I received notification of my first electronic-only volume of BIT a few days ago and have just finished going through it. The experience was fine. I upped the text size in my browser so it was easy to read and zipped through the papers in pretty much the same way and pace as I used to with the hardcopy. The main difference was that previously I might have gone through the hardcopy in bed and then, later, sat at my desk to index, download and store any of the papers I was interested in; whereas now I need to do all of that at my desk. It could be argued that I could read the papers elsewhere on an iPad and then go to my desk to do the indexing and storing; however, now that I’m accessing the papers directly from the web site, it seems more sensible to do the indexing and downloading as and when I’m doing the reading.

Anyway, overall the experience of receiving an electronic journal, reading it and filing papers I’m interested in, was fine – no problem. However, that is not how it will be going forward. Since I have elected to take alerts on papers as they are accepted into the journal, I will already have seen several if not all of the papers in the electronic editions of the journal that I receive in future. I will report on that after I have experienced it.