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Three Tweets for the Web

The relative decline of the book is part of a broader shift toward short and to the point. Small cultural bits—written words, music, video—have never been easier to record, store, organize, and search, and thus they are a growing part of our enjoyment and education. The new brevity has many virtues.

Bantamweight Publishing in an Easily Plagiarised World

Bantamweight publishing is popular among those who feel brevity is a virtue. But when an entire work of art is bounded in 140 characters, even brevity has its limits. Sometimes, squeezing in a proper attribution through editing content can change the original meaning, when the edits unwillingly shift from cosmetic to substantive.

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship

Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print—scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse—electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.

University Publishing In A Digital Age

This paper argues that a renewed commitment to publishing in its broadest sense can enable universities to more fully realize the potential global impact of their academic programs, enhance the reputations of their institutions, maintain a strong voice in determining what constitutes important scholarship, and in some cases reduce costs.

What Colleges Should Learn From Newspapers' Decline

Newspapers are dying. Are universities next? The parallels between them are closer than they appear. Both industries are in the business of creating and communicating information. Paradoxically, both are threatened by the way technology has made that easier than ever before.

Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content

The failure of micropayments, both past and future, illustrates the depth and importance of putting publishing tools in the hands of individuals. In the face of a force this large, user-pays schemes can't simply be restored through minor tinkering with payment systems, because they don't address the cause of that change -- a huge increase the power and reach of the individual creator.

Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

A lot of people in the weblog world are asking "How can we make money doing this?" The answer is that most of us can't. Weblogs are not a new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward. Instead, weblogs mark a radical break. They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity. It's intuitively appealing to believe that by making the connection between writer and reader more direct, weblogs will improve the environment for direct payments as well, but the opposite is true. By removing the barriers to publishing, weblogs ensure that the few people who earn anything from their weblogs will make their money indirectly.

The Emergence of Intelligent Content: The Evolution of Open Content Technologies and Their Significance

This paper traces the history of open content technologies in an effort to understand the nature and significance of intelligent content. What is illustrated is that a common thread runs through SGML, HTML, XML, Web 2.0, the Semantic Web, DITA, and OOXML and that the evolution of open content technologies has enabled the emergence of intelligent content and with it a new form of organizational agility. This whitepaper has been prepared as a corollary to the presentation “Content Fusion: There’s a Piece of Data Lodged in my Document” at Intelligent Content 2009, Palm Springs CA, January 29-30, 2009.

After Launching 300 Content Websites, These Are My Observations

To help those people who are considering going online and to offer some thoughts to those who already have a website here are 10 observations I’ve made over the last few months.

Paid Versus Free Content Is Back in The Headlines

Earlier this year Chris Anderson, who is best known for his book The Long Tail, wrote an article in Wired Magazine called ‘Free’. As the title suggests it is about the “inevitable move towards a price point of zero for content and services on the web.”

The Real State of The Blogosphere 2008

A few weeks ago Technorati came out with their annual State of the Blogosphere 2008 numbers. They revealed that 133 million blogs have been setup since January 2002. That means, on average, over 72,000 blogs have been setup every day since the blogging phenomena started. Staggering numbers!

How to Publish Without Perishing

One could imagine the book, venerable as it is, just vanishing into the ether. It melts into all the other information species searchable through Google’s most democratic of engines.

The Publishing House: An Exploration of the Internet Publishing Revolution

This paper will discuss the state of new media before describing solutions to the problems introduced by instant publishing. Two prolific sources of information, news articles and research, are the focus of this paper.

Mediatization or Mediation? Alternative Understandings of the Emergent Space of Digital Storytelling

This article reviews the social potential of digital storytelling, and in particular its potential to contribute to the strengthening of democracy. Through answering this question, it seeks to test out the relative strengths and weaknesses of two competing concepts for grasping the wider consequences of media for the social world: the concept of mediatization and the concept of mediation. It is argued that mediatization (developed, for example, by Stig Hjarvard and Winfried Schulz) is stronger at addressing aspects of media textuality, suggesting that a unitary media-based logic is at work. In spite of its apparent vagueness, mediation (developed in particular by Roger Silverstone) provides more flexibility for thinking about the open-ended and dialectical social transformations which, as with the printed book, may come in time to be articulated with the new form of digital storytelling.

Eliminating the 'End Game' from Electronic Deliverables

Once you start looking at your publishing process separately from your content and style considerations, you will have identified how your “End Game” impacts your production process. Then, you can take the necessary steps to eliminate it.

Literature-Space Vs. Cyberspace

Stories are so hardwired into our subconscious that it would not surprise me if we did indeed inhabit a story-space that is different from our web-based reading-space. This is a testable proposition. Do our brains work differently when we are in the middle of a story versus when we are in the middle of web surfing? I would be astounded if they were the same. But if that was all the happened -- different strokes for stories than for links, then the solution to exiting the web and entering stories is easy -- just read, listen, or watch more stories.

Time Well Spent: The Magazine Publishing Industry's Online Niche

This article compares the uses of the print and online versions of the same magazine by its readership. Combining surveys of the readership and commercial data from the publisher and web designer, the study examines how one magazine has developed an online publication for its readers. Group Leisure is a niche magazine which has been in print for over a decade and online for two years. This article analyses the usage of the magazine in terms of age, gender and modal occupation of its readers and examines how their understanding of spending and saving time on the magazine underpins their perceptions of its value. The results and conclusions of this research have relevance to the publishing industry and to the study of online journalism.

A Wiki Situation

Admit it: You sometimes consult Wikipedia. Scott McLemee wonders if you should write for it, too.

Publishing is Dead

What does the internet mean for Traditional Publishing? It means death. Not one to pull punches, Mike Scantlebury expounds his theory in a humorous and direct way.

How to Get Your Blog Mentioned in the Society for Technical Communication's Intercom: Include the Word "Technical Communicator"

The keywords that set off the Intercom editor's Google Alert no doubt included technical communicator, technical writer, technical communication, and Society for Technical Communication.

Forums for Citizen Journalists? Adoption of User Generated Content Initiatives by Online News Media

The mainstream online news media face accusations of being slow to respond to so-called 'grassroots' or 'citizen journalism', which uses the world wide web, and in particular blogs and wikis, to publish and promote independent news-related content. This article argues that the adaptation of established news websites to the increasing demand from readers for space to express their views is driven as much by local organizational and technical conditions as it is by any attachment to traditional editorial practices. The article uses qualitative research interviews with the editors and managing editors of nine major British news websites to reveal the debates journalists are having about their changing roles, the challenges of meeting commercial expectations and legal obligations, and the innovations taking place in online newsrooms. It provides journalism and interactive media scholars with case studies on the changes taking place in journalism's relationship with its consumers.

The Guild Model

The Guild Publishing Model is a workable and presently working model, taken seriously in computer science, economics, business, and demography among other fields; however, it has not entered the discussion of scholarly electronic communication. Instead, for example, discussion of scholarly communication in high energy physics focuses on arXiv.org, the repository model. We believe that this is a mistake; the GPM is an important and significant model that is worth noting, examining, and extending to other fields. The GPM can provide rapid sharing of information and increased comprehensive research access for those in academic departments or research institutes with small libraries, and it is an economically feasible model for institutions with basic computing support. The GPM is flexible, set up locally, according to interest, need, and available resources.

Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing on the Web

As scholars and researchers, we are often called upon to separate the high-quality materials from the bad. What are the methods by which quality control is established and what are the indicators that allow a user to recognize the good materials?

The Half-Life of Internet References Cited in Communication Journals

This exploratory study examines the use of online citations, focusing on five leading journals in journalism and communication. It analyzes 1126 URL reference addresses in citations of articles published between 2000 and 2003. The results show that only 61 percent of the online citations remain accessible in 2004 and 39 percent do not. The content analysis also shows that .org and .gov are the most stable domains. Error messages for 'dead' URL addresses are explored. The instability of online citations raises concerns for researchers, editors and associations.

Are you Hurting Your Career By Not Blogging or Podcasting?

Talks about myths, rewards, trends, tips, and issues surrounding blogging and podcasting, especially in terms of how it affects your career.

The Deep Niche

The deep niche--the rolling 'interest tribe' comprised of that day's enthusiastic, new audience--is something that publishers must acknowledge, and accommodate in our business plans, if we are to sustain ourselves. The Web is not merely a threat to publishers--it can also be the means to connect to the people we most want to reach: the interested reader.

Digital Libraries and the Need for a Universal Digital Publication Format

Reports have revealed low uses of e-books and other lengthy texts held in digital libraries. In this article we claim that one of the main reasons for the lack of interest is the current multitude of end-user text formats, some oriented towards print, others proprietary, and few optimized for sustained reading of text-intensive publications. We note IDPF's reluctance to develop a common digital publication format, discuss requirements for a universal, open-standard end-user format, and present the effort to establish such a format by the OpenReader Consortium. The main objective of the article is to examine the pros and cons of a universal, reader-oriented text format for different types of critical text editions and digital libraries.

Effect of E-Printing on Citation Rates in Astronomy and Physics

In this report we examine the change in citation behavior since the introduction of the arXiv e-print repository. It has been observed that papers that initially appear as arXiv e-prints get cited more than papers that do not. Using the citation statistics from the NASA-Smithsonian Astrophysics Data System, we confirm the findings from other studies, we examine the average citation rate to e-printed papers in the Astrophysical Journal, and we show that for a number of major astronomy and physics journals the most important papers are submitted to the arXiv e-print repository first.

In Google We Trust?

Trust, authority, and reputation are central to scholarly publishing, but the trust model of the Internet is almost antithetical to the trust model of academia. Publishers have been so preoccupied with the brute mechanics of moving content to the online world that they have virtually ignored the challenge that the Internet trust model poses to the scholarly publisher. Publishers can learn much about approaches to handling Internet trust from the actions of major online players outside the publishing industry. Publishers should also benefit from watching the trust models that are being experimented with in the nascent realm of social software applications. Publishers once led the way in establishing the apparatus of trust during the transition from manuscript to print culture in early modern Europe. Ultimately, publishers should again take the lead in helping to establish new mechanisms of trust in what could reasonably be described as 'the early modern Internet.'

The Added Value Features of Online Scholarly Journals

Online scholarly journals have become an important tool for the generation of knowledge and the distribution and access to research. The purpose of this article is to analyze the features of online scholarly journals and to determine whether they incorporate new Internet-enabled features and functions which help to meet the needs of the members of the scholarly community more effectively. Drawing on Taylor's concept of added value [1], the features of online scholarly journals were classified into the following types: features which enhance ease of use and facilitate access to data, features that provide selected information and thus reduce noise, features which improve quality, features which address specific user needs, and features which contribute to time or cost savings. The analysis revealed that, although some online journals operate in the same way as print journals, there are others which incorporate innovative features which are transforming the journal to make it a more effective tool for scholarly activity.

Scientific Articles in Internet Homepages: Assumptions Upon Lay Audiences

This article studies a set of scientific/technical articles published in Internet homepages. Focusing upon current trends on genre theory and the functional approach deployed by Halliday and Martin [1], linguistic features and schematic structure are analyzed in relation to more standard genres. The structural analysis suggests that these kind of texts imaginatively realize and assume the standpoint and main tenets of a lay audience that just consumes specific genres, most being analogous to the persuasive, manipulative, amusement-oriented genres of TV news stories, tabloids, and commercials. It is pondered that much of the "technological utopianism" (term used by Kling [2] surrounding the ever increasingly standardized Internet discourse turns the Internet into a productive vehicle to sustain technoscience as modern myth by spreading and forging that utopian imagery into the audience's consciousness, and that scientists are taking fruitful advantage of the utopian, futurist, and often sensationalist accounts of the Internet as a formidable frame to advertise themselves and the deeds achieved in their laboratories.

Thinking in Pixels: An Editing System for Electronic Texts

On-line publication alters the relationship between editor and writer, creating a potentially more collaborative and fluid text. This article explores implications of increased publication options and examines conceptual distinctions among Fixed-Format, Electronic, and Meta-media Editors. We propose a keyboard editing/commenting technique that will work across platforms and software programs and in every mode of electronic communication including simple e-mail. This ASCII based system uses only four symbols in various combinations to convey all of the print editor's marks and also allows the editor or reader to insert comments in the immediate context. The result is increased efficiency and flexibility for writer and editor or teacher and student.

What Happened to Usability Interface

User Interface has been on sabbatical, but I am happy to announce that we have returned. Starting with this issue, the newsletter is online and ends our traditional newsletter format.

Online Flipping: Examination of the Digital FlipViewer

This article examines the usability of FlipViewer software for digital FlipBooks. The FlipViewer software allows users to read online documents in a three-dimensional e-book format simulates a paper document. Participants performed 11 tasks with a FlipBook and their performance was evaluated. Some tasks were difficult for participants to complete, however, participants were satisfied overall with their experience using FlipViewer® and 100% indicated that they would recommend the product to others.

Digital Object Identifiers for Scientific Data

The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a system for identifying content objects in the digital environment. DOIs are names assigned to any entity for use on Internet digital networks. Scientific data sets may be identified by DOIs, and several efforts are now underway in this area. This paper outlines the underlying architecture of the DOI system, and two such efforts which are applying DOIs to content objects of scientific data.

The Complete Beginner's Guide to Writing Articles

So how do you get started? What do you write about? What do you actually DO with your articles once you've written them? It seems daunting, I know. I was petrified myself when I first started writing articles, I still get nervous every time I start submitting a new article all over the net.

Imparting Values to the Peer Review Process

Writing is popularly believed to be a spontaneous exercise. Often it is, but one cannot sustain oneself as a writer of merit, as a writer whose works will live on, without quality. Quality control--who could disagree with that? Whatever we write needs to be freed from both paper and its production costs, but not from peer review, whose 'invisible hand' is what maintains its quality. Peer review is educative, informative, enlightening. Peer review invests you with the confidence that eggs you on to keep writing. Peer review offers you the credibility you seek in the writing market, from editors, publishers, agents and readers. Peer review lends respect to your writing, and with time, to your by-line.

"Why Would You Want to Do That?" Online Publication for Graduate Student Scholars, Ethos, and the Middle Ground

Explores the intersection between peer-reviewed print journals and online publications, and then examines two hybrid publications, one outside the discipline of professional communication and one inside, to determine whether a middle ground is attainable, and whether it can provide the same enculturating experience without hampering the development of professional ethos.

Evaluating Faculty Research in the Electronic Age: Business School Deans' Perceptions of Publication Formats

Perhaps the most obvious example of innovation in faculty performance is the adoption of new technologies for research. Both administrators and faculty have expressed concern about the role that electronic publications play in their research evaluation systems, particularly in Business Schools, where scholarly publication is often emphasized over other activities. Yet, there appears to be no empirical evidence for the way that electronic journals, conference proceedings, and abstracts are evaluated compared to printed paper versions. Therefore, this study sought to determine how Business School Deans regard the physical form in which their faculty are publishing.

What Shall We Do With the Publications?

Publications pages are often among the most popular pages on web sites, particularly government sites. But this handy convention has turned into a problem.

Weblogs as a Bridging Genre

Weblogs (blogs)--frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence--are the latest genre of Internet communication to attain widespread popularity, yet their characteristics have not been systematically described. This paper presents the results of a quantitative content analysis of 203 randomly-selected weblogs, comparing the empirically observable features of the corpus with popular claims about the nature of weblogs, and finding them to differ in a number of respects. Notably, blog authors, journalists and scholars alike exaggerate the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and oriented towards external events, and underestimate the importance of blogs as individualistic, intimate forms of self-expression. Based on the profile generated by the empirical analysis, we consider the likely antecedents of the blog genre, situate it with respect to the dominant forms of digital communication on the Internet today, and suggest possible developments of the use of weblogs over time in responsgenres.

Conditions for Viable Scholarly Electronic Journals: The Role of Digital Libraries

Three characteristics of hard-copy scholarly journals--visibility, immutability and longevity--which electronic journals might emulate to gain more acceptance and trust of potential authors and readers, are pointed out. The role of digital libraries in helping electronic journals in the emulation is also discussed.

Digital Libraries, Knowledge Networks, and Human-Centered Information Systems

One of the most dramatic changes in the ongoing information revolution is the rapid convergence of computing, communications and content industries. Digital content, especially in the form of large, distributed, heterogeneous collections of electronic objects - text, voice, images, graphics, video, and others - is fueling the growth of the computing and communications in each other. This paper discusses the role of digital libraries, and knowledge networks in general, in this process, in the context of human-centered information systems.

Dissemination of Japanese Academic Journals over the Internet

NACSIS started an Internet-based document delivery service called NACSIS-ELS in April 1997. As of September 1997, 25 Japanese academic societies are participating in this service and 48 scientific journal pages will be captured and made available on NACSIS-ELS. The history for the development of NACSIS-ELS is described and the copyright charging strategy is discussed for two models, i.e., an individual user model and an institutional use model. Other issues related to electronic journals are also mentioned such as security protection measures, academic society activities over the Internet, and the issues for the establishment of globally distributed digital libraries.

Electronic Journals: What Do Users Think of Them?

The present paper describes a variety of user attitudes and behaviour towards electronic journals. It draws on projects conducted between the early 1980s and the present day. In general, electronic journals still do not support the tasks which users perform and tend to be negatively perceived. Because journal publishers tend to be author-oriented, they have ignored the human factors literature and produced electronic journals for which there is little demand.

Layered Data View for Searching, Browsing, and Presenting Scholarly Documents

This paper describes about the study result on text formats suitable for searching, browsing, and presenting scholarly documents as a digital library service, in relation with the document distribution formats and with the data production methods. Two types of data sources are considered in the context of their application to NACSIS-ELS. The printed document sources are first discussed mainly from the viewpoint of fulltext data production and their application, including application of OCR and document structure recognition technology. Electronic text sources are then discussed mainly from the viewpoint of format conversion and the mutual relation among formats for layered data view.

Technical Aspect of Next Generation Digital Library Project

Digital libraries are one of the central and most compelling applications for the 21st century's highly information-based societies. The development of such system needs three kind of technologies. First one is a system architecture that defines overall system structure and provides common services and interfaces. Second one is individual technologies that include search technology, retrieval technology, contents entry technology and so on. Third one is an integration technology that enables to combine individual technology as a system on the system architecture. The system architecture that plays a central role should be designed to have a interoperability to the international standards and de fact standards. Because digital libraries have to be open and inter-connectable.

Towards a General Theory of the Digital Library

Debate about the digital library is clouded by emotion and self-interest. Emotion plays its part because the digital library is seen by some as a threat to the book, and a threat to the book is an attack on culture itself. Self-interest enters the fray because in the instability provoked by the digital library there will be winners and losers, whether in business, or the professions. Depending on your point of view the digital library can be the end of libraries as we know them, or the salvation of libraries as we know them.

Personal Publication and Public Attention

What makes weblogs a genre different from the autobiography, the diary, the researcher's journal or any other pre-Internet writing? While weblogs have many non-digital predecessors, blogs cannot live outside of the computer. They are ergodic texts (Aarseth 1997), and demand the assistance of technology in order to be created and used.

Facing the Future of Electronic Publishing

Since its inception, Kairos has been criticized both for being too non-traditional and for being too traditional. The journal has always been engaged in a delicate balancing act: we want our authors to have their submissions recognized as valid peer-reviewed scholarship for purposes of tenure and promotion, and we want to make sure that we aren't simply replicating the kind of scholarship that could just as easily exist in a print journal.

"Just" Professing: A Call for the Valuation of Prototypical Electronic Scholarship

We should not limit our view of 'what counts' as electronic publishing to online journals that merely replicate print conventions but enlarge it to include other, even yet-to-be-developed forms of electronic publishing.

An Electronic Journal Browser Implemented in the World Wide Web

The networked delivery of medical journal content along with innovative presentation of associated abstracting and indexing data presents new issues for the evolving digital library.

What are eBooks Good For?

The internet and e-book technology gives you the power of independence-the power to create your own e-books and sell them online.

A Basic Guide to Power Blogging

Blogs (web logs, online journals) are nearly mandatory now. From presidential candidates and CEOs to avid hobbyists and local clubs, blogs are being used to share ideas and opinions. As the next new communications/community building/marketing tool beyond conventional web sites, blogs offer a more dynamic, timely, and personal interactive experience. Join over 4 million other bloggers by following these easy steps to Power Blogging.

Going Online: Making the Right Decisions

Putting documents online takes planning and special expertise. Making the right decisions up front can save you months of frustration later on— and help you avoid many pitfalls. This workshop provides everything you need to know about planning and managing an online project. It deals with the decision-making process, not the design process. It is intended for managers, technical communicators, and consultants responsible for putting documents online.

Writing a Collaborative Book in Cyberspace

New software is released. The same day, a 1,000 page book is released that 'unleashes' the hidden secrets of the software. How did the book get there so quickly? This paper takes an insider’s look at a case history — the writing and publishing of the Lotus Notes Unleashed series of books — to show how the Internet is being used to provide more timely and accurate information on technical subjects. The described case includes assembling the writing team, writing the book, the editing process, and publication of the book, all done using the Internet and computers as a primary medium.

Publishing Newsletters on Paper or Online: A Profile of How Three Chapter Editors Did It

The switch to web delivery meant that we no longer had to restrict the newsletter to black and white, and we were no longer limited to four pages (a folio) or a multiple of four pages. An end to the cost constraints imposed by printing also allowed more creative formatting and the use of color.

Blogs on the Side

Blogging as a trend has gained enormous popularity with the simplification of automated self-publishing systems, such as Blogger at www.blogger.com, or MT at www.moveabletype.org. Blogging as a way of life is also gathering adherents at a rapid pace.

Harnessing the Power of the Internet

The 'information highway' and 'World Wide Web' are hot topics today. Companies are feeling that they must have a Web presence. Companies are also using Internet technology (HTML) to put technical documentation on the Net or on internal networks. Technical communicators are being asked to create Web pages and Internet documents. In this one-day seminar, you will discover what Internet publishing is all about. You’ll learn how to design effective Web pages and Internet documents.

Crossing the Divide

This essay summarizes the editor's views of publication in the field of human-computer interaction. Digital technologies have begun changing the way journal articles and conference papers are produced, reviewed, published, accessed, and used. This period of profound change presents challenges and opportunities for both new and existing channels of scientific and technical communication.

Designing Information for the 21st Century

In the past, documentation meant printed books. Then along came online help. Online books soon followed. Now we have the Internet and web pages. Developing a documentation plan today means more than planning how books are going to be structured, reviewed, and printed. It needs to take into account the possibilities that these new media have to offer. Achieve the most effective results by making delivery in these media part of your documentation planning.

On Beyond Help: Interface Design Paradigms for Online Documents

In the world of printed documentation, there are many different programs, with different ways of solving the problem of editing and layout, but they all produce the same product in the end--a printed page. The online world can be bewildering even to experienced authors, since not only the authoring approach but the end result can vary so widely. This session is a look at some of the different types of online systems and how they affect both interface and document design.

Pages, Books, the Web, and Virtual Reality: A Response to Negroponte's "Books Without Pages"

Inclusion of Nicholas Negroponte's paper on 'Books Without Pages' (1979) in this Journal requires explanation, as the paper does not concern itself directly with computer documentation. However, the implications of its assertions and questions ultimately involve all of us who teach, practice, and learn about documenting computer programs. As we leave paper and move to other media to deliver our instructions to users, we are faced with the same questions that Negroponte was asking over 15 years ago. Just as the MIT researchers were doing, we look for new metaphors and new ways to define the relationship between our 'readers' and the information we are providing to them. We search for that perfect controlling metaphor that will clarify how our communications in new media work, and how we can apply some sense and some structure to them, a new 'grammar', if you will, for our books without pages.

E-Books

E-books are a cost-saving technology for students. Imagine while reading your expensive paper textbook that it suddenly displayed a video that taught you the technique you just read about. Imagine searching through your textbook with the click of a button. Imagine your textbook costing about half of what you used to pay. That’s right—you didn’t read the last line wrong. It was half the amount you used to pay. Imagine all this and more, with e-books. E-books have many advantages over paper textbooks. The best advantage for students would have to be the cost. E-books are sold at very low prices because the whole printing process is out of the picture. This saves money for the publishers and in turn saves money for students.

Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age

If you like to think about your work philosophically, or even if you don't, David M. Levy's book tackles some of the big questions in our profession: paper versus digital, reading versus viewing, libraries versus the Web, brick and mortar schools versus distance education. And the great thing about the book is that he thinks you don't have to choose between one or the other in each of these apparent dichotomies; in fact, what's needed is a balance between the two.

E-Books: It's About Evolution, Not Revolution

This article is a general update about the state of the art and business of e-books. With the dampening of some of the dot.com hype the e-book picture is actually becoming more sensible. There is still a lot of change happening and no one knows where we might end up, but some solid work is being done both on the technology and on the business side. What isn't quite happening yet, and what I look forward to, is a re-definition of "book" to include things that didn't really fit into the hard copy world, such as the publication of individual essays (of any length), stories, poems, novellas, etc., and even possibly a return to serialized works. Put your thinking caps on, folks, there are great possibilities!

The Handbook of Digital Publishing

The Handbook of Digital Publishing is a remarkable work for both its breadth of content and the quality of explanation. The handbook is, quite simply, overwhelming. From animation to ZIP files, surely these two volumes have it covered. I looked up things I knew and things I didn't. For both, I found in Kleper a lucid, detailed explanation, usually complete with topic history, technical specifications, and options for use.

Evaluating Our New Look and Moving Online: Seeing Is Believing

The editorial advisory board and I have been asking our readers' opinions about the journal's redesign and the directions this publication should take in the future. We've also commissioned usability studies and carefully examined the technologies available for online publication. In this editorial, I'd like to share what we've learned and the directions in which we hope to move during the coming year.

About Freeloading

Jess McMullin, a Usability Analyst at Cognissa, and a long time reader of WebWord, wrote me a lettera couple of days ago. His basic complaint was that I don't give my readers enough credit. I'm pretty sure that he feels offended that I have called my readers a bunch of 'freeloaders'. What does that mean and what is freeloading?

Directions for Online Publishing

Online publishing of newspapers, magazines, and books is really a meaningless concept. We have to leave the legacy publications behind as we invent the world of online publishing.

Reality Bytes -What the Information Superhighway Won't Deliver

Today, information technology has deluged us with not only a torrential flood of information but also a multitude of ways in which to display, package, and disseminate this information. With the proliferation of computer technology and the vigorously-and somewhat fanatically-promoted paperless and faceless virtual society of the fiture, we are faced with somewhat frightening challenges.

eBooks: A Battle for Standards

After a decade, however, my initial enthusiasm over eBooks has waned considerably. Rather than looking forward to a new title as it becomes available, I immediately ask which format the title is available in, question how I can best access the title (which operating system, using which eBook reading application), scheme about how best to convert it to a more convenient format, and then eventually give up caring. Certainly, eBooks still hold a great deal of unrealized promise.

Modern Chivalry and the Case for Electronic Texts

Finding editions of particular literary texts for the purposes of teaching or research has always been a problem for literary scholars. Given the current proliferation of electronic versions of texts available on the World Wide Web, it is tempting to assume that the problem is solved. Yet most professors are reluctant to use these sites and do not often recommend them to students. In reflecting on the reasons for this phenomenon, the most obvious causes seem to stem from questions of authority, design, and a general lack of knowledge concerning what is available and where it can be attained.

World Wide Words: A Rationale and Preliminary Report on a Publishing Project for an Advanced Writing Workshop

Publishing articles on the World Wide Web in established webzines edited for love or money by people who take their tasks seriously offers a possible remedy to the problem of inauthenticityor pseudotransactionality in student writing.

Writing and Publishing in the Boundaries: Academic Writing In/Through the Virtual Age

Increasingly, online publications are vying for prominence and acceptance in the academy. Questions about their validity and quality are raised alongside debates about the effects that these publications will have on academic scholarship. Despite all the hype around e-journals, few have carefully analyzed what differences actually exist between online journals and print journals. In this article, I undertake a comparative analysis of two key journals in the specialty field of computers and composition—Computers and Composition: An International Journal for Teachers of Writing, primarily a print journal, and Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, an e-journal.

Design, Technology, and Collaboration: A Case Study in Internet Publishing

This case study presents the process and procedures involved in migrating print documents (technical documentation, newsletters, brochures, white papers, etc.) to the Internet. Included is a discussion of how print prototypes were developed, the online 'translation' of information structures ,as well as the selection and training of the business unit’s web team, and the role of the project leader. Issues like 'designing for maintenance,' management support, and technological benefits and constraints are highlighted.

Moving to Electronic Delivery of Documentation

Includes information about the fundamentals of electronic documentation, case studies, what to expect, how to research, identify, and implement a process for moving from an exclusively hard copy development and delivery process to electronic documentation development and delivery. While anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can potentially view electronic documentation, this white paper also addresses globalization issues related to the development, delivery, and use of electronic documentation.

Is Scientific Writing on the Fast Lane of the Information Highway? An Analysis of Electronic Publishing

Because of the advances of computer technology and the accessibility of the Information Information Superhighway, electronic publishing is surpassing print literature. Electronic publishing includes libraries, on-demand publishing and journals. This paper specifically covers the purpose of electronic journals and the techniques for publishing. It also focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of electronic journals, and asks 'Is it a viable form of written communication?'

Legal Issues in Cyberspace

What are these issues and how do they affect you? Whether writing source code, developing e-commerce Web sites, or using the Web for business or as a consumer, you can be affected by Internet law in ways you might not imagine. Our rights of free speech and privacy take on new dimensions in cyberspace. Our copyright and trademark laws are being applied to cyberspace with caution and controversy. New avenues of criminal activity in cyberspace can wreak havoc in our business, professional, and personal worlds. This paper focuses on Internet law involving copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, free speech, and privacy.

Introduction to Electronic Publishing on the Internet

Publishing electronically is becoming increasingly important as global networks expand, providing a new audience. for the new medium. The volume of information available electronically is staggering, and electronic media are becoming available to thousands of more people daily. The audience for electronic publishing is vast, educated, scientifically and technologically sophisticated, and international, perhaps more so than for print publications. Electronic professional journals (e-journals) are gaining acceptability, especially when editors exercise credible peer review. Because many technical communicators are technologically oriented, they are well positioned to facilitate electronic document publishing Knowing how to use the Internet can be an important job skill.

Yours Authentically...

As electronic documents gain ascendancy, the authenticity of the author and the integrity of e-mail documents, which most of us usually take for granted, may become major stumbling blocks for ecommerce, e-learning, online training, and technical communication in the future. How can we be certain of the authenticity of electronic documents? While this problem exists equally for paper-based documents, given sophisticated scanners, software, and color printers, electronic documents are especially prone to tampering, mismanagement, and outright fraud.

Business Model Issues in the Development of Digital Cultural Content

This paper examines business model aspects of digitizing cultural content. It is based in large part on a Study conducted by the author and his colleagues for the Department of Canadian Heritage. Based on data collected from several cultural institutions regarding their efforts to digitize content, the study found that implications for the cost side have been significant, leading to explorations of facilities and content sharing programs, formalized budgeting, the need for better copyright expertise and improved mid to long term planning. On the revenue (funding) side, a clear need for more rigorous assessments of user demand emerged. In addition, the possibility of revisiting organizational mandates was identified, as well as various revenue-generating opportunities including sponsorship, user-fees and private/public sector partnerships.

Issues in Sustainability: Creating Value for Online Users

Based on a talk given at the 2003 IMLS Web-Wise Conference, this paper addresses two issues related to the long-term sustainability of collections that museums, libraries, and other heritage institutions put online. The first is that of building collections and services that are core to the mission of the institution and that are likely to win support among its users. The second is the planning process of building those collections and services. In the latter case, Smith describes an IMLS-funded project that the Council on Library and Information Resources has undertaken to assess the business planning processes used by museums and libraries and offer models to follow.

The Processed Book

The 'processed book' is about content, not technology, and contrasts with the 'primal book'; the latter is the book we all know and revere: written by a single author and viewed as the embodiment of the thought of a single individual. The processed book, on the other hand, is what happens to the book when it is put into a computerized, networked environment. To process a book is more than simply building links to it; it also includes a modification of the act of creation, which tends to encourage the absorption of the book into a network of applications, including but not restricted to commentary. Such a book typically has at least five aspects: as self-referencing text; as portal; as platform; as machine component; and, as network node. An interesting aspect of such processing is that the author's relationship to his or her work may be undermined or compromised; indeed, it is possible that author attribution in the networked world may go the way of copyright. The processed book, in other words, is the response to romantic notions of authorship and books. It is not a matter of choice (as one can still write an imitation, for example, of a Victorian novel today) but an inevitable outcome of inherent characteristics of digital media.

Moving into XML Functionality: The Combined Digital Dictionaries of Buddhism and East Asian Literary Terms

Compilation of the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism (DDB) began with the realization of the dearth of adequate lexicographical and other reference works in the English language for the textual scholar of East Asian Buddhism in particular, and East Asian philosophy and religion in general. The (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) CJK-English Dictionary (CJK-E) began soon after. I decided, during my first Buddhist and Confucian/Taoist texts readings courses, to save everything I looked up, and have continued that practice to the present, through the course of studying scores of classical texts. Although the content of these two lexicons is presently being supplemented by other interested parties, the terms that I have been compiling serve as the major portion of the work.

Personalising Electronic Books

The paper addresses how hyperdocuments, accessible via electronic books (e-books) which are read using the World Wide Web, can be endowed with features that personalise the interaction process that takes place between the reader and the e-book. A novel, abstract approach to modelling the personalisation of hyperdocuments is introduced. This approach aims to make available features that allow readers to interact with these documents in a manner much closer to that with paper-based documents. The research is based on a formal characterisation of personalisable hyperlink-based interaction. This characterisation is unique in formally modelling a rich set of user-initiated personalisation actions that allow users to come closer to satisfying their specific, often dynamic, information retrieval goals.

The Soundproof Book: Exploration of Rights Conflict and Access to Commercial EBooks for People with Disabilities

This document will lay out the heated rights controversy concerning the use of synthetic speech -- Text-To-Speech (TTS) as it relates to the use of eBook publications by persons with disabilities.

Survey on Electronic Book Features

While people may not want a radical departure from the paper book, they want to do things with electronic books that are not possible with paper books. For example, they want to 'personalize' their electronic book reading experience by changing the fonts, typefaces, and margins, moving illustrations and tables around the page, sizing images differently than text, and so on. In effect, people want to manage the presentation of information within the electronic book. This raises an issue because not only do people want to manage presentation, they want to add content to electronic books they purchased. For example, they may read a related article and want to add that content to the book. Adding content should not be viewed as simply creating an annotation or note but adding content that becomes part of the book and incorporated into the table of contents and index.

A Brief History and Technical Overview of the Current State of JAC Online, with a Few Observations About How the Internet is Influencing (or Failing to Influence) Scholarship: or, Who Says You Can’t Find JAC Online?

This article has two purposes. A number of people have asked me what has been involved in producing the current version of JAC Online, and so the electronic archive’s history and technical development is presented here for them. In the process of working with JAC Online, I have come to some tentative conclusions about the role electronic research plays in scholarship, the significance electronic publications hold for paper publications, the question of e-publication and tenure, and how much technical knowledge is relevant to current and future scholarship in the humanities. I present these tentative conclusions in the context of my experience as an online editor. It is important to emphasize that my experience is limited to a single journal and my role with that journal is limited to that journal’s needs, and thus what I say is local knowledge. But like a lot of people I see all knowledge as local, even in cyberspace. To create the context for what I will suggest about the current state of online scholarship, I will first recount the history of JAC Online.

Institutional Repositories: Partnering with Faculty to Enhance Scholarly Communication

Institutional repositories build on a growing grassroots faculty practice of posting research online, most often on personal web sites, but also on departmental sites or in disciplinary repositories. This demonstrates a desire for expanded exposure of, and access to, their work. In addition, digital publishing technologies, ever-expanding global networking, and enabling interoperability protocols and metadata standards are coalescing to provide practical technical solutions that can be implemented now. The convergence of these interrelated strands indicates that institutional repositories merit serious and immediate consideration from academic institutions and their constituent faculty, librarians, and administrators.

The eBook Advantage: Writing and Publishing Electronic Books

Hall, the author of three eBooks, explains how technical writers can earn extra income by writing and publishing their own electronic books.

Independent Publishing is Growing Up

It can be said that the first year you publish an independent web zine you are in the process of learning the concept of the independent web. There is no one definition that could incapsulate what is and what isn't the indepenedent web other than the independent web is free. Free from commercialization. Free from censorship. Free from politics. Free from the boxes that we can find ourselves working our day jobs. The independent web movement is about everything we can't do elsewhere. What we can't do at our day jobs, we do on the web. What we can't do in our country, we do on the web. What we can't express elsewhere, we express on the web. We do it by ourselves for ourselves. It's our sandbox and it is our right to express ourselves not just as citizens of a country but as human beings as individuals.

Rock, Paper, Stone: The Biz Stone Guide to Independent Publishing

People have things to say. Maybe you're one of them, struggling to get a voice through the bottleneck that is big publishing. Maybe you're a talented individual who would write more if you had a forum. Maybe you're an expert in certain areas but all that insightful content stays trapped within you because you don't have an outlet. Oh, but you do. Today's Web is fertile soil for independent publishing. Not only is it easy to get your voice out there, but your voice is also heard, acknowledged, and in many cases responded to by interested, intelligent readers who have discovered your work because they sought it out and are happy to have found it. This low barrier to publishing gets you writing, and that's important.

Down By Law

A library's core mission is to provide free and full access to a world of ideas. The most exciting thing to happen in libraries in the last decade has been to see that mission extended to include access to the Internet. New library services, funded by generous federal support, have made more Internet access available to more and more people. Now, those same sources may force public libraries to censor Internet access.

Online Vs. Hard-Copy Marketing Material: Both Have a Place

The World Wide Web, the panacea of the so-called information age, was supposed to transform the way we shop, are entertained, and get informed. If the web was supposed to be so great, why are we still reading so much information on paper?

Living Documentation: The Future of Technical Writing

Living documentation is documentation that does not cease to be developed until the product ceases to develop. Living documentation can be produced at any time in multiple formats. The book, web pages and online help would continue to be developed as long as that development either solves inaccuracy or increases product usability and customer satisfaction.

Print to Online: Conflicting Tales of Transition

This is a success story of how a large, high-tech service support organization made the transition from print to online documentation in both CD-ROM and Web media. But this is also a cautionary tale of the damaging drawbacks resulting from that changeover. The co-existence of two such very different evaluations, both based on accurate reporting about common products and circumstances, is emblematic of the challenges that new technologies can bring to information developers. The success story, told by the publications group responsible for the transition, is focused on new features and reduced production expenses. The cautionary tale highlights larger issues of process, product suitability, and indirect costs that affect both users and the company, including the publications group itself. The instructive value of considering two such versions of a single case history is in developing a fuller view of how technology advances can lead to unintended consequences for information developers.

Best Practices for Digital Archiving

The rapid growth in the creation and dissemination of digital objects by authors, publishers, corporations, governments, and even librarians, archivists, and museum curators, has emphasized the speed and ease of short-term dissemination with little regard for the long-term preservation of digital information. However, digital information is fragile in ways that differ from traditional technologies, such as paper or microfilm. It is more easily corrupted or altered without recognition. Digital storage media have shorter life spans, and digital information requires access technologies that are changing at an ever-increasing pace. Some types of information, such as multimedia, are so closely linked to the software and hardware technologies that they cannot be used outside these proprietary environments [Kuny 1998]. Because of the speed of technological advances, the time frame in which we must consider archiving becomes much shorter. The time between manufacture and preservation is shrinking.

Practical Lessons for Small-Scale Web Publishers

Electronic publishing through the World Wide Web offers tantalizing opportunities for small-scale operators such as individuals in academic or other non-profit institutions trying to reach a wide audience. Early users of the Web quickly recognized it as a ground-breaking medium for electronic publications. By making it easy to display and read texts online, the Web became a platform for materials that were too specialized, too ephemeral or too experimental for publication as traditional books or articles. However, the recent explosive growth and widespread commercialization of the Web have eroded or at least marginalized small-scale electronic publications. Successful small-scale Web publishing is still possible, but that success must be preceded by careful planning and goal-setting.

How Scientists Retrieve Publications: An Empirical Study of How the Internet Is Overtaking Paper Media

Bo-Christer Björk and Ziga Turk, editor and one of the co-editors of the Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction, surveyed scientists and discovered that they increasingly look to e-journals for information.

White Paper on Electronic Journal Usage Statistics

Electronic journals represent a significant and growing part of the academic library's offerings. As demand for e-journals increases, librarians are faced with a new set of decisions related to acquisitions and services. Must libraries retain both print and electronic copies? Is the price of the electronic copy justified by its use? Do usage patterns show that some journals will be as heavily used -- or more so -- in 20 years as when they are published? Answers to these and other questions require statistics on usage, and in the electronic realm, such statistics must come from the publishers.