info NeoGnostic: It's eBook Week again!

: Name: Chris Armstrong; Location: Aberystwyth, Wales, United Kingdom

I am the owner and managing director of Information Automation Limited (IAL), a company that specialises in research, consultancy and training for the information profession. We are particularly interested in all forms of electronic information resources (e-journals, e-books, etc) and I teach a course in electronic publishing at the Department of Information Studies in Aberystwyth. Drilling down still further(!), my interests centre on the quality and evaluation of electronic information, and in the thinking that underpins activities in library and information science.

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Monday, March 03, 2008

It's eBook Week again!

... and we are reminded of this by, e.g. Epublishers Weekly, in their latest post, 30 Benefits of Ebooks. And there are 30, too!

Slightly strangely, the Benefits are copyright - © 2008 by Michael Pastore... which presumably means I can only quote 3 here! Most of them are pretty obvious: searchable, portable, update-able, "defy space" (I thought "save shelf space" but it seems that this means they can be read by many people at one time - defy the time-space continuum of StarTrek, I suppose), and so on. But all worth repeating, just so libraries, readers and publishers get the message.

But I have to take issue with number 14 - e-books are free. Some may be - like the cited Project Gutenberg - but as a generalisation, it is very 'Dumas'. As in "All generalisations are dangerous, even this one." You have to pay for some e-books. Others are licensed.

And on a day that I have discovered both Hypertextopia and the First Monday article, Open access book publishing in writing studies: A case study, number 23 - Ebooks empower individuals to write and to publish... is very apposite.

>>Technorati tags: ebooks; publishing