key questions 

1) how you're going to deliver the publication (online or embedded in data carrier such as a floppy disk, zip disk or CD) and

2) how the information is going to be presented.

Different presentation mechanisms - PDF, HTML, TIFF, GIF etc - can be delivered online and in physical carriers. Your answers should be determined by what works best for your markets and by consideration of issues such as cost, maintenance and portability.

Estimates of future use of different media vary significantly. One of the better studies is The Scale of Future Publishing in Digital and Conventional Formats: a report to the British Library Policy Unit (PDF) by Mark Bide & Associates

     physical format publications

A decade ago the "road ahead" for many publishers appeared to be physical format publications rather than the global information highway. As late as the mid-1990s Microsoft still envisaged that you'd be using CD-ROMs rather than accessing content online, a vision memorably recorded by Fred Moody in I Sing The Body Electronic (New York, Viking 95). 

Why the emphasis on publishing bits of plastic? There are two reasons. 

Some publishers (and librarians and consumers) are more comfortable with tangible objects. More importantly, CDs offer 'canned bandwidth': the ability to quickly deliver large quantities of information - video, text, audio and still graphics - to a market that may not have a good internet connection.

Although broadband has yet to arrive in Australia, publication on the web meets the needs of most users and publishers. With the exception of products involving quick access to video or major interactive graphics (eg virtual reality), physical format is now generally seen as at best a transitional stage in the move towards publication online. Few database/book publishers now use CDs.

As a consequence there's little recent writing about CD publication. One exception is On A Silver Platter: CD-ROMs & The Promises Of A New Technology (New York, New York Uni Press 99) edited by Greg Smith, a collection of US academic essays that now appears almost quaint. Most of the technical literature is concerned with specifics of the technology (eg the excellent guide by Grant Erickson of the Uni of Minnesota) or with sound recording. 

Examples of that work are Sorin Stan’s definitive The CD-ROM Drive: A Brief System Description (London, Kluwer 98), Lee Purcell's CD-R/DVD Disc Recording To Optical Media (New York, McGraw-Hill 00), Mark Chambers’ Recordable CD Bible (New York, IDG Books 97), the CD-ROM Professional's CD-Recordable Handbook: The Complete Guide To Practical Desktop CD (New York, Info Today 96) by Dana Parker & Robert Starrett and their more general New Rider's Guide to CD-ROM (Indianapolis, New Riders 94). 

The CD-ROM Handbook (New York, McGraw-Hill 94)  is a detailed collection of technical papers, edited by Chris Sherman, on the history of CD-ROM and CD-R. 

Purcell & David Martin collaborated on The Complete Guide to Recordable CD (New York, SYBEX 97). Many of the above are accompanied by a CD-ROM of demonstration software for several platforms.

Electronic Publishing on CD-ROM: Authoring, Development & Distribution (Sebastopol, O'Reilly 96) by Steve Cunningham & Judson Rosebush and Creating Interactive CD-ROMs for Windows & Macintosh (Boston, AP Professional 96) by Scott Fisher are now difficult to obtain, as is Electronic Publishing Unleashed: Discover the Power of Electronic Publishing Online & Via CD-ROM (Indianapolis, SAMS 95) by William Stanek, Lee Purcell & Robert Bind. The latter's title foreshadowed the future: the next edition was simply titled Web Publishing Unleashed.

     online

In presenting information online publishers have several options, depending on requirements for navigation through the document, verisimilitude to a printed text and inclusion of audiovisual content.

In practice publication as ASCII text - just the text, nothing but the text (no hyperlinks, no formatting) - while acceptable for a browserless internet of the early 1990s is no longer a viable presentation standard. 

Debate instead rages about PDF versus derivatives of Standard Generalized MarkUp Language (SGML) - ie XML, TEI and HTML - and about particular graphic or audiovisual tools such as TIFF, GIF, JPEG and PNG. The following page of this guide explores those standards. Later pages look at how they're being used by specialist and general publishers.

As a starting point Bill Kasdorf's 1998 article on SGML & PDF: Why We Need Both in the excellent Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP) discusses both technologies. There's more detailed coverage of tools and issues in the design and accessibility guides on this site.


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