Future trends of e-publishing

Many industry commentators believe that the Internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular will come to play a central role in electronic publishing, although speed of access at present is too slow to allow multimedia applications to run acceptably on it. Digital Versatile Disk Read-Only Memory (DVD-ROM) is likely to be a successor to CD-ROM, its main advantage being increased storage capacity for space-intensive multimedia elements such as video and audio files. However, DVD-ROM development costs are likely to be even higher than those for CD-ROM, and there is no compelling reason to believe that DVD-ROM will do better in the marketplace than CD-ROM. A small number of manufacturers are now producing simple set-top boxes that allow consumers to use their televisions for access to the Internet, but the convergence between broadcasting personal computers, and the telephone that has been predicted for some while has yet to come about.
Although it has been suggested by both critics and advocates of electronic publishing that it might lead to the demise of the printed book, this seems unlikely, at least in the near future. At present there are no significant advantages to reading a novel or magazine in electronic format, and these types of publication are less expensive to produce in traditional print format. The market for hand-held devices that make electronic text more portable has never really developed, probably because books already offer readers portability and ease of use at a relatively low cost. It seems most likely that both electronic and print publications will continue to exist side by side well into the next millennium.