The continuing shift to digital

Most encouraging news from Tim Reese: he's revsing, upgrading, and digitizing his watershed history Sykes Regular Infantry Division, a tome that sells for $199 and up in its old, uncorrected paper edition. PDFs and CDs will be the new medium.

I hope every Civil War author with important out-of-print work will bring it back digitally, so it's available perpetually at a reasonable price.

For readers, this could be a very blessed trend. Some of the material currently available only through interlibrary loan or microfilm hints at the scope of this problem: Keyes' memoirs; Scott's memoirs; Sedgwick's letters to his sister; Welles diary; Chase's diary; Bates' diary; Butler's letters; the list goes on.

There will eventually be needed a body of critical commentary and scholarly reading guides to help pick through the increasingly available older material - but that's all right. We have blogs to start with ...