The meaning of publishing, speed, capacity and processing power
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07378839910267244 |
| Published date | 01 March 1999 |
| Date | 01 March 1999 |
| Pages | 75-88 |
| Author | Steve Gilheany |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
75
Benefits of traditional publishing
technology
Publishing books was expensive. This had many
important benefits. First, it could not be done
often, so authors had to collect their thoughts
and have them well organized. Any changes
would have to wait for a second edition, which
would not be published for many years. The
second edition might never be published; this
impelled authors be done with their creative
works before starting on the publishing trail.
The publishers who invested in publishing an
author’s work wanted assurance that their
money would have a reasonable return. To
ensure quality publications, publishers paid for
pre-publication peer review of manuscripts.
Publishers also did careful editing and proofing.
Changes between editions were substantial, well
thought out, and often listed in a preface. An
author’s internal thought process was not laid
out in a series of daily editions in which the ebb
and flow of good and bad versions of their pre-
sentation washed over their hapless readers.
Hypertext has always had a micro-hypertext
side in which every keystroke and mouse click is
recorded as a reversible change which creates a
new document version. Hypertext is also, at
least conceptually, designed to stay out of the
way when not wanted. This unobtrusiveness
would allow the viewing of book editions with-
out seeing the daily changes (or the dailies in
movies, which are made from yesterday’s takes).
Hypertext carries with it the possibility of
recording too much and the professional
responsibility, on the part of librarians, to avoid
preserving too much.
In the mechanical world, books were expen-
sive and were well cared for. Libraries kept track
of where books were shelved. Because the num-
ber of editions was severely limited, the fact that
a book was in multiple libraries meant that there
were multiple identical copies of a work to
survive disaster. On the Internet, no one knows
which of many versions of a work is available,
where it is available, or when it will cease to be
available at each of the locations where it is
currently available.
When one referred to the edition of a book,
others could find an exact copy of the work.
Now, with electronic publishing on the Internet,
even the identification of a revision is often
The meaning of
publishing, speed,
capacity and processing
power
Steve Gilheany
The author
Steve Gilheany is a Senior Systems Engineer at Archive-
Builders.com, in Manhattan Beach, California, USA.
E-mail: SteveGilheany@ArchiveBuilders.com
Keywords
Electronic publishing, Internet, Technological change
Abstract
Publishing has been defined as a way to make information
widely available to the public. Our formerly mechanical world
required many preliminary actions, such a typesetting and
proofing, which became associated with the meaning of
publishing. Electronic publishing makes is possible to make
anything available to the world instantly with no preliminary
preparation. Under these circumstances, materials can be
divided between text posted to the Internet and works
published with preliminary preparation. The local loop of the
telephone line defines the speed of the Internet for most
people. The local loop has lacked the speed to make flipping
through pages in books or full motion video available over
the Internet. Storage systems for electronic documents have
defined large-scale document storage and video storage as
too slow, too unreliable, and too expensive to be consistent
with the free paradigm of the Internet. The demands for
processing power by electronic gaming are opening the way
to publish interactive simulations as a means of expression.
Increases in speed, capacity, and processing power will add
new document types to the meaning of electronic publishing.
Library Hi Tech
Volume 17 · Number 1 · 1999 · pp. 75–88
© MCB University Press · ISSN 0737-8831
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