Stop Printing:
- That many, but not all, institutions prefer the electronic medium to its print counterpart.
- That scholars across generations generally share this preference.
- That both of these preferences are trending more and more toward electronic over time.
- That a number of compelling reasons exist to keep the printing press from dry dock, including the plight of the non-affiliated reader, the need/desire of publishers to recognize a print ad revenue stream, and a desire to test the long-term viability of e-archiving solutions like Portico and LOCKSS.
And Rick Anderson added:
During the print era, we all thought of ourselves as more-or-less permanent repositories of the information we selected. But we paid for permanence with breadth — we could afford to house our journals permanently, but we couldn’t afford to buy everything our patrons needed. Today we can flip that model: online access makes it possible for us to provide much more of the content our patrons want, but (in many cases) not to do so in a reliably permanent way. This means we have to ask ourselves a serious question: to what degree is permanence of access more important than breadth of coverage? I think the right answer will vary depending on the library.