That's the way it looked at first glance at this year's BookExpo, held this past weekend in Chicago's cavernous McCormick Place. A visitor who didn't bother to venture more than a few aisles from the entrance could have been forgiven for assuming that this was the same old book industry, that any minute now Bennett Cerf or Alfred A. Knopf would pop onto the floor. This is electronic publishing. It is absolutely certain, though, that e-publishing is here to stay, and that it is going to have deep effects on the ways Americans write books, edit books, print and distribute books, and read books. My own hunch is that those effects are more likely to be positive than negative, but it is a hunch and a risky one at that.
High- tech loves an acronym.
At the click of a mouse, with the latest revisions, these high-value documents are turned around in a matter of hours. Plus, with virtually no makeready waste, you can print in the precise quantity required by end-user demand. Now they can be stored electronically and printed only when readers actually order them. The possibilities this opens for scholarship, research, literary experimentation and other work outside the mainstream of commercial publishing are obvious and encouraging. But Xlibris and other such undertakings are also the flip side of the coin.