Future of Electronic Publishing

electronic

UNESCO’s somewhat arbitrary definition of”book” is:”Non-periodical printed book of at least 49 pages excluding covers”.

The development of electronic publishing was supposed to improve everything. Yet a bloodbath of unusual proportions has taken place in the past couple of months. Every thing appeared to have gone wrong: the dot.coms dot crushes, investment capital dried out, competing standards lacked an already fragile marketplace, the hardware (e book subscribers ) was clunky and awkward, the applications unwieldy, the e-books badly written or already in the public domain

This further alienated the few prospective readers left.

Moreover, Epublishing’s delivery platform, the Internet, was transformed beyond recognition since March 2000.

 

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From a spacious, somewhat anarchic, web of networked computers – it has evolved to a territorial, commercial, entrepreneurial expansion of”brick and mortar” giants, subject to government regulation. It really is not as friendly towards separate (small) publishers, the backbone of E publishing. More importantly, it is expropriated by publishing and media behemoths. It is treated as being a medium for cross promotion, supply chain management, and customer relations management. It gives only some minor synergies with non-cyberspace, real world, franchises and media properties. The likes of Disney and Bertelsmann have swung a complete circle by considering the world wide web to become the upcoming big thing in New Media delivery – to frantic efforts to support the red ink it oozed throughout their otherwise impeccable balance sheets.

But would be the silent pundits right all the same? Could be your future of publishing (along with other media industries) inextricably intertwined with the web?

The solution depends on if an old habit dies hard. Internet surfers are used to free information. They have been extremely reluctant to cover advice (with precious few exceptions, like the”Wall Street Journal”‘s electronic edition). Furthermore, the Internet, together with 3 billion pages listed in the Google searchengine (and another 15 billion in”invisible” data bases ), provides many free substitutes to every information product, however superior. Web based media companies (such as Salon and Britannica.com) have been tinkering with payment and pricing models. But that is contrary to the point. Whether in the form of subscription (Britannica), pay-per view (Questia), pay to publish (Fathom), sample and also pay to buy the physical product (RealRead), or micro-payments (Amazon) – the public refuses to cough up.

Moreover, the advertising-subsidized absolutely free articles Internet site has died with Web advertising. Geocities – a network of free hosted, ad-supported, Web sites purchased by Yahoo! – is currently unnecessarily shutting down Web sites (when they exceed a certain level of traffic) to convince their owners to revert to a monthly payment fee version. Together with Lycos in trouble in Europe, tri-pod may follow suit shortly. Earlier this year, Microsoft has shut down ListBot (a host of discussion lists). Suite101 has ceased paying its own editors (content authors) effective January 15th. About.com fired tens of thousands of category editors. With the ugly demise of Themestream, WebSeed will be the only content aggregator which tries to reverse the trend by emphasizing (partly) on advertising revenue.

Unbelievably, e-publishers actually tried to limit the access of library patrons to e books (i.e., the committing of ebooks to multiple patrons). But, libraries are not only repositories of wisdom and community centers. They’re the biggest buyers of e-books. Together with schools and other educational associations, libraries can serve as decisive socialization agents and present generations of pupils, students, and readers into the chances and riches of e-publishing. Government use of e-books (e.g., by the military) may have the identical beneficial impact.

As standards converge (Adobe’s Portable Document Format and Microsoft’s MS Reader LIT format will be very likely to become the winners), as hardware improves and becomes more ubiquitous (within multipurpose apparatus or as standalone higher quality components ), as content becomes much more attractive (already many brand new titles are published in both print and digital formats), as more versatile information taxonomies (like the Digital Object Identifier) are introducedas the Internet becomes more gender-neutral, polyglot, and cosmopolitan – e-publishing is likely to recover and thrive.

The publishing of periodical content and instructional research (including, gradually, peerreviewed research) may possibly be already changing into the Web. Nonfiction and text books will accompany along with Alternative models of pricing are already in evidence (author pays to write, author is worth it to acquire peer review, writer pays to write, buy a physical product and earn access to enhanced online content, and so on). Website evaluation bureaus will assist you discriminate between the credible and the in-credible. Publishing is moving – albeit kicking and screaming – on – online.