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overview

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economics

studies

delivery

formats

monographs

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fiction

e-journals

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film

music

webcasts

interactive

editing

business

education

government

culture

e-texts

devices

libraries

digitisation

on demand

rights trade

UGC

DIY

CMS

landmarks








related
Guides:

Intellectual
Property


Censorship

Design

Accessibility

Information
Economy








related
Profiles:


Print &
the Book


Blogging


section heading icon     overview

This guide explores content creation and distribution, in particular electronic publishing. It identifies publishing genres, discusses significant issues and points to resources of particular value for making sense of the 'content industries' in the digital environment.

     contents of this guide

The following pages cover -

  • past & future - an introduction to publishing, past, present and future
  • economics - research into pricing online publications, rights trading, print-on-demand and experiments by the likes of Fatbrain and I-Universe
  • studies - major conference proceedings, academic studies, industry reports and bibliographies regarding internet publishing
  • delivery - physical format (CD-ROM, Digicards and other physical media) versus online delivery
  • formats - industry standards, the debate about PDF versus SGML (HTML, XML), and preservation guidelines
  • monographs - developments in scholarly and special-purpose book publishing, and digital thesis projects
  • dissertations - developments in digital thesis projects
  • fiction - mass market book publishing
  • e-journals  - academic and special-purpose serials
  • newspapers - taking newspapers online
  • directories & data services - developments with online information services, from corporate data to white pages and restaurant guides
  • film and video - film and the broadcasting industry
  • music - the music business
  • webcasts - webcasting as a technology, business, regulatory challenge and channel
  • interactive - the games industry, online and offline
  • editing  - standards, guidelines and benchmarks for editing electronic publications, including EAD, TEI and MEP
  • business - electronic publishing within and for the corporate sector
  • education - courseware and other electronic publishing within the education sector
  • government - developments in government publishing
  • culture - taking museums, theatres and other cultural institutions online
  • e-texts - comments on 'electronic books'
  • devices - recent developments in publishing books on portable devices ranging from the PalmPilot to the SoftBook
  • libraries- information about global access to digital resources (the web is in one sense an electronic library) and about how institutions are responding to publishing challenges
  • digitisation and archiving - an overview of digitisation projects and projects to archive the net
  • on demand - developments with print-on-demand (POD) technology, likely to have a greater impact over the next five years than e-books
  • rights trade - rights management, syndication and other questions
  • UGC  - user generated content - blogs, zines, fora, home pages
  • DIY - self-publishing in print and online
  • CMS  - off the shelf and custom-built content management systems
  • landmarks - inflection points in the history of publishing

     orientation

Definitions of 'publishing' vary and may be contentious, with for example -

  • disputes in the digital environment about the interpretation of enactments covering transmission and availability
  • value systems that privilege particular industries , with for example a strong demarcation between print, broadcast and music recording although all are concerned with conveying information to audiences and all potentially involve questions about the rights and responsibilities of content creators, intermediaries and consumers
  • assertions of hierarchies within industries, typically with claims that sectors addressing elite markets, avoiding ephemeral content or using comparatively permanent media (bound acid-free paper versus tabloid newsprint) are engaged in publishing rather than what is dismissed as 'entertainment'

This guide, along with other pages of the Caslon.com.au site, avoids the characterisation of publishing as an avocation for gentlemen or something that centres on reproduction of timeless works of prose. Instead we have broadly treated 'publishing' as both

  • making information publicly available (whether online or in physical formats), irrespective of the size of the audience
  • an enterprise that encompasses the 'content industries' - book, journals, maps, prints, musical scores and recordings, film, video ...

The following pages focus on text genres, exploring the interaction between authors, intermediaries (govt, booksellers, distributors, libraries) and end users. However, they feature discussion of video, film, audio and interactive genres such as computer games.

     related guides and briefings

This site includes a number of guides of particular relevance to electronic publishing, notably those dealing with Intellectual Property and the separate guides on design and accessibility.

This site also includes a detailed profile on the history of the book and reading.

The Ketupa.net site provides information about major media groups.





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version of February 2006
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