Electronic publishing

Electronic publishing (also referred to as e-publishing or digital publishing or online publishing) includes the digital publication of e-books, digital magazines, and the development of digital libraries and catalogues. It also includes an editorial aspect, that consists of editing books, journals or magazines that are mostly destined to be read on a screen (computer, e-reader, tablet, smartphone). Electronic publishing (also referred to as e-publishing or digital publishing or online publishing) includes the digital publication of e-books, digital magazines, and the development of digital libraries and catalogues. It also includes an editorial aspect, that consists of editing books, journals or magazines that are mostly destined to be read on a screen (computer, e-reader, tablet, smartphone). Electronic publishing has become common in scientific publishing where it has been argued that peer-reviewed scientific journals are in the process of being replaced by electronic publishing. It is also becoming common to distribute books, magazines, and newspapers to consumers through tablet reading devices, a market that is growing by millions each year, generated by online vendors such as Apple's iTunes bookstore, Amazon's bookstore for Kindle, and books in the Google Play Bookstore. Market research suggests that half of all magazine and newspaper circulation will be via digital delivery by the end of 2015 and that half of all reading in the United States will be done without paper by 2015. Although distribution via the Internet (also known as online publishing or web publishing when in the form of a website) is nowadays strongly associated with electronic publishing, there are many non-network electronic publications such as encyclopedias on CD and DVD, as well as technical and reference publications relied on by mobile users and others without reliable and high speed access to a network. Electronic publishing is also being used in the field of test-preparation in developed as well as in developing economies for student education (thus partly replacing conventional books) - for it enables content and analytics combined - for the benefit of students. The use of electronic publishing for textbooks may become more prevalent with iBooks from Apple Inc. and Apple's negotiation with the three largest textbook suppliers in the U.S. Electronic publishing is increasingly popular in works of fiction. Electronic publishers are able to respond quickly to changing market demand, because the companies do not have to order printed books and have them delivered. E-publishing is also making a wider range of books available, including books that customers would not find in standard book retailers, due to insufficient demand for a traditional 'print run'. E-publication is enabling new authors to release books that would be unlikely to be profitable for traditional publishers. While the term 'electronic publishing' is primarily used in the 2010s to refer to online and web-based publishers, the term has a history of being used to describe the development of new forms of production, distribution, and user interaction in regard to computer-based production of text and other interactive media. The first digitization initiative was in 1971 in the United States, by Michael S. Hart. He was a student at the University of Illinois, and decided to launch the Project Gutenberg. The project was about making literature more accessible to everyone, through internet. It took a while to develop, and in 1989 there were only 10 texts that were manually recopied on computer by Michael S. Hart himself and some volunteers. But with the appearance of the Web 1.0 in 1991 and its ability to connect documents together through static pages, the project moved quickly forward. Many more volunteers helped in developing the project by giving access to public domain classics. In the 1970s, CNRS digitized 1 000 books from diverse subjects, mostly literature but also philosophy and science, from the 1180s to present times, as to build the foundations of a big dictionary, the Trésor de la langue Française. This foundation of e-texts, named Frantext, was first published on CD under the name of Discotext, and then published on the web in 1998. The Frantext is always enhanced, and in 2016 they registered 4 516 texts. In 1974, Raymond Kurzweil developed a scanner that was equipped with an Omnifont software that enabled optical character recognition for numeric inputs. The digitization projects could then be a lot more ambitious since the time needed for digitization decreased considerably, and digital libraries were on the rise. All over the world, e-libraries started to emerge. The ABU (Association des Bibliophiles Universels), was a public digital library project created by the Cnam in 1993. It was the first French digital library in the network; suspended since 2002, they reproduced over a hundred texts that are still available. In 1992, the Bibliothèque nationale de France launched a vast digitization program. The president François Mitterrand had wanted since 1988 to create a new and innovative digital library, and it was published in 1997 under the name of Gallica. In 2014, the digital library was offering 80 255 online books and over a million documents, including prints and manuscripts.