Stakeholders and
standards in the e-book
ecology: or, it's the
economics, stupid!
Karen Coyle
When we think of the production of paper
books, we generally think of publishers as the
actors in that world. In fact, the production of
books involves many players; a partial list would
include authors, agents, editors, publishing
houses, illustrators, paper makers and binders,
printers, distributors and retailers. Although the
printing of books is many hundreds of years old,
the current book business has a distinct
twentieth-century flavor, with its outsourcing of
functions like actual book printing to
companies that can take advantage of
economies of scale. There is a hidden business
around the book business that is mainly
invisible to us.
When people refer to ``publishers'' or
``publishing'' there is some confusion as to
whether they are referring to the entire process
with all of its players or to the process that takes
place within the publishing houses, that is, the
area of selection of content and nurturing of
writers and their creative products, and trying
to reconcile this with the bottom line of making
enough sales to keep the business running. Two
recent books on the publishing business
eloquently discuss the tension between the
creative, intellectual process of publishing and
the business aspects of selling books in a very
competitive marketplace (Schiffrin, 2000;
Epstein, 2001).
The emerging e-book business is a new entry
in the chain of events that leads from the
publishing house to the customer. I am using
the term e-book to refer to a literary work in
digital form, not the software and/or hardware
that renders it for reading. This is similar to the
Association of American Publishers'definition
of an e-book: ``An ebook is a literary work in the
form of a digital object consisting of one or
more standard unique identifiers, metadata,
and a monographic body of content, intended
to be published and accessed electronically''
(Association of American Publishers, 2000,
p. 31).
Electronic book production replaces the
traditional services of printing and binding,
shipping, warehousing, and retail. That these
companies produce the book products after
publishing houses have done their job of
selection and editing is not new. What is new
about e-books is that the e-book business
produces a machine-readable rather than a
The author
Karen Coyle is a Digital Library Specialist at California
Digital Library, Oakland, California, USA.
Keywords
Electronic publishing, Standards
Abstract
Standards are being developed in five primary areas of e-
book development: e-book formats, digital audio formats,
digital rights management languages, digital rights man-
agement systems, and distribution and promotion. Each of
these standards has technological, economic and social
aspects. This article describes some key e-books standards
and discusses how these aspects are shaping the emerging
e-book products.
Electronic access
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Theme articles
314
Library Hi Tech
Volume 19
.
Number 4
.
2001
.
pp. 314±324
# MCB University Press
.
ISSN 0737-8831