“Fax: I’m sorry, we’re not a museum”

That made my point much more succinctly (apart from making me LOL).

Anyway, you’re still talking about going out of your way not to catch up with technological progress. For any given type of human endeavour there will always be areas where the old analog way is better than the new digital one; the question therefore always is: do the advantages of the digital method outweigh the advantages of the analog one?

In this particular case the result of that comparison may be a much closer call than I imagine. It is the authors — regardless of their quality — who have to jump through hoops. It is the publisher that determines the nature of those hoops. The first thing says something about the power that publishers hold over writers, even over good ones. The latter says something about publishers’ view on technology.

Curiously, John Scalzi himself makes this filtering claim in a comment below the article where he says:

Indeed, when I was the editor of a humor area on AOL, of all places, I demanded mailed submissions because I believed that price of a stamp (which I think was 35 cents at the time) was a bozo filter. And I was right.

http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/eitems.htm

They don’t come out and say it, but I think the last sentence gets to the real reason,

“But as long as there are only a handful of us in the office and 400 - 600 submissions each month, we have to ask you to send in manuscripts.”

If they open it up to e-mail, they would get *a lot* more — probably more than they can reasonably review.

So creating a small barrier to entry (print and mail the submission) is probably a very good way of managing their workload. Obviously, they’ll lose out the occasional person like Scalzi who doesn’t own a printer, but clearly they find more than enough quality fiction to run on a regular basis.