The challenge to academia is to invest in services that will turn the abundance of electronic data into sound, useful, compelling information products. The process of filtering, labeling, refining, and packaging, that is, the process of editing and publishing, takes resources and will be shaped by the electronic world in significant ways. This essay is concerned with this process. The pace of investment in digital communication within academia may well be led by its value in education, service broadly defined, and research; in each case, institutional revenues and success may depend on effective deployment of appropriate digital communication. The opportunity to distribute journals electronically has implications for publishers' costs and revenues. Digital documents can be distributed at lower cost than paper; the network may also reduce some editorial costs. However, sustaining high production values will continue to involve considerable cost because quality editing and presentation are costly. On the revenue side, sale of individual subscriptions may, to some degree, yield to licenses for access via campus intranets and to pay-per-look services. Publishers are likely to work with an agent for design and distribution of electronic information. In contemplating how to take advantage of electronic publications, universities and their libraries must consider how conventional operations might be pruned to allow for more expenditure on electronic information products. In the end, universities should be drawn to the electronic information services because of their superiority in instruction, their reach beyond the academy, and their power in the creation of new ideas. (Contains 31 references.) (AEF)