The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing

Book excerpt: What is metadata? When do you need to archive digital content? How does electronic publication affect copyrights? How can XML and PDF improve your workflow and your publications? There is a digital dimension to virtually all publishing today. Beyond the obvious electronic media--the music and movies we take for granted, the increasingly indispensable Web, the eBooks that most of us will take for granted in a few years--almost everything we read, even on paper, was produced digitally. This new digital world offers a steadily increasing number of choices. It is this rich and rapidly changing publishing environment for which The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing was created. Although there is a vast amount of information on a host of topics relevant to digital production and publishing available--some in print, more on the Web--there has been, until now, no single resource to which those involved in any dimension of publishing could turn for guidance. The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing fills that need. The Guide is definitive: written by experts in the broad array of subjects it covers, it provides reliable, authoritative, user-friendly information about a vast number of topics. Designed to be the first place to go to learn about any of the numerous interrelated issues that define the digital publishing landscape, it offers readers a multilevel approach, from a brief glossary definition of a technical term or acronym (sometimes all a user needs), to a concise discussion of a topic (comprehensible to the lay person, yet useful for the technical expert). It puts a subject in the context of other topics and broader issues, with real-world examples, liberal cross-references, and pointers to sources of further information in print or electronic form.