 |
|
Caslon's online guides
e-publishing |
the Web | governance | being digital | new economy | dot com books | connecting | copyright | taxation | money | e-capital | security | censorship | who's dot who | media | news sources | design | accessibility | publishing | marketing | metrics | consumers | privacy | technologies This guide offers a selection of pointers to print and electronic resources about electronic publishing. We've picked out some key documents and highlighted issues of particular importance for our clients.
A separate guide deals with Intellectual Property Online - Australian and overseas developments regarding copyright, patents and trademarks in the digital environment. We suggest that you contact us to discuss access to Caslon's extensive research and assistance in developing strategies to make the most of opportunities online. A major development this month is the latest release of information about the HistoryE-book project of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation (sponsors of the scholarly electronic publishing conferences noted later in this guide), the project aims to provide electronic access - online, in CD-ROM and other digital formats - to the back catalogue of US scholarly presses. It is taking place in conjunction with the American Historical Association's Gutenberg-e Prizes project, which will provide electronic access to new historical monographs. Both projects have been animated by Robert Darnton, whose perspective on electronic publishing is supplied in his recent essay A Historian of Books, Lost & Found in Cyberspace. We've provided more detail about the projects in the 1 July issue of Interface on this site. Within Australia the following bodies organise conferences, provide information and otherwise grapple with electronic publishing issues such as copyright and liability. Australian Copyright Council - headquartered in Sydney, the ACC is a specialist nongovernment body active in advising authors, artists and others on copyright questions. It publishes a range of guidebooks that are excellent value. More information about copyright is supplied on our Intellectual Property guide. The Arts Law Centre of Australia (ALC) provides advice and information to artists and arts organisations in all sectors of the cultural industry regarding contracts, copyright, insurance, defamation, business structures, employment and taxation. The Communications Law Centre (CLC), as the name suggests, is concerned with the Internet and other communications law. The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) is one of a number of bodies representing writers and has recently announced an interesting electronic publishing testbed with Australia's IPR Systems (IPR). The Copyright Agency Ltd (CAL), an intellectual property rights management agency, represents authors and publishers. The Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association (AIMIA) is increasingly operating in alliance with the Internet Industry Association (IIA). The Australasian Web Publishers' Association is a professional association for local "electronic publishers", from our perspective disappointingly provincial and driven by the joys of coding HTML rather than the imperative to meet client and user needs. The Design & Usability guide on this site contains pointers to key web style/design guides and other tools, such as Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox newsletter and the outstanding Yale Web Style Guide. We'll shortly be providing a guide on Accessibility issues. Several directories of Australian web authors and web development companies exist, of which the most useful is probably the Australian Web Developers Directory (AWDD), associated with www.consult and independent of the Internet.com online magazine WebDeveloper.
The Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP) and digital library journal Dlib are excellent value. Locally there's disappointingly little significant writing, once the hype is discounted. The Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee (AVCC) held a symposium on electronic publishing some time ago. In contrast there has been extensive and excellent work overseas. Technology and Scholarly Communication, edited by Richard Ekman and Richard Quandt (Berkeley, Uni of California Press 99) is the print version of the major 1997 conference under the auspices of the Andrew Mellon Foundation. A concise response is provided in To Publish Or Perish, a 1998 Pew Symposium and other resources identified by the US Association of Research Libraries Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC). The otherwise excellent Journal Publishing, edited by Gillian Page, Robert Campbell & Jack Meadows (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 97) only scratches the surface of publication in the digital environment. Charles Bailey's Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography online - recently updated - provides a useful introduction to North American research into academic EP. Peter Schillingsburg's Scholarly Editing In The Computer Age - Theory & Practice (Ann Arbor, Uni of Michigan Press 96) has been helpful in our work for academic clients. The Commonwealth government's largescale Information Management Website (IMW) - a tool for electronic recordkeeping and publishing within the bureaucracy mentioned in previous versions of this guide - has now been abandoned. The new FedInfo site provides access to Online Publishing Standards and to the AusInfo Guidelines for publication of information in electronic formats. Less useful is the 1997 report on Management of Government Information As A National Strategic Resource. Pointers to some design and usability guidelines, standards and studies are found on our Design and Usability guide. The 1996 OECD report on Content As A New Growth Industry explores markets, concentration and technologies for audio-visual and multimedia products. It's a starting point for understanding an evolving industry.
For thoughtful writing about electronic journalism we recommend the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) and the newer Online Journalism Review (OJR). Jakob Neilsen's Alertbox is essential reading on editing for usability. Amy Gahran's Contentious and online industry analysis in Steve Outing's Planetary News are useful reads. The News guide on this site features some journals, online and otherwise. For those interested in media developments Europemedia (the new media in the European Union) and the Virtual Information Institute, a media offshoot of Columbia University. Brill's Content (self-styled "independent voice of the information age", an age that apparently only affects Manhattan and California) offer analysis and entertainment. We are highly sceptical about much of the hype concerning electronic books, ie devices such as the Rocket eBook, which will be the subject of a Caslon report appearing later this year. However, several of our clients are interested so we have provided links to the major products (commercially available or merely mooted), along with some other pointers.
The 'breakthrough' meeting on electronic books was Electronic Book 98, a major conference organised by the US Department of Commerce and the Video Electronic Standards Association. We recommend looking at the papers from the conference and material from the Kent State 'FuturePrint' symposium mentioned below. The E-Books Organisation is an industry-dominated body with an information clearing house and promotional function. Electric Book is a website with information about electronic books and online newspapers, journals and monographs. Kent State University is hosting ongoing "virtual symposium on the future of print media", with presentations by hardware/software vendors and publishers. The Xerox Affordances of Paper project explores why we continue to use what one wit described as "dried tree-flakes encased in dead cow", particularly large documentation systems such as those found in hospitals and the armed forces. Interestingly, Amazon.com will sell you everything from petfood and hardware to antiquarian books but is not flogging e-books. The E Ink Corporation, as the name suggests, is investigating 'electronic ink' projects, in particular devices that have the flexibility of a sheet of newspaper. Call us party poopers, but we expect to be wrapping our garbage in copies of the non-digital Financial Review for some time to come. From a less visionary perspective Xplor International (these days you're apparently not serious in the digital publishing game unless there's an 'X' in your moniker) provides a venue for information exchange under the umbrella of the Electronic Document Systems Association in competition with the Collaborative Electronic Notebook Systems Association (CENSA). The more narrowly-focussed EBX Working Group is an ad hoc body developing a standard - closely aligned with Glassbook - for electronic book exchange. It operates in competition with the Open eBook Authoring Group, aligned with the Rocket eBook and similar devices in developing an XML- and HTML-based specification for use by publishers and hardware developers. The Group recently released version 1.0 of its specification. Of potentially greater impact is Microsoft's announcement of ClearType, proprietary font display technology claimed to significantly increase screen readability, and new Reader software for PCs and handheld devices. On 6 January Barnesandnoble.com and Microsoft announced a strategic partnership, with the etailer to establish a "unique superstore" in the middle of this year for selling thousands of eBooks online. Parent Barnes & Noble will sell eBooks and eBook hardware through its 972 bricks-&-mortar stores across North America. In the near future we'll be providing detailed pointers to key research into the economics of electronic publications. In the interim we recommend the studies by Hal Varian and Andrew Odlyzko, particularly the latter's First Monday article on The Economics of Electronic Journals and Varian's cogent 1996 paper Pricing Electronic Journals. Odlyzko's papers on electronic commerce and publishing, including rigorous studies of pay-per-use versus subscription models in competitive pricing of information goods, are available on the Web. In North America and the European Union there are a number of very large scale projects involving digitisation of text and graphic resources for publication on the Web. Next month we will be providing pointers to some of the best sites, in particular those concerned with project overviews.
The jury is out on whether digital delivery for print-on-demand (ie downloading of an electronic text from a publisher's server for printing of a single copy in a bookshop or a kiosk) will prove to be viable. Before you scoff, note that EMI and Sony announced in July 1999 that they are embracing similar technology for producing compact disks on-demand. In addition to Xerox, the two leading specialists trialling the technology in US bookstores and libraries are:
In December Barnes & Noble announced that it would use IBM technology in print-on-demand facilities in its regional distribution centres.
Later this year we will be releasing a report on Australian and overseas electronic publishing experiments - usually authors provide text to the publisher, who then pours that content into a template and releases it over the Web. Have your credit card details handy and you can receive the latest opus via an email (usually as a PDF) or your browser for display on your desktop machine, on a handheld device such as a PalmPilot or as a printout. Start-ups such as Fatbrain, Dissertation.Com , E-Rights and I-Universe (and downmarket copycats such as 1stBooks) may revolutionise specialist publishing or merely serve as the digital version of the vanity press. Much has been made in some circles of the "runaway success" of isolated high-profile experiments such as online publication of a Stephen King novel. For us, the jury is still out, although we are sceptical about the viability of the business model and the technological solutions apart from a few niche markets. Two examples may illustrate some of our concerns: Bookface, an Amazon.com affiliate, is essentially a promotional site offering 'free' access to selected texts (no best-sellers, much ephemera and public-domain work), which are displayed online. The site is funded by advertising and support from retailers and publishers. While it's proponents claim that the experience will get people "hooked on books", that's field of dreams territory, akin to past trials involving distribution of books with breakfast cereal or popular magazines. Those getting paid for the distribution are happy but there's no indication that the premises are correct and outcomes achievable. For those worried about divulging their credit card info online, US-Dutch startup NetPack plans to use bookshops to sell charge cards that when swiped through a special reader at home or the office - yes, you'll have to buy a special keyboard, probably one specific to NetPack! - will allow you to download someone's deathless prose. Our confidence in the proposal wasn't heightened when twenty out of twenty attempts to access the site resulted in our browsers (four browsers on three machines) falling over. There's a dawning realisation that consumers visit sites to conduct transactions or to access content, not for the joy of admiring someone's code. Along with navigation, "content is king". But content doesn't fall from the skies like a nicely roasted duck, silver knife and fork attached. Given the difficulty sites experience in generating their own content - it's challenging, it's expensive - many are replicating traditional publishing models by buying syndicated content. Four experiments of interest are:
For those seeking precedents for how 'connectivity' is reshaping the world we're preparing a short guide on the printing revolution, markets, readers and the history of the book. That guide is available here.
|
|
|