Will there ever come a time...

[macalicious731]

... when manuscripts will be able to be submitted on CDs or other discs?

Personally, I like having paper copies of things, but disc seems so much easier, so much cheaper...

Would there be any dangers to this process? The disc is lost or misplaced and the whole ms. is gone to who knows where...

I'm thinking on the keyboard. Are there any other thoughts to this?

[Yeshanu]

If you read Writer's Market, you'll find that some publishers accept submissions on disc now, and some accept email submissions.

And some cling stubbornly to paper...

[maestrowork]

Sooner or later someone would have to print it on paper because most people prefer to read paper-format.

The question comes down to who is paying for it? If you send them a CD or disc, they are the one paying for printer toner and paper.

Other more minor issues: CDs or discs could get damaged or destroyed or lost (easier than, say, 500 pages in a box); email attachment can get deleted accidentally, etc.

[Risseybug]

the publisher has to print out 90,000 words of a book that they'll never publish, it gets expensive for them.

Some smaller pub's take e-mail submissions. Some take e-mail queries, but need ms's on paper.

I think a ms. on paper is easier to keep track of than, say, 500 floppys or CD's a month. Imagine the slush pile THAT would make!

[CindyBidar]

Think of the virus risk. :evil

[maestrowork]

Oh yeah, I forgot about virus.

I remember when I was working at Schlastic, some poor soul sent me some Doc files full of viruses. I told her and she couldn't believe me. It happened that someone had sent her some files and it infected her entire department.

[James D Macdonald]

Plus there's all the changes you need to make along the way. If they're made with pencil on paper, you can see where the changes are.

And there's the formatting of the text itself. .RTF, .DOC, .TXT, .WPD, .ASC, in a dizzying array of non-compatibility.

[Ravenlocks01]

Some programs have a Track Changes function for editing. And I suspect (although I haven't done any empirical studies) that younger generations of editors may feel more comfortable reading on the screen than their older counterparts.

Personally I rarely print stuff to read. What am I going to do with it afterward? Keeping it all online eliminates clutter.

[Jules Hall]

Some smaller pub's take e-mail submissions. Some take e-mail queries, but need ms's on paper.

Baen prefer e-mail submissions, according to their web site. I'm sure they're not alone among reasonably-well-known presses.

There are good reasons why electronic submissions might be more convenient. Mainly it's easier to track them -- the computer can tell you very quickly what the average waiting time is, how long the oldest unread manuscript has been waiting for, what should be read next, whether they actually have a submission from the author who's asking what happened, and who (if anyone) read it...

Balance that against printing costs (remember that they probably only print the first 10 pages of most manuscripts...) and who knows what answer you'll come up with.

[Jamesaritchie]

I'd say 98% of all print publishers still edit by hand, and paper manuscripts are still sent back and forth between writer and editor. I hope this doesn't change anytime soon. It's the superior way of doing things.

[Ravenlocks01]

I don't see that it's superior. It's just one way of doing things.

[Jamesaritchie]

"Just one way of doing things" suggests that all ways are equal, and this is never the case. Whatever you do, there will be many ways of doing it, but there's almost always a way that's easier and better.

It is a heck of a lot easier and better to go through the editing and rewriting process with a print manuscript. Especially one of novel length.

I've done it both ways, and unless some really new and innovative software comes out to aid in the process, I never again want to go through the editing, revising, rewriting of a novel manuscript electronically.

As for Baen, I suspect they prefer electronic slush submissions because they don't seem to buy any of them. If you don't expect to buy anything from the slush pile, then electronic is the way to go.