2. ADVANTAGES OF DIGITAL PUBLISHING
COMPARED TO TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING
The advantages of digital publishing compared to traditional printing are, Digital publishing can give a variety
of content across multiple devices such as smartphones and tablets.
A few examples of traditional printing are Etching, Linocut, Woodcut, Screen printing, Lithography, Gravure
and Flexography compared to digital publishing these methods are a lot more time consuming as it has to be
done by hand whereas digital publishing can be done on a computer. Another advantage is that more people
are going online and using smartphones/tablets which means they spend more time looking at the news and
reading books online than going and buying a newspaper, magazine and books etc. A few examples of digital
publishing are e-magazines, e-newspapers, adverts, DVD covers, Training materials, promotional material,
flyers, e-books and leaflets.
For example if you were to use an e-book, the advantages of this would be that it can be purchased instantly
instead of going to a book store and buying a book, you can take it on the go with you and its easy to put
away as you can just put your smartphone or tablet in your bag/pocket, can offer free samples of books,
magazines to lure more customers into using e-books and lower production costs. The disadvantages of an e-
book are, that it can be easily pirated, cannot be signed/autographed which means it looses sentimental
value, harder to loan friends as you won't want to give them your smartphone/tablet and a change of reading
experience as many authors such as J.K Rowling don't want their books being turned into an e-book as it
changes the experience of reading the book.
Overall I think that digital publishing is better than traditional publishing as its a lot more modern and many more
people use digital publishing.
3. The advantages of using the e-book system compared to the traditional system for the publisher:
The publisher can more easily distribute their work, through the internet and thus their work can gain popularity and access to the
market more easily. Whereas, for the traditional system, the publisher does not have a lot of control over the distribution.
There are more and more number of online book vendors that open all the time and thus distribution channels have become greater
in number. Whereas, traditional publishers still exist, due to the popularity of digital publishing they are slowly moving into
vending digitally published material.
There are more text formats being developed, and therefore the digitally published material is more compatible with many devices
and becoming more popular.
More software is developed which can read digitally published material. Due to increase in popularity of digital devices, people spend
more time one digital devices then they did before, and therefore it is becoming more convenient for them to read of their
devices instead of physical material.
The advantages of using the e-book system for publishing compared to traditional publishing for the readers.
Using electronic devices for reading material is becoming more and more common as digital devices are become more advanced
and portable, as well as more convenient for people to carry around and read from. Readers can store all their reading material
digitally in their devices, whereas this is not possible for traditional publishing and readers have to carry around all their reading
material.
Electronic devices such as the amazon kindle uses technology such as electronic ink which makes it look more like real ink, which is
more preferred by readers, and therefore they prefer to read digitally published material than physical books or newspapers.
And due to popularity for digital devices, people like the electronic ink more than published books.
Additionally, electronic book vendors online, provide a platform for people to make comments on the published work and allow online
payment. This is beneficial to readers because they can know whether the published work is worth to buy. Additionally, the
vendors also allow the readers to communicate with authors about their books which is useful for the readers. Whereas this is
very difficult to organize in traditionally published books, because it is hard for vendors to tell their customers about books.
Also, readers have a lot more flexibility in choosing the kind of books they want to read, the genre, the chapters
