Electronic Publishing Process
The electronic publishing process follows a traditional publishing process but differs from traditional publishing in two ways: 1) it does not include using an offset printing press to print the final product and 2) it avoids the distribution of a physical product. Because the content is electronic, it may be distributed over the Internet and through electronic bookstores. The consumer may read the published content on a website, in an application on a tablet device, or in a PDF on a computer. In some cases the reader may print the content using a consumer-grade ink-jet or laser printer or via a print on demand system.
The benefit of electronic publishing comes from using three attributes of digital technology: XML tags to define content, style sheets to define the look of content, and metadata to describe the content for search engines. With the use of tags, style sheets, and metadata, this enables reflowable content that adapts to various reading devices or delivery methods.
Because electronic publishing often requires text mark-up to develop online delivery methods, the traditional roles of typesetters and book designers have changed. Designers must know more about mark-up languages, the variety of reading devices available, and the ways in which consumers read. However, new design software is becoming available for designers to publish content in this standard without needing to know programming, such as Adobe Systems' Digital Publishing Suite and Apple's iBooks Author. The most common file format is .epub, used in many e-book formats, which is a free and open standard available in many publishing programs. Another common format is .folio, which is used by the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to create content for Apple's iPad tablets and apps.
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Famous quotes containing the words electronic, publishing and/or process:
“Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“While you continue to grow fatter and richer publishing your nauseating confectionery, I shall become a mole, digging here, rooting there, stirring up the whole rotten mess where life is hard, raw and ugly.”
—Norman Reilly Raine (1895–1971)
“The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.”
—Jean Szarkowski (b. 1925)