E-Publishing Today

Publishers traditionally draw on a number of services and skills to create books and journals, including: (i) commissioning and (in the case of academic texts) peer review; (ii) editing and proofreading; (iii) design and typesetting; (iv) printing; (v) sales and marketing; and (vi) warehousing and distribution. The aim of the present study was to analyse the impact that e-publishing technology has already had on each of these areas and the extent to which traditional approaches to publishing may change in the future. This includes an overview of hypertext both fictional and non-fictional and a broad historical analysis of the reaction that publishers and booksellers have had to e-publishing to date. Drawing on this overview, the main section of this review consists of a tour through the publishing process, balancing the merits and pitfalls of e-publishing s effect on each of the aforementioned stages. The concluding section offers some conclusions and recommendations, based on the results of this study. For the purposes of this study, the term e-publishing was used to describe the provision of any text in an electronic format from hyperlinked websites to CD ROMs to read-only PDF files although it was most often used to describe e-books (read through PDAs) and websites. based services.