So I went to Amazon to test the new concordance feature about which David blogged (to no avail, alas) (I mean, “I went to Amazon to no avail,” not “he blogged about it to no avail”), when I noticed that not only were the regular books I’ve written available from Amazon, but also the reviews and articles I published in Interpretation.
I’m proud of “Walk This Way”; I think it segues nicely into the lecture I gave a couple of weeks ago, and someday maybe they’ll mate and give birth to a book. But $6 is a little much even for a very good article by itself. I’d understand if you held out for the complete issue of Interpretation for just a little more. But the mini-reviews for $6? That’s just absurd. My review of Lohse’s Theological Ethics of the New Testament is just 300 words or so. Email me, and I’ll send you the Word file for a buck.
It’s cool that Interpretation has ventured into electronic distribution. I just wish they’d done it a little more generously.
Looks like it might be a standard charge for digital documents like that. I was looking for books at Amazon by a particular author yesterday and some articles he’s written for several magazines and journals came up – all for $5.95
Now if I was really interested I’d buy that if it was a PDF file and maintained the original page numbers and formatting so I could cite it as I would the paper edition. But $6 (US$ at that) for an HTML article that I can’t see the formatting for. I don’t think so.
Maybe, it’s my underlying attitude that HTML text doesn’t have that “authentic academic” feel to it. And that might be something to get over real soon now.