What's wrong with this story? What strange, irrational, one might even say unprofessional act have I just described?

Was it wasteful of me to inflict this burden on so many in-baskets, knowing that considerably fewer than half the recipients will look at my paper? Not at all! I will be content if a dozen people take a serious look—that will be enough for my message to propagate—and I have followed the best strategy to bring that about.

Was I, then, foolish to waste paper, postage, and secretarial time in this old-fashioned effort at communication, when email would have done the trick effortlessly? Not yet! Not all my correspondents communicate in that way, I lack the electronic addresses of many of those who do, and surely somebody (though I have no idea who) is paying for all those email transmissions, so the monetary savings to society as a whole may be at least in part illusory.

Was it, perhaps, absurd of me to lavish extreme care on these preprints, rearranging the footnotes for easier reading, and even worrying about the proper choice of fonts to convey to my readers as clearly as possible the relations between the tiny sections and subsections?