One of the little joys in the academic life is when you finally receive the hardcopy reprints of your published paper. I guess it is an antiquated practice dating back before the electronic era. In days of old, when manuscripts were handwritten, it would be wonderful to have copies of your own work typesetted professionally with which to send to other researchers in the field. Nowadays, chances are you would have sent a preprint by email to whomever you thought would be interested in the paper, even before you send it to a journal. With the typical lag of 1 to 2 years for the paper to be refereed, revised, appear electronically and finally appear in print, you would have in the meantime shared your work at conferences, corresponded with others and possibly moved on to another project.
So some of the journals like the journal of number theory have already done away with sending you free paper reprints or off-prints. They gave me a special authors electronic reprint with a cover page. Still, it is quite nice to have off-prints. Not the typical 50 copies but perhaps at least one for keepsake. I received my set of 50 offprints from Springer this month. Imagine my dismay when I opened the package to find that it was damaged by water somewhere during postage. The local postal company had a note to say it received the packaged already damaged and there is nothing I can do about it. Although the pages have dried up, they are warped and sticking to each other. It is much better to print off a new copy from the laser printer.
