1. See, for example, Astle and Hamaker (1988), Joyce and Mertz (1985), Joyce (1990), Kingma and Eppard (1992), Chressanthis and Chressanthis (1993a, 1993b, 1994a, 1994b), Noll and Steinmueller (1992), Petersen (1989,1990), Quandt (1996), and Thatcher (1992). [BACK]

2. A small number of additional papers, by authors not involved in Foundation projects, was commissioned on topics deemed particularly relevant for electronic and digital libraries. [BACK]

3. For more detailed discussion of these issues, see Blinder (1997) and Blinder and Quandt (1997). [BACK]

4. As a parallel, note that investment in computers and related equipment accounted for less than 10% of gross investment in the U.S. economy in 1996. For a comprehensive account of the economics of the "computer revolution," see Sichel (1997). [BACK]

5. For example, digitizing in a myriad different ways: see Anne R. Kenney's remarkable benchmarks in chapter 2. [BACK]

6. Technically speaking, the sellers of such products are monopolistic competitors. [BACK]

7. But price discrimination emerging from the difficulty of reselling cannot be the whole story, because it seems largely confined to journals and not to monographs. [BACK]

8. Louisiana State University, among others, has replaced journal subscriptions with a liberal document delivery service, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. [BACK]

9. Bakos and Brynjolfsson (1997) argue that under certain simplifying assumptions, the latter strategy permits the vendor to realize substantial profit while at the same time inflicting only modest deadweight loss on the purchaser. [BACK]

10. The question of the quality of presentation versus the cost is one of the important trade-offs that the academic profession may have to face in the future. See Andrew Odlyzko (chapter 23). [BACK]

11. By "interrelated" we mean that some of these questions cannot be answered in isolation: the answer to one may well depend on the answer to another one. [BACK]

12. See, for example, Chressanthis and Chressanthis (1993a, 1993b, 1994a, 1994b) and Petersen (1989, 1990). For a notable exception that does deal with the issue of which journal prices are increasing, see Noll and Steinmueller (1992). [BACK]

13. Analogies are the Netscape HTML Editor or the Microsoft FrontPage Editor that permit one to write HTML code practically without knowing anything about HTML. [BACK]

14. It is a common perception that the amount of time spent on software installation and on the maintenance of computer and software integrity is substantially larger today than it was in the ''good old days" of DOS, a mere five years ago. [BACK]

15. The vastly different outcomes that may occur when different search algorithms are applied to the same database is well illustrated in Besser and Yamashita (1997). [BACK]