E-Publishing - Week Three

The Book vs The E-Book

"e-publishing requires us to rethink what we mean by 'the book', that standard of complex communication for over 5 centuries which was pretty much unknown for the millenium before Gutenberg" (quote from Moodle)

Focusing on the 'Gutenberg Project' or 'Project Gutenberg' collects texts that are out of copyright (author died, copyright not been renewed etc) allows more people to have access to knowledge.

Orality and Literacy

- printing had a profound effect (these days e-publishing is probably going through the same thing)
- greater accessibility
- quite expensive technology (not everyone could afford a printing press)
- reformation (religion) could now read the Bible
- messenger (things could change) could not trust the written word, spoken word trusted much more - eyes could be easily deceived
-*lists*

Technology in the Hidden Revolution

- workflow
- typesetting - getting the type set out properly
- standardisation system
- postscript - translates what is going on, how things should look
- pdf - portable document format
- sgml - simplified general mark-up language
- html - hyper text mark-up language

In the second half of the lecture we looked at lulu.com which is an online publisher. Using Project Gutenberg we chose a novel and imported it into lulu.com and practiced putting together our own book. The website was surprisingly simple to use and talked the user through step by step how to put the book together.

For the final project, there is the possibility to publish a book using lulu.com. I think that if I was to do this for my assignment then I would have to learn how to use the website to its full advantage and conduct various research into online publishing, Project Gutenberg and into lulu.com.