ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC 1

As the pandemic COVID-19 spreads across the world, it is clear that a lot of both public and private sectors in the country have come to a temporary halt . One important sector that has been temporarily crippled is the education sector with the pandemic forcing for early closure of all schools so as to prevent the spread of the Corona virus. However, all hope is not lost despite the closure of schools students have been able to continue with their education and gaining knowledge through their online classes and through various electronic publishing sectors.Today in our blog we look at one of this platforms that has recently come into the limelight, Electronic Publication, we look at where it come from and in the next blog we will look at its present status and even  its probable future status .Electronic publishing is the more recent way in which books, stories, collections and works of non-fiction can be distributed via the internet and computers in general. The ultimate goal of Electronic Publishing is to provide fast and easy access to information contained in the publications with simple, powerful search and retrieval capabilities.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_publishing

 Electronic publishing has very specific non-book characteristics that distinguishes it from print publication :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-books

• electronic publications can be produced and disseminated very rapidly - once a page of text has been coded with HTML tags it can be published immediately - the book takes much longer to produce and distribute;
• if correction is necessary, an electronic text can be updated or corrected with the same immediacy, whereas a book must either go through a second edition, or, if the error is caught in time, have an erratum slip inserted;
• electronic publication can be made collaborative and interactive, involving either several "authors" or authors and readers;
• electronic publications can be disseminated world-wide without the need for separate rights negotiations for different countries and without the costs of distribution or reprinting;
• where an electronic publication is charged for, the producer does not incur the costs associated with retail bookselling, that is, there are no "middleman" costs;
• through effective, electronic interaction with the buyer or user of an electronic publication, the producer can collect valuable market-research data very cheaply;

but, on the other hand:

• electronic publishing still reaches only a minority of potential users or customers - even though this minority may constitute most of the market for some products (e.g., financial business information, scholarly communications), and much of the majority is in the developing world, where usage is likely to be slow to emerge;
• electronic publishing demands access to relatively advanced technology on the part of both the producer and the consumer of information or entertainment - even the base level of provision is still expensive for the ordinary citizen;
• mobile computers, notebooks and smaller, are either too big or have screens that are too small, or otherwise inadequate, for use across the full range of environments in which a book can be read;
• the technology is still, to a significant degree, user-unfriendly to many people;
• the technology consumes a greater amount of energy in its use than the book;

 

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTS

In the 15th Century it was tedious business of producing a book with the use of parchments from animal skins and other materials like bark, cloth or paper for writing upon this way very time consuming and only one book could be produced at a line. This changed when Johann Gutenberg developed the technique of producing a number of letters of types which could be assembled to form a page of writing which was linked and impressed upon in less than a minutes, this method was called Letterers Printing .By the 18^th Century Alois Senefelder development   of photograph of the 19^th century and the breakthrough in a halftone printing ,lithographic printing became a commercially acceptance standard ,later when the technique of multicolor printing combined with the Litho process it become industry standard as it today.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepress

To produce a design for distribution on a printing press the artwork had to be created by hand with the use of a microcomputer dot matrix photo typesetting system, then with the use of dark room each individual artwork had to be shot to film before been burned to a plate. In 1984, the birth of Apple Macintosh and Post Script text could be input in digital form and images as placed with the use of a scanner. With the use of the Apple Macintosh and Post Script Language digital files could be sent to an Imagesettes (Linotronic) which exposed the digital file to film which was burned to plate printing. In 1990 Tim Berners –Lee and CERN in Geneva developed the hypertext system known as HTM.

With introduction of the internet commercially in 1993, electronic publishing became an exciting prospect data can be transmitted and disseminated to practically any part of the world at the speed of light .ISDN (Integrated Service Digital Network) is a circuit switched telephone network system, designed to allow digital transmission of voice and data over ordinary telephone copper. Another common method of transferring electronic published file is FTP (File transfer protocol) which is used to connect two computer over an internet that supports TCP PRESENT.

Broadband or wireless are the most widely and commonly used methods of way since Johann Gutenberg’s letter press printing with the introduction of computer and the advances in Internet technology and file transfer.