A comprehensive guide to the opportunities, processes, products and management issues surrounding electronic publishing.

Refresh the Book discusses the changing perceptions, functions, forms, as well as literary and artistic potential of the book in the digital age.

The first comprehensive guide to all aspects of digital publishing, from rights to eBooks, to accessibility, to content management.

Digital technology is now a normal part of everyday life. The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun. Still, the vision of this transformation is far from new. For more than a century now, avant-garde artists, activists and technologists have been anticipating the development of networked and electronic publishing. Although in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now certainly become a reality. How will the analog and the digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over? In this book, Alessandro Ludovico rereads the history of the avant-garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-called dichotomy between paper and electronics. Ludovico is the editor and publisher of Neural, a magazine for critical digital culture and media arts. For more than 20 years now, he has been working at the cutting edge (and the outer fringes) of both print publishing and politically engaged digital art.

Electronic Publishing: State of the Art Report provides an overview of the state of knowledge in electronic publishing. This Report is organized into three parts: Invited Papers, Analysis, and Bibliography. The Invited Papers describe some of the problems of producing effective commercial versions of electronic document transfer systems, drawing on the experience of participants in the DOCDEL project funded by the Commission of the European Communities (CEC). These projects show many interesting and potentially important possibilities for commercial activity, in areas ranging from authoring systems designed to help the electronic origination of scientific and mathematical works, to developments in the field of storing and transmitting graphical information. The Analysis assesses major advances in electronic publishing. The Analysis is constructed by the editor of the Report to provide a balanced and comprehensive view of the latest developments in electronic publishing. The editor's personal analysis of the subject is supplemented by quotations from the Invited Papers, written by leading authorities on the subject. The Bibliography is a specially selected compilation of the most important published material on the subject of electronic publishing. Each key item in the literature is reviewed and annotated to assist in selecting the required information.