My hunch is no, if one thinks that blogs could somehow replace scholarly books. However, I predict that once the majority of academic journals are available online and once the next generation of scholars gets comfortable with accessing electronic archives, we might see a shift in emphasis from the book to the article. I hope so anyway. Given that university presses are cutting back on the number of acadmemic titles that they publish each year, I think its ridiculous to expect assistant professors in the humanities to have published at least one and, increasingly, two books in order to get tenure. A few strong articles should suffice to establish the young professors' merit
Scott McLemee's piece, A Dogged Pursuit, is more about the fact that university presses have established blogs. It remains to be seen whether these blogs will function more or less as electronic catalogs, or if they will become a discursive site in which the ideas in the books are debated and discussed. I'm skeptical about whether the latter can work well due to the obvious conflict of interest involved. After all, the university presses want to promote their books, and its not true, particularly when book buying is concerned, that all publicity is good publicity. Besides, don't journals and reviews already cover the books anyway?
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