The window opens . . .but it's going to close in about a year

Views: Print or Byte? - Inside Higher Ed:
"It's clear that the recession is accelerating the shift to digital publishing. “With the economy shaping up as it seems to be,” one astute observer of trends in the university press world told me last summer, “we’re going to see a 15 year leap in publishing in the next two years.” And that was well before trillions of dollars started vanishing into the ether."
. . . The bane of the entire publishing industry for centuries,” writes Thatcher, has “been the need -- rooted in the simple economic fact that unit costs decrease rapidly with the increase in the size of print runs when offset printing technology is used -- to make guesses up front about the lifetime sales potential of each book. And naturally, in their excitement about the new books they had acquired, editors were forever optimistic about their prospects in the marketplace and urged initial printings to be correspondingly generous.”