Philosopher and logician Volker Halbach writes:
Oxford University Press recently told me that “it appears that we no longer make individual pdfs of our works available for sale, as digital rights management is extremely challenging for that format.” Generally, the only version of a monograph that is accessible online will be an html file. This is very worrying because the html version of every monograph that I have looked at differs significantly from the hard copy and pdf. Of course, line and page breaks of the paper version are lost in the transition to html. In the html, italics can appear as roman, sans serif letters grow serifs, and the size of letters and symbols can shrink or grow. In my field, logic, these differences can be significant, especially if the changes are not uniform. Generally, htmls are also much harder to read with their bad spacing and other limitations to typesetting.
However, there are more serious concerns: Often parts of the text are added, replaced, or deleted. Here are some highlights from two monographs: On p.132 of Jarred Warren’s Shadows of Syntax, a line with two inference rules is just replaced with the word “math”. The reader of the html is left wondering what the rules might be. It becomes more confusing when symbols are added. One of the most dangerous symbols in this respect is negation: On page 261 there is an additional negation symbol making the claim there false in the html. On p.272 the reader of the html will be left with the impression that Warren does not know the main difference between Zermelo and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, because the crucial axiom of replacement is absent from the html. Instead the power set axiom is repeated. I also looked at Alex Paseau and Owen Griffiths’ One True Logic. On page 137, eight lines (in different places) are missing. On p.141 the authors announce a formula “in all its unabbreviated glory”. In the html exactly this formula is truncated and the second half replaced with a single hyphen. There are many further deviations between the two versions that do not only impede readability, but constitute substantial differences in content.
None of the authors I have talked to have approved the html version. Already now there are books for which the pdfs of the hard copies are not available online. One can still click the pdf button, but this generates only a pdf from the html with all the mistakes. In such cases there is no legal way to access a digital version that has been authorized by the author(s).
I became aware of the issue when I recently tried to persuade OUP to publish a digital version of my book on logical consequence that had appeared as a hard copy last September. They asked me to make some minor changes to the pdf on which the hard copy version is based. Thus there will also be two hard copy versions; and even readers who get hold of the paper version cannot be sure that they have the definitive version.
These sound like some rather serious problems that affect the integrity of published work. What do other philosophers or academics think? Press editors are also welcome to weigh in to explain this change. It might be useful to know whether other presses, besides OUP, are doing this. (Submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.)
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