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C-2-C: Creator to Consumer
in a Digital Age
electronic texts and modern digital book production
Traditional book printing methods are now being closely pursued by digital texts and eBooks. This study covers all possible new modes of text transmission - from downloadable books, to print-on-demand, and multilingual editions and XML-based versions in different formats.
The general sense of the future the authors generate is that texts must be made available in a variety of forms, to suit the requirements of different readers. So, a text which is encoded in XML can be made available as a Web page, as an eBook, chunked for WAP, or converted for whatever device the reader has available. This process is increasingly popular with mobile phone users and other handheld devices..
 They also look at the issues of self-publishing and self-archiving which have been advanced in the last few years by people such as Steven Harnad.
They discuss a wide range of pricing models for commercial exploitation of texts: one-off payments, subscriptions, pay per view, and content-on-demand.
Many of these issues of digital rights, payments, and micro-payments they discuss are the sort of things Ted Nelson was proposing years ago - but now we are a lot nearer to the reality. Are you listening, Ted?
It's a shame that they occasionally express their ideas in rather tedious language, because the ideas themselves are very interesting - such as the observation that there is more profit in transporting printed books than in publishing them. [Reason? Weight.]
There are good summaries of the latest state of play in the e-text business, as well as a general survey of book production which argues that digitisation is now virtually unstoppable. This will be a handy book for those who would like to catch up to date with issues of eBooks, digital Ink, and other forms of delivering text - which can be words, sounds, and pictures in digital form.
And this is not a polemic criticising the printed book . They know that this form remains as popular as ever. Rather, it's an attempt to look at the implications of the digital revolution for the publishing business.
There is also consideration of copyright issues, meta-data [that is, data about data] and multi-language production. If there are weaknesses, they are only an undergraduate tendency to signpost their arguments ["This chapter will show..."] and an occasional paucity of concrete examples. But on the whole this is book which will be of interest to anybody who wants an overview of publishing in the digital age.
© Roy Johnson 2002
[more e-COMMERCE books]
Bill Cope and Dean Mason, C-2-C: Creator to Consumer in a Digital Age, Altona (Vic): Common Ground Publishing, 2001, pp.279, ISBN 1863350470
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