E-Publishing - Week 11

Ooooh so it's week eleven, also known as December 7th, also known as 18 days to Christmas and also known as the day that I got a chocolate snowflake in my advent calender. And that's right it's time for an E-Publishing overview!!!

So let's have a re-cap of what we've learnt over the weeks.

We've looked at blogging, publishing books using Lulu, interactive fiction, online news and visual novels and where everything started, what exactly is e-publishing.

So what is E-Publishing? After three....one, two, three....... E-Publishing is short for Electronic Publishing and refers to the publishing of works online, on compact disk, emailed or on an electronic reader. Simple yes? And of course E-Publishing refers to blogging, publishing books through, interactive fiction, online news and visual novels...ties in nicely. They all need a variety of technologies such as xml, sgml, html, pdf, PostScript, Internet, World Wide Web, etc etc and of course are all connected through E-Commerce....remember the publishing value chain? (and incase you've forgotten e-commerce is the buying and selling of products and services on the web or electronically). Oh and while we're hovering near the subject, now is the time when I should also bring up the term Print on Demand or P.O.D. It is a printing technology that in which new copies of a book are not printed an order has been received, obviously this technology did not come about until digital printing began as it was not considered economical before then. Smaller companies and also academic publishers rely solely on P.O.D whereas bigger companies tend to only use it in special circumstances.

P.O.D of course brings us back to Lulu. Lulu the online software that anyone can use to print their own copy of an out of copyright work. This is definitely a good example of a P.O.D company.

Basically. All forms of E-Publishing are linked by their base technology. All rely on the internet, and also formats such as .pdf and .html to make them work. Blogs also rely on RSS feed to show regular updates and to inform your followers of your latest posts, also they rely on the convention of hyperlinks (obviously as I've already used them in this blog entry alone). Anyway it is safe to say that fundamentally as their basic level all forms of E-Publishing can be linked by their reliance on technology. Whether it be in the form of the Internet and the World Wide Web or by RSS feeds and P.O.D, E-Publishing would simply not exist without today's technologies.