Publishing bks on the Web? Worthwhile?

[mfraser]

I"m a librarian for a non profit organization, "The Transportation
Association of Canada".  Among other things, we publish a good deal of
material, and up until now we've only ever published in paper format.
However, we're thinking about moving some of our documents to the Web.
The idea being that we would create them in html (rather than  PDF) and
take advantage of the multimedia capabilities of the Web.  Like our
paper publications, we would charge our customers a fee.   Are any of
you working in organizations that are making use of the Web in this
way?  Are you publishing documents only to the Web, or are you
publishing in paper as well?  If you are publishing in both formats, is
much extra effort needed to create  both the static (paper document) and
the multimedia document (html).  Do you find it is worth the extra
trouble?

Personally, I'm keen very to try out an html version of one of our
bestsellers, but I want to establish that  the idea isn't overly
"leading edge".  The fear of our strategy people is that our clientele
won't find an online version all that useful compared to paper.  Are
they right?  I'd really appreciate hearing about any of your experiences
on this subject.

Thanks
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Morven Fraser, Transportation Association of Canada Library
2323 St. Laurent Blvd., Ottawa ON K1G 4J8 Canada
mfraser at tac-atc.ca   Tel 613/736-1350   Fax 613/736-1395
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