Amendment to 9 June 1997 version of essay on electronic reprints
T. J. Walker, 24 June 1998

As shown in this table, I have recalculated and simplified my 9 June 1997 estimates of the economics of ESA offering electronic reprints.

The details of the 1997 calculations are at http://tjwalker.ifas.ufl.edu/eprints.htm.

Here are the details of the 1998 calculations:

The $12 average cost per page for paper reprints is derived as follows: For a poster I gave at an ESA meeting, Harry Bradley told me that ESA paid $20,250 for reprints for JEE in 1995. In 1995, JEE published 1805 pages. Ray Everngam later told me that for 1996, 97% of JEE authors bought reprints. My guess is that most orders were for 100 reprints; at any rate, beyond the first copy, costs are small. I used these figures and assumptions to estimate that the per page cost of 100 reprints is ca. $12: $20,250/(0.97 × 1805) = $11.57 = ca. $12.

The $17 is the approximate price per page of reprints based on the prices for 100 copies in the current ESA Journal Reprint Order Form. To arrive at the $17, I calculated the price per page for all numbers of pages from 1-16. Because 1-page papers were priced at $40 per page and could not constitute a very large portion of reprint pages sold, I left it out and averaged the prices per page for the other 15 no.-of-pages categories. The average was $16.75, which rounds to $17 [If the 1-page price is averaged with the rest, the average becomes $18.21, which rounds to $18.]

The average cost per page of e-reprints is rounded from $2.75 to make it $3.