From Mr R. Dudley, MRPharmS
SIR,-I was interested to read the report (PJ, March 25, p487) on your recent "2000 and counting" conference on the impact of IT developments on pharmacy practice. I attended at that conference myself, and your report was certainly full and detailed.
There was one point discussed by some of us over lunch which did not feature in any of the presentations made: the possible development of the online version of The Pharmaceutical Journal. I refer specifically to your developing the ability to offer your readers the option to receive The Journal in electronc form only via an e-mail account.
I already receive two other publications in just this way. Each appears in my mailbox at 5pm on its day of publication in portable document format. Each downloads within 60 seconds and it hardly takes much longer again to open them and begin studying them via Acrobat Reader, a free piece of software widely available and designed precisely to enable the reading of PDF files on any PC.
The benefits are obvious, and worth serious consideration: guaranteed receipt of the publication in question at a fixed time on a specified day, something that mailing facilities by no means always achieve. There would be significant savings to be made in transmission (as opposed to mailing) costs. You would have no raw materials, ie, paper costs, to cover at all. If I want hard copy output from any of the online publications I currently receive, I print it out myself. This uses much less paper than if I had received the whole publication through the post, let alone that my paper is probably much cheaper than the high-quality material you use.
Related to this, but perhaps most important of all, there would be a real saving to be made in wider environmental terms. You would reduce your need for woodpulp, however "renewable" that might be. The ecological strains we are placing upon our planet are becoming increasingly obvious, and the least any of us can do is consider how we can adapt our lives to mduce that pressure as much as possible.
I realise there are significant implications here for some of your potential revenue streams - all those lovely advertisements currently scattered gaily through each issue - but these are not insuperable and I strongly believe this is a development you should seriously consider.
Robert Dudley
Greasby, Wirral