also addresses the fundamental conflicts in the spread of digital communication: conflicts between personal privacy and society's interest in openness; between security and freedom; between commerce and community. At the same time, Esther Dyson opened a website to converse with her eaders. She will take her readers' comments into consideration in a paperback version, Release 2.1.

Jean-Paul, a musician and writer living in Paris, sent his comments in his e-mail of June 21, 1998:

"My future on the Web is more personal than professional. The Internet will allow me to do without any intermediaries: record companies, publishers, distributors… Above all it will allow me to formalize what I have in my head (and elsewhere), for which the print medium (micro-publishing, in fact) only allowed me to give something approximate. Then the intermediaries will take over, and I'll have to look somewhere else, a place where the grass is greener…"

4.3. Electronic Publishing

Since the seventies, the traditional publishing chain has been drastically disrupted.

The printing work traditionally done by pre-press shops was first weakened by the introduction of photocomposition machines. The text and image processing work began to be executed by advertising agencies and graphic art studies. The impression costs went on decreasing with the spread of desktop publishing, copiers, color copiers and digital printing equipment.The text and image processing work is now provided at low price by desktop publishing shops and graphic art studios.

Furthermore, digitization accelerated the preparation process of a publication, because the sub-editor, the artistic designer and the staff responsible for the make-up can now work at the same time on the same book.

During the ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence held in January 1997, Peter
Leisink, Associate Professor of Labour Studies at the Utrecht University,
Netherlands, explained:

"A survey of the United Kingdom book publishing industry showed that proofreaders and editors have been externalized and now work as home-based teleworkers. The vast majority of them had entered self-employment, not as a first-choice option, but as a result of industry mergers, relocations and redundancies. These people should actually be regarded as casualized workers, rather than as self-employed, since they have little autonomy and tend to depend on only one publishing house for their work."

Digitization makes possible the on-line publishing of educational and scientific publications, for which the latest information is essential. Some U.S. universities distribute specific textbooks gathering a selection of chapters selected in an extensive database and some professors' articles and commentaries. For a seminar, a very small print run can be prepared upon request with electronic scientific texts sent to a printer. Electronic publishing could also keep alive some academic publishers, and publishers issuing documents relating to very specific and specialized research, for which the printing of a document in a small number of copies has become more and more difficult for budgetary reasons.

At present, electronic publishing and "traditional" publishing - such as on-line bookstores and "traditional" bookstores, or cyberlibraries and "traditional" libraries - are complementary.

Even if electronic publishing considerably expands over the next few years, people will still find it convenient to have the paper version of a book or a magazine, perhaps until the digital books become really cheap. Nevertheless, the functions of traditional publishing will certainly have to be thoroughly redefined in relation to the development of electronic publishing and its considerable prospects, beginning with the low costs and the quick access to documents.

The Web has developed more and more interaction between the printed document and the electronic document, to such an extent that it becomes difficult to establish a frontier between the two supports, and it will probably no longer be necessary to make a distinction between them in the future. Most of the recent print media already stem from an electronic version on a word processor, a spreadsheet or a database. More and more documents are "only" electronic. Because of the development of digital libraries, there are fewer documents available in print. Those documents existing only in a print version can easily be scanned if necessary.

In his article The Future of Publishing, Kushal Dave, an avid computer and modem user and a high school freshman, stated:

"[…] the fully electronic document is coming into its own, thanks to the many benefits it provides. The cost is a magnitude lower than paper, while the speed is much higher. Michael Hart is the executive director of Project Gutenberg […]. In an electronic mail dialogue, he cited the example of Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland. Not taking into account the cost of a computer (as little as $1000) since most people have them anyway, a copy of the book on floppy might cost a dollar. There is also no time spent publishing the document, once it's in e-text (electronic text) form it can be gotten almost instantly. On the other hand the cheapest possible paper copy of the book would be $5 because of the cost of printing, and printing would also delay its availability to the public. Electronic documents also have a better availability, since they can be reproduced infinitely and do not require leaving your house, thanks to low-cost modems. Furthermore, it is now possible to read Associated Press Reports as they are released, not in the next morning's paper, and you don't even have to pay the 25 cents. Cost, speed, and availability are just some of the compelling arguments for electronic publishing instead of paper.

Another advantage of electronic publishing is all the new possibilities it provides. Just about anybody can electronically publish anything. […] Karin L. Trgovac, director of communications for Project Gutenberg, sums it up by saying, 'I think electronic publishing helps to level the field in terms of who can publish. Look at the range of people who have access.'

Fortunately, the increased variety of the documents does nothing to impede searches for particular documents. Services like Gopher on the Internet can lead you in the right direction, and within a document, searching is a snap. Just type in what you want and before you could find the index in a paper document, you'll have found what you want.

Thanks to feedback and other features, electronic documents are an example of the encroachment of interactivity upon the passive activities we hold dear. […] 'Physical media just can't compete . . . [electronic text] just offers more 'bang for the buck', explains Hart.[…]

There are also many companies attempting to capitalize on the multimedia possibilities of electronic publishing. Sound and pictures are being incorporated in low-cost Internet World Wide Web 'publications', and companies like Medio and Nautilus are producing CD-ROMs that represent the new generation of periodicals - now music reviews include sound clips, movie reviews include trailers, book reviews include excerpts, and how-to articles include demonstrative videos. All this is put together with low costs, high speed, and many advantages."

Kushal answered my questions in his e-mail of September 1, 1998:

ML: "How do you see the relationship between the print media and the Internet?"

KD: "This is still being worked out, of course. So far, all I've been able to see is that electronic media undermines the print form in two ways: a) providing completely alternative presses that draw attention