What is electronic publishing?

Electronic publishing has many facets. All large-scale print medium publishing these days is electronic, and much medium-scale and small-scale publishing is also electronic, going under the name of``desktop publishing''.

However, by `electronic publishing' one generally means publication of texts for distribution and reading in an electronic medium. Electronic media are themselves very varied: floppy disk, CD-ROM, magnetic tapes, opto-magnetic storage devices, computer hard disk - these change rapidly from one generation of technology to another. Another kind of electronic medium is more complex: the server-client networking characteristic of company (or university) intranets or the World Wide Web. Not all electronic publishing involves text, or text alone, or hypertext.

So it is useful to make the following distinction:

Electronic publishing:

The production of texts for distribution and reading in an electronic medium.

Computer-supported publishing:

The production of print medium texts with the use of computers (desktop publishing).

But a more general sense is emerging:

Multimedia publishing:

The production of texts from an underlying text database for distribution and reading in more than one medium.

Exercises and discussion points:

1. Find examples of several different types of computer-supported publishing. Comment on whether the use of a computer is essential for each type.
2. Find examples of several different types of electronic publishing in the strict sense. Comment on the pros and cons of electronic publishing for each type.
3. Find examples of multimedia publishing, and try to define and illustrate the notion of `multimedia'.
4. Find definitions of `hypertext' on the web and try to relate these definitions to the way you normally think of text.