The future of books in an electronic era

Books form an important part of human culture. They can be used to document, entertain, inform and instruct. Conventional approaches to book production have involved either manual or mechanical binding of sheets of paper in order to form an organised, structured, composite entity. New publication media now offer many alternative approaches to the creation of books and the ways in which they can be disseminated and used. This paper therefore discusses the growing importance of electronic publication. It then uses a case study to illustrate the influence that online books and other forms of electronic document might have on conventional publishing processes.