embryonic because the eBook still feels a bit ‘under development’. These days new words are being added to the dictionary under the letter ‘e’. It’s easy; just add e - eInk, ePaper, eLife, eworld, eMedia - etc. Not to be outdone the letter ‘i’ is also in for new family members: iBook, iPhoto, iLink. Note the use of the second letter capital - another addition to written English (or should it be eEnglish?). The eBook has it’s own semantic problems because you can’t be sure whether someone is using the term in the context of a device or the actual content: so - ‘I read War and Peace on my eBook’ means that they used an ebook device (see below). But, ‘I don’t bother with paper books anymore; I just read eBooks’. In this context, the eBook is a piece of fiction or non-fiction. But what is the difference between a piece of interactive media like a CD-ROM and an eBook?
Ways to help think through ideas and compelling ways to communicate them. Being a visual person myself, I have always doodled on paper when I am trying to figure an idea out. Projects like web site design or CDROM interfaces do not just result in visual designs but complex arrangements of links between different data. Developing concepts for these types of 'new media' projects will inevitably include representing the designs (both style and structure) visually. To help us design for the computer as medium there are some good techniques for building visual representations, and some very powerful software tools are available.
A talk to a delegation of Chinese publishing executives introducing the broad range of activities and issues around the idea of the computer as publishing medium.
Electronic Publishing can mean many things to many different people. It can include ebooks, web sites, desktop publishing, computer games, interactive television,talking books and new technologies such as g3 phones and PDA (Personal Digital Assistants).
