Traditional Publishing vs. e-Publishing

Traditional Publishing vs. e-Publishing

Once upon a time, if someone wanted their ideas to be seen in writing, they had to go through the long, tenuous process of publishing, which cost a good deal of time and money, and was a gamble at all points in the process. Today, however, individuals can instead choose to self publish their works through the World Wide Web, allowing for minimal work to exposure time lapse, and a more one-on-one approach to reading.

e-Publishing is a powerful medium, and its siren-call is a hard one to resist. "..the new media’s appeal to writers goes beyond dollars," Paul Roberts writes, "There’s the allure of a sexy new technology, sharpened by a fear of professional obsolescence. The fact is, multimedia can do things the printed page never even dreamed about. It’s digital, which means that obscene amounts of data can be encoded and stored of a four-inch wafer-thin laser disc. It’s also interactive, which means that all those digitized artifacts--hundreds of photos and graphics, video clips, my own wee texts--can be linked together in a kind of electronic-semantic web." (Tribble & Trubek, 390-391).

Yet despite its innovations, e-publishing is still a young medium, and possibly it is far too new of an outlet to truly be one in which an up-and-coming author should rely. And yet, it is indeed a medium with many pros and cons over traditional publishing.

For example, when one goes to a traditional publisher, unless they have been published before, it becomes dramatically difficult to convince the publisher that their work is worth the effort. That is because there are many costs that go into paper-based publishing, such as the costs of ink and paper, labor costs, and distribution costs.

Howev...

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... not detract from the fact, however, that all books have a tactile responsiveness to them that makes them highly desired over a computer screen.

There are many pros and cons to each method. How important to you as a writer is widespread exposure, compared to individual cognition? Perhaps the internet, despite its firm hold on our culture, is simply too young of a medium to effectively interpose old fashioned printed text.

Works Cited:

Landow, George. "Twenty Minutes into the future, or How are we moving beyond this book?". Tribble and Trubek. 214-226

Plato. "Phraedrus". Tribble and Trubek. 360-364.

Roberts, Paul. "Virtual Grub Street: Sorrows of a Multimedia Hack". Tribble and Trubek. 389-399.

Tribble, Evelyn B, and Trubek, Anne, eds. Writing Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital Age. New York et al. Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 2003