The publishing process: the hyper-book approach

Abstract

This paper presents a general overview of the publishing process, including both paper and electronic publishing. The main actors (e.g. authors, publishers and libraries) and the associated publications channels are discussed. One channel is discussed in more detail: this channel incorpo rates all the steps involved from the acquisition of a manu script in a generic mark-up language to the presentation of the final electronic publication to the user in the library. The use of a generic mark-up language (e.g. SGML - stan dard generalised mark-up language) is viewed as being an essential component for facilitating the exchange of elec tronic documents between different systems and applica tions. In addition, the use of a generic mark-up language allows several steps of the publishing process to be auto mated, from the production of electronic books, to the addi tion of the resulting books to a (electronic) library.