Google Print and the principle of functionality Available to Purchase

The purpose of this Editorial is to outline the economic factors involved in digitisation and the maintenance of digital collections.

The paper assesses the cost‐effectiveness of digitisation.

Google Print's assumption that whatever has been published is worth digitising is a massively false and uneconomic assumption.

The paper highlights the crunch point for arguments regarding digital preservation – determine costs according to the usefulness of the artefact and be ruthless about dropping items which do not meet “baseline measures of functionality”.