From: eengelke@sail.uwaterloo.ca (Erick Engelke)
Subject: Re: Publishing Articles Through the Net
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 22:49:52 GMT

ptrubey@netcom.com (Phil Trubey) writes:

>Publishing Articles Though the Net
>
>I have recently begun wondering if there is a paying market for 
>a company that publishes articles, magazines, newsletters, etc.
>on the Net.  

A few companies like Clarinet have a good deal of experience
in this sort of thing.  Brad@clarinet.com might be able to 
give you some ideas.

>I know that the Internet, USENET, etc. have a long tradition of
>free information dissemination.  The kind of information that is
>currently disseminated for free on the Net is not the type of
>information that this hypothetical company would publish.

One area I would like to see some growth is billed online access
to library documents.  For example, I would like to read/copy certain 
IEEE papers, some OSI docs, etc.  Often journals have a set rate they 
charge if you copy articles and I would be willing to pay such rates 
for the privilege of fast delivery.

Idealy the abstract and maybe a few paragraphs would be available
in RTF or even cheap ASCII and you could use that to judge whether
you wish to 'purchase' a copy of the article.  At that point you
could get a PS or RTF+GIF or other format of the article with the
right to make one non-distributable printed copy.

The beauty here is to not merely do this for new articles, but also
for harder to find work.  Among the 'classics' which not everyone
can find are the Van Jacobson and Phil Karn papers which never
became RFCs though the content now affects the net.

Another area which would be interesting is providing electronic
book distribution.  In many cases, such as shareware, purchase of
the manual is how you pay for software and its popularity would 
probably be increased by a simplified way of orderring - through
the net. 

Look at Kinko's (a North American firm which will print copies of 
books in their copy centres and will automatically send the royalty
to the appropriate account).

As an interesting aside, when slight revisions are made, it would
be nice if previous customers of that work could get a discount
if they chose to download the later release.

>Articles could be formatted in plain ascii, or, more likely, formatted
>professionally and distributed in postscript.

I would like to see a special RTF format with the addition of compressed
graphics (eg. gif), some primitive font info (eg. PS font compatible)
and hotlink features for books which have hypertext built-in.
IBM's BOOK files such as those on OS/2 PDK CD-ROMs are good examples of 
what to think about.  It doesn't take much to convert a completed
document to use hotlinks and they make the document very useful for
users.

>Distribution would be accomplished via e-mail.  It is probable that
>such a company would make heavy use of the new PEM mail standard for
>authentication.

Mail is good for non-connected people, but I would like to see the eventual
advancement to an online service which used privacy enhanced features
to get credit/user info and place the order with the ability to search
for new titles too.

-- 
Erick Engelke					  Engineering Computing
						 University of Waterloo
Waterloo TCP Architect		 erick@development.watstar.uwaterloo.ca
Newsgroups: alt.internet.services
From: chris@chrism.demon.co.uk (Chris Marriott)