Electronic Publications

This Story says the arguments for the survival of paper are very sound, yet, the arguments for eBooks are equally sound. They say it will become a delicate balance of practicality vs necessity.

It\'s a good look at two sides of an argument that includes the environmental impact of both.

Business2 has A Story on paper stubbornly resisting the trend to go digital.

\"In part, that\'s because it already works so well. Think about it this way: Paper is a versatile technology that\'s been perfected over the past 2,000 years. It\'s flexible, durable, cheap, and ubiquitous. Words and images can be stored on it using pens, brushes, crayons, typewriters, or ink-jet printers. It\'s easy to share. Drop it, fold it, leave it out in the sun or even in the rain, and it still works. Paper is comfortable with its nondigital status -- which may explain why technophiles are always gunning to replace it.\"

Wired has a Little Blurb on Douglas Rushkoff\'s Exit Strategy.


The book is being published in print with footnotes contributed by readers of the free e-book version published last July. More than a thousand people around the world participated in the project, with a disproportionate number from Croatia, Rushkoff said.

\"Open source means to prove that collaboration works better than authority, or private authorship, for that matter. Universal autonomy beats slavery to absolutes,\" he said. \"It\'s the point of the book, too. What my modern-day Joseph learns is that people who build pyramids are slaves -- whether they\'re physical pyramids or investment ones.\"

Someone writes \"hhmgroup.com has a Story that has a good list of places to actually get some ebooks for that ebook reader of yours you aren\'t quite sure what to do with \"

There\'s a Similar Story at 360.com as well.

Gerry writes \"More ebook stuff from Christian Science Monitor..... so are ebooks the future, a bad idea, or a not-yet-and-not-like-this phenom? Depends who you talk to, what you read..... also addresses the idea of electronic and print on demand publishing -- freedom from the corporate editor-agent establishment or a flood tide of unmitaged crap? You decide (if you have the time).....

Full Story \"

ZDNet reports that Palm\'s eBook sales rose more than 40%
last year. They sold 180,000 eBooks in 2001. Palm also released
lists
of top-selling eBooks.




href=\"http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/newsbursts/0,7407,5101
172,00.html?chkpt=p1bn\">Full Story

Bob Cox passed along this Wired Story that says all is well in eBook land.


Even though several e-book-only imprints have closed up shop, book reading and sales are stronger than ever.


In the past year, 1,600 titles were downloaded more than 3.1 million times at the Etext Library at the University of Virginia. That\'s 8,715 free e-books per day.

Can e-books improve libraries?, by Chris Rippel @ The
Central Kansas Library System, takes a very detailed look at how eBooks are fitting into libraries.


He begins by discussing three roles for e-books in libraries.

Role 1\'s focus on e-book hardware does an admirable job introducing current e-book technology to patrons, Role 2\'s focus on e-book titles better integrates e-book technology into traditional library work, Role 3 does motivate patrons and librarians to try e-books because role 3 improves the ability of libraries to provide books to patrons.

Tanya writes \"Yet another sign that e-books aren\'t quite ready for prime-time, or should I say not wanted?


CNN Story \"

The e-book company, which offered more than 400 titles, will be closed by the end of the year and 29 jobs will be cut. Time Warner will continue to publish electronic texts, but as companions to paper editions.

The University of Phoenix is going bookless. Detroit Free Press says within a year the school\'s 95,000 students will stop buying traditional textbooks. Instead, required reading materials, workbooks, syllabi and part of a reference library will be available online for a $70-per-course fee.

\"I don\'t think this is a complete substitution for textbooks but an enhancement,\" Ward said. \"Many people think one will replace the other, but I think the two will coexist side by side, like online classes and brick-and-mortar institutions.\"

Steve passed along This One on a device, described in Thursday\'s issue of the journal Nature, that is fired by plastic transistors that are flexible, potentially inexpensive to make and work well enough to constantly refresh a screen to create moving images. The tiny display uses active matrix technology, the kind used in good quality laptop computer displays.

Yahoo!\'s eBooks news section has more stories, and there\'s also a Story @ BBC.

From the November issue of D-lib:

This article will lay out the issues surrounding the in-house development of a fully featured electronic reserve platform known as Allectra at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. It will move through every issue surrounding digitization in general, with the added topics of authentication and copyright management. To show the scale of this pilot project, during the winter 2001 term, the 85 documents on Allectra for 22 courses at the University of Calgary were accessed more than 5,000 times.

More.

Via the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter:

During 2001 and 2002, the University of California libraries will be participating in a research project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The goal of this project is to determine user responses to relying on digital access to selected journals, print holdings of which will be relocated to remote storage during the project. The study will test the hypothesis that effectively shared digital resources can begin to relieve the pressures on physical facilities and capital budgets to house and manage print materials.

For more information about this initiative, click here. The project is expected to be of critical importance to all of UC’s libraries as we develop strategies, policies, and programs for managing research library collections of print and digital materials. In addition, we expect that the project’s outcomes will also be of considerable interest to academic and research library communities nationwide.

More.

Scott Adams has written a very interesting look at eBook publishing. His e-book, \"God\'s Debris,\" is the No. 1 best-selling e-book in the world this year, it sold only 4,500 copies.


He says E-books are impervious to analogy, will never enjoy more than 5 percent of the market for pleasure reading, and the most compelling reason for e-books comes from the publisher\'s point of view.

His Full Story from IHT.com, Read the introduction, or now Buy the hardcover.

From Information Science Abstracts editor Donald T. Hawkins:

The bibliometric characteristics of electronic journals (e-journals) covering the field of information science have been studied. Twenty-eight e-journals were identified and ranked by number of articles on the subject they published. A Bradford plot revealed that the core is not well developed yet, but it will likely contain six journals. The publication of information science articles in e-journals began about 1990. In 1995 (the starting date for this study), a modest 26 articles appeared, but publication has now risen to approximately 250 articles per year. The most prolific authors are identified. The vast majority of them are located in the United States or United Kingdom. Only 26 articles have authors from more than one country, showing that electronic technology has not yet strongly influenced international collaboration . . .

More.

The Chronicle of Higher Education\'s unofficial liason to the library world, Jeff Young, provides a helpful summary of the netLibrary saga so far:

The struggling e-book provider netLibrary filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Wednesday, and the nonprofit library organization OCLC immediately announced that it had offered to purchase all of the company\'s assets.

The company\'s fiscal implosion came just five days after one of its investors had filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that netLibrary had overstated its earnings to attract venture capital . . .

More.

Paul A. Greenberg of the E-Commerce Times reports that publishers continue to push e-books, even though the public isn\'t all that interested:

\"Do we need e-books? Do we want them? Can we curl up at night with a digital book the way we do with some of our favorite traditional books?

No, no and no.\"


Why are publishers continuing with e-books? Because they are a, \"low-risk venture with low overhead.\"

Tanya writes \"Another sign that E-books were not the next big thing they were supposed to be.
\"

Stories from The NYTimes.com and CNET on Random House Trade Group folding its e-book imprint, \"AtRandom\", due to scant consumer demand for books that can be read on screens, they company will continue to publish electronic versions of books.

ezine-tips.com has the 2001 Ezine-Tips Online Publishing Awards posted.


These are the main guidelines they used to judge newsletters:

Writing quality, originality, sources and timeliness.
.Format and design that enhance the content.
.Value for readers.
.Mission clarity.


They range from Bent on Waterfowl, about waterfowl hunting, to, Neat Net Tricks, a collection of site, software and search-engine reviews.

These newsletters all have great content, well-written, timely and essential for the target audience. Cool niche stuff for all!

Salon has an Interesting look at \"9/11 8:48\", the first book published about the terrorist attacks it was a print-on-demand book. The book is a collection of writings on the 9/11 attacks, and was the first out of the gate, but ran into more than a few problems getting sold.

\"I don\'t want this book confused with instant history,\" Rosen said. \"It\'s not an attempt to provide the first rough draft of history -- it\'s not summarizing the O.J. Simpson trial a week later. It\'s voices speaking in the moment.\"