E Publishing.

E-publishing has "given a new dimension to the written world, but is it for the mutual good?

To co-opt Clifford Lynch's painfully accurate wry observation, "I suspect that more words are being published about the ebook phenomenon in print than have actually been placed into e-books so far". That's not an inaccurate or hyperbolic comment - despite the furore and hype that surrounded e-books upon their introduction into the consumer market, the medium has yet to live up to its reputation. Or so it seems the reality of the situation is, as tends to be the case, a blend of both promise and failure.

That's a funny thought, given that most retailers - both traditional and online have actually been doing a fair amount of work to integrate e-books into their traditional sales models. Although dedicated "e-book only" devices such as the Rocket eBook by NuvoMedia seemed to herald the future (at least back in 1998 and 1999), they never really took off. On the other hand, electronic versions of texts started climbing fairly rapidly (albeit erratically), with Amazon offering e-books for sale in either Adobe Reader or Microsoft Reader formats. The digitization  of books isn't just limited to the world of print; it's spilled over into a variety of other formats as well, such as audio-books. Interestingly enough, e-books aren't just about large document files; companies such as Audible offer "audio e-books": digital audio files of entire books, available for download to an iPod, other MP3 players, or to PCs for burning to CD. Of course, while retailers are doing their share, organizations such as Project Gutenberg, and Google Scholar (not to mention Google Print) are plunging into the world of e-book_ as rapidly as possible. Project Gutenberg is probably the most traditional model of e-book propagation to date; it transcribes "public domain" texts (i.e. works of classic literature that can be considered the common ancestral property of all humankind, as well as those works of literature for which copyright and intellectual property rights have expired). The free e-books that it produces are mainly out-of-copyright classic fiction titles with almost 20,000 titles in the public domain. It should most probably be kept in mind that some people consider the manner in which Google Scholar and Google Print are making text available online too not "technically" count as the .creation of e-books; after all, they're not publishing anything new, they're just searching (and perhaps archiving?) the information out there, in much the same manner as with any other data. Right

The problem with e-books, and indeed anything that enters the digital medium, is that matters inevitably get complicated. Very, very fast. If one starts with the basic concept (and the harsh truth, in all fairness) that the process of implementing e-books is complicated and anachronistic as a business practice, it's not hard to extrapolate how publishers must feel about entering the market. On the one hand, money talks (if not eloquently, then at least very loudly), and most "traditional" publishers would be happy to sell their souls in order to tap the digital market.
For example, once again, take Project Gutenberg as a model: with the average number of e-book downloads on a monthly basis at two million, even if the books were being sold at half of their traditional print price (which we can set at an average of six dollars), that comes out to three times two million dollars. Working realistically, even if one-tenth of the current user-base at this website remains loyal, that still comes out to approximately 600,000 dollars per month. That may not be a huge amount of cash for a publishing group on the scale of Houghton Mifflin or Random House, but think about some of the other factors affecting this very conservative estimate: a limited number of texts; a price limit that could be effectively lowered; instant distribution and very little (if any) additional capital expenditure. All in all, a great deal.

Which is why traditional publishers are of two minds about e-books. On the one hand, they see this enormous potential market, but on the other, it is exceedingly complex and totally unruly - it is a business in flux, and to any traditional company, that screams "Danger!". For example, the biggest issue that may be plaguing companies hoping to enter the e-book proto-industry, is that of "vapourware", or at least its e-book equivalent, in which announced launch and development cycles for new reading devices and services (including distribution) are bumped off schedule repeatedly, sometimes even by years. And some other products are culled from the market almost as soon as they hit the cybernetic (or rarely, real-world) store shelves, under the notion that their opportunity costs are incapable of being justified.

So getting into e-books hasn't been as easy or as quick as everyone expected it to be. That is mainly due to the fact that publishers need to protect their profits (after all, money is the key driver in all businesses!) and therefore have to ensure that e-books do not suffer the same fate as the music industry supposedly did. Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems are designed to protect e-books from unauthorized access and copying, and changes to copyright laws in countries such as the United Kingdom, have been initiated in order to protect owners of copyrighted material in electronic form. In the UK, since 2003, it has been an offence to try to interfere with or avoid DRM systems. But naturally, as turned out to be the case with the music industry, such draconian measures don't necessarily hold a great deal of meaning. Peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, especially those such as BitTorrent and Kazaa Lite K++, have made the dissemination of the e-book incredibly easy. Most popular modern fiction is readily available for download - for research purposes of course. Try locating copies of Stephen King's Dark Tower series of novels, and chances are that you will find more than 1400 files that not only cover the entire seven-novel series, but also offer it in a variety of languages (German, Swedish and English being the most popular) and file formats (Adobe Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Reader, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Works, Corel Office, plain text, JPG, GIF, PNG, and last but not least HTML). It's not just file-sharing though as far back as 2003, according to an Associated Press article from Tokyo, published in USA Today, cell phones were being used as a medium of transmission: Japan's magazine publishers association mailed out approximately 34,000 posters to bookstores asking patrons not to use camera phone to shoot pages from periodicals or books instead of buying them, once bookstores reported that such usage was "devastating sales".
Again, the issue is a complicated one.

In countries such. as China and Korea, where publications are heavily censored or banned, inappropriate infringement may sometimes be the only way to gain access to reading material that would otherwise remain unavailable. In fact, it may even be the only way for Pakistanis and members of other countries where books and magazines are limited in variety to find reading material that suits their tastes! But at the end of the day, the area remains stubbornly grey, and a Catch-22 situation emerges: should publishers risk losing what guaranteed print sales they have by offering electronic distribution, or should they go head and hope that the successful iTunes model of music delivery can be adapted to media other than music and video? That remains to be seen.

_{source Spider Mag.}