第七章 电子出版的发展趋势外文翻译资料

Chapter 7 TRENDS IN ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING

Chennupati K. Ramaiah, Schubert Foo and Heng Poh Choo

1. Chapter Overview

　　The parallel development of information and communication technologies, and the pervasiveness of electronic information fuelled by the Internet, has provided electronic publishing with new explosive growth opportunities. Electronic publishing (EP), from its initial mainly text-based stand-alone publication base, is fast transforming into a resource set of interactive publications endowed with rich multimedia that can be packaged in many ways and disseminated in various forms across different networked environments. The whole publishing chain is changing as the distinction between author, publisher, reader or user, and library are being blurred.

The fast changing landscape in EP has resulted in many issues that need to be addressed, developments that are worthy of mention, and emerging trends that need to be understood. These include tracing the development from print to EP; various publishing models for eContent; various distribution models for eContent; emerging and defacto document formats and file formats used in EP; new file sharing technologies for EP; authoring and reading eContent; policies and legislation; combating piracy and concept of fair use; EP business models; growth and impact of the EP market in both developed and developing countries; and the latest EP trends and future technologies.

This list is by no means exhaustive. It is intended to highlight several pertinent areas of EP development. This chapter attempts to cover and summarize a number of these areas by highlighting contributions along these various aspects, thereby providing an up-to-date overview of EP. They not only reflect new EP developments and research trends but also reflect the continuation of this body of rich EP literature from the past.

2. The Potential of Electronic Publishing

Electronic publishing (EP) refers to the application of computing software by a publisher to information content created and packaged for a specific audience, and the distribution of the final product through electronic means. As such, publishing is an integrated process aimed at providing information in different quantities and with different qualities to different categories of end-users.

Initially, ePublications were stand-alone publications distributed through storage media such as diskettes and CD-ROM. Later, ePublications became multi-dimensional when multimedia technologies enabled sounds, moving images and occasionally even smell to be incorporated. Advances made in networking technologies has resulted in EP increasingly being used to refer to information content distributed over network environments such as the Internet (Ludwick amp; Glazer, 2000; Burk, 2001). EP can therefore be categorized broadly into offline and online publishing. Offline publishing utilizes different types of storage and delivery media such as CD-ROM, CD-I, DVD, memory card, and diskettes, while online publishing uses communication networks such as the Internet, intranets and extranets as the delivery platforms. Many types of ePublications exist. These include all kinds of information resources, educational aids, games and other kinds of entertainment products.

Electronic and networked information creation and dissemination has created new opportunities for the distribution of the information products and new varieties in the kind of information that could be made available. The whole publishing chain is changing and the distinctions between author, publisher, reader or user, and library are being blurred (Peek, 1994). With the advent of the World Wide Web and its transformation into a graphical medium, new possibilities for EP were created.

ePublications offer the potential of enhancing information with additional dimensions in a cost-effective way and thus enabling the information to reach a wider audience of users compared to paper-based print publications (pPublications). EP offers a number of advantages and benefits to publishers, readers and users, libraries and organizations. Publishers can potentially: benefit from decrease in publication costs, increase the amount of information that can be included in a publication, and implement new approaches to the organization and presentation of information. Users are given the opportunity and ability to interact, customize and create individual pathways and information layers; include simulations and experiments; and to visualize the impact of full-colour figures and video.

The major information owners and providers that engage in EP are commercial publishers, corporate organizations, government organizations and information publishers. Commercial publishers are concerned with creating a marketplace for EP products and devising viable business models for the new medium. This is closely linked with the concept of value-added publishing, whereby the expertise and experience of publishers are put to good use to package and produce electronic information products that suit the targeted usersrsquo; needs. Corporate organizations have developed EP technology solutions for the efficient management of information as a functional aspect of a core business. This in turn enhances the bottom-line of these organizations. Typical applications are technical documentation, in-house publications and product description brochures. Government organizations have adopted EP technologies as the better management of information can improve the efficiency of the bureaucracy and support decision-makersrsquo; need for sufficient information. Information publishers such as financial information services and bibliographic database services have a long history in EP due to the demand for market information that is volume-dependent or time-dependent. Finally, the academic and research community benefits from EP through cost reduction and

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