Thus I don't know what our savings would be if the Society discontinued printed issues. The money spent on reprints is more than half of what the Society gets from institutional subscriptions. Commercially published scientific journals have a less certain future. If library subscriptions cease, they must find a way to collect page charges in my opinion. I've branched this to some interested colleagues.
Page charges yield about four times more than institutional subscriptions.
I'm not sure whether that is a representative or complete analysis of the story about page charges, but it is an interesting one. The real issue is that there is no strong rationale for authors' being willing to pay page charges for paper journal publication, where the distribution is so poor and inefficient and where costs can be recovered from subscription revenue. That's why I ask about true costs, and in particular, true costs for an electronic-only version. What I meant was if the demand for and use of the paper version vanishes. They should be a lot more than that if you don't substract but restructure completely.