The London Book Fair 2004 had the future of electronic publishing as the theme of several seminars. Chas Jones reports on what the guest speakers had to say.

Our propensity for printing our intellectual output onto wood-pulp persists in spite of the Internet and the development of digital delivery.

There have been an impressive number of failures as publishers try to imitate the printed book. These are judged to have failed not just because they do not deliver significant added value, but because they are trying to replicate the successful, portable and very personal format that is the printed book. Successful challenges are, however, being mounted.

In science, technical and medical (STM) publishing, the trend to online access appears unstoppable. ‘Open access’ is what they call the process of making the information from all the scientific journals available to all. There is even talk of the writer paying a publication fee which they can recoup through sales of their paper.

For the international scientific community, this is a revolution. The power of the search engine will make information available worldwide. For the research community in the developing world, access to the corpus of technical information will do just a little to offset some of the disadvantages under which they have to work.

In the business world, electronic delivery will soon be the exclusive means of delivery. The Financial Times has recently taken its website from free to fee. There is enough free access to keep the site attractive to advertisers but the archives required by researchers and analysts are available to subscribers only.

A major move over from print media is forecast in the STM arena before the end of this decade. By then, 50% of magazine and news content will be delivered electronically.

However, in the business of publishing books, wood pulp will remain dominant. But that statement masks the way delivery will have changed. One feasible model for the future of fiction would see batch print reserved for bestsellers (100,000+) while everything else would be available in digital form. Print on demand will be there to provide a printed copy of the digital material. The future is definitely digital.

For an overview of the way information is distributed and stored:

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/execsum.htm

© 2004 Charles Jones