History of Electronic Publishing

Before we can trace the origins of Electronic Publishing we must first look back to the early methods of media distribution of books and manuscripts. In the fifteenth century it was a tedious business of producing a book with the use of parchments from animal skins or other materials like bark, cloth or paper for writing upon this was very time consuming and only one book could be produced at a time. This was to all change when Johann Gutenberg developed the technique of producing a number of letters or ‘types’ which could be assembled to form a page of writing which was inked and impressed upon paper in less than a minute this method was called “Letterpress Printing”.

By the end of the eighteenth century Alois Senefelder developed Lithographic printing which was able to produce multiple copies with delicate shades and tints, with the development of photography in the middle of the 19^th century and the breakthrough in halftone printing, lithographic printing become a commercially acceptable standard, later when the technique of multicolor printing combined with the Litho process it became industry standard as it is today.

Between the 1960’s to late 1970’s the means of producing a document onto a plate for a Litho printing press was time consuming. To produce a design for distribution on a printing press the artwork had to be created by hand with the use of a microcomputer dot matrix photo typesetting system, then with the use of a darkroom each individual artwork had to be shot to film before been burned to a plate.

In 1984, with the birth of the Apple Macintosh and PostScript, text could be input in digital form and images placed with the use of a scanner. PostScript was developed in the early 1980’s by Chuck Geschke and John Warnock who later founded the company Adobe. PostScript was a very important development at the time for exchanging data in its page description and programming language.

With the use of the Apple Macintosh and PostScript language digital files could be sent to an Imagesetter (Linotronic) which exposed the digital file to film which was then burned to plate for printing. This technology made printing process more efficient, cost effective and cut out the use of the darkroom technique. 1990 Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in Geneva developed the hypertext system known as HTML and in 1993 Marc Andreessen and NCSA developed a graphical user interface to the WWW, called "Mosaic".

With the introduction of the Internet commercially in 1993, electronic publishing became an exciting prospect. Data can now be transmitted and disseminated to practically any part of the world at the speed of light. With the introduction of email the publisher could send data files and graphics around the world but in the early days file sizes were limited to 5mega bites. ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) is a circuit-switched telephone network system, designed to allow digital transmission of voice and data over ordinary telephone copper wires, resulting in better quality and higher speeds than available with analog systems this system was used by many publishing house to transfer files and data. 

Another common method of transferring electronic published files is FTP (file transfer protocol) which is used to connect two computers over an internet network that supports TCP/IP protocol. Large data can be sent from one computer to another.

At present “Broadband” or “Wireless” are the most widely and commonly used method to transfer data and files over the internet with a speed of several megabits per second through a fiber optic cable, this connection runs 24 hours a day and the publisher can send files constantly.

We can clearly see that Electronic Publishing has come a long way since Johann Gutenberg’s letterpress printing press with the introduction of the computer and the advances in Internet technology and file transfer.

 

 “The physical production of national newspapers takes place outside the city centre and often in several places simultaneously, thanks to the ability to send information quickly and accurately via satellite, cable, internet and facsimile transmission.” [“Printing” – [Book]. by W.R. Durrant Chapter 1 (page 12)]