[WEB4LIB] Publishing bks on the Web? Worthwhile?

[sean]

mfraser wrote:
> 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.

cool. 

does your existing audience use the internet? is there a wider potential
audience awaiting on the web? will they pay? is your organization funded
in part by circulation or purchase of your publications? those might be
some quick reality checks, i'm sure you have more...

> 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

one nice thing about storing your publications in a markup language is the
potential to output to multiple media on-demand. you can author and store
content in something like sgml, (la)tex, or maybe xml -- then output to
the web (html), email (text), paper (postscript), ebook (pdf) etc. from
the same common content repository.

> 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?

if you're storing the content in a format that can output to several
destination media, then the trouble to output the content to a chosen
format is minimal. your web site might allow customers to purchase
printable PDF or postscript content that is personalized on-the-fly to
include customer name, rank, serial #.

> 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

noh. hurry up :-)

> 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.

depends on the content, don't you think? a clever editor from new riders
press gave me his $.02 on the ebook: Why are they starting with the
classics? (well, it may have to do with copyright but the point is people
don't want their leisure reading devoted to a little 5'' lcd box)

for work-related and professional publications, readers may prefer to get
their reference material, software documentation, contracts, long boring
reports, etc. online - to facilitate searching, searching across multiple
publications, and re-purposing (cut-and-paste) content as appropriate. 

there was some old research devoted to on-screen vs. on-paper reading
behaviour mentioned when i was a library student. iirc this was conducted
when a cutting edge CRT used 80x40 black characters on a white background,
before the days of high-resolution displays with aliased fonts, etc. --
would be very interested if someone with access to that sort of research
can bring me & web4lib up to speed on it.

hope your e-publishing project is a great success!

--sean :-)

--
mailto:sean at savvysearch.com                sean dreilinger, mlis
 http://www.savvysearch.com                http://durak.org/sean