MARKETS for E-Publishing

Online services offering databases of specialist business, scientific, and legal information on subscription made up the early professional market for electronic publication. Such databases are still heavily used, but are now mostly available on CD-ROM or on the World Wide Web. Business news services are now also part of the professional market for electronically published information, with subscribers receiving only those news stories relevant to their interests.
The consumer market for electronic publications is coming to be dominated by the World Wide Web. Many newspapers now have Web sites where news can be updated hourly or more frequently, although these sites are not yet very profitable, since their advertising revenue is not nearly as substantial as revenue generated from traditional print advertising. Consumer reference products such as encyclopedias and to some extent dictionaries, atlases, and other reference works make up a large part of the CD-ROM market and some may in time be accessible over the World Wide Web. These products are more marketable in electronic format than other types of book because they benefit more from the kind of automated searching and incorporation of multimedia elements (such as video and animation) that software allows. Educational publishing has also benefited from CD-ROM delivery for some of its products, as multimedia content is both attractive to students and can help them to understand complex concepts.
Multimedia games on CD-ROM are also a substantial part of the consumer market. These allow users to interact with characters and participate in adventures in virtual worlds that are often intricately designed and very complex. Multimedia games are usually not based on existing games but have largely grown out of the potential to manipulate images, video, and sound made possible by increasingly powerful personal computers.