ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING AND TRADITIONAL PRINT PUBLISHING

The move to electronic publishing for a traditional print-based publisher is not an easy one. Although most publishers own the rights to a great deal of text and images, these are often not held in digital format and have to be changed into machine-readable form before being published electronically. Text and images must then be “marked up” with some form of tagging, so that they can be accessed and manipulated by software. Any existing digital printer’s tapes that a publisher might hold also have to be converted, often laboriously, to a format that electronic-publishing software can use. If software has to be developed to display the text and images (for a multimedia product, for example), the cost to the publisher can be considerable. All this means that electronic publications are much more expensive to produce than print publications. However, manufacture of a CD-ROM is much less expensive than the manufacture of a book or journal, and once software has been developed it can sometimes be reused for other electronic products, so the high initial costs of electronic publication can eventually be offset.
Some publishers, especially science and journal publishers, now publish information simultaneously in print and electronic formats, or in electronic format alone. This allows them to originate text and images in digital format, with tagging that can be used for both print and electronic delivery. The speed of electronic publication over the Internet or through proprietary online services can be very valuable for scientific journal publications, since publishers can deliver rapidly changing data daily or even more frequently to subscribers. It is now so easy to publish on the World Wide Web that some researchers have even set up journals of their own, bypassing the traditional publishing process altogether. The quality of such publications can be an issue, however, since the editorial procedures that traditional publishers use to establish accuracy may also be bypassed.
Copyright is of greater concern for electronic publishers than for print publishers, since it is very easy for users to make digital copies of electronic publications and distribute them, or sell them, to other people. To address this issue, copyright law is being revised at both the national and international level to take electronic publication into account. Several systems exist, or are currently being developed, that allow publishers to encrypt their content in ways that will allow only authorized users to access it.