E-books and the Challenge of Preservation

The concept of electronic publishing was first articulated by Vannevar Bush of MIT in the seminal 1945 article ‘As We May Think.’ In 1991, Apple Computer introduced Jurassic Park as an electronic book for their Powerbook 100 laptop using the Adobe Acrobat portable document format (PDF). In 1998, the Rocket E-book was introduced, and in 1999, Simon & Schuster and Stephen King published an electronic novella that could be read on any Internet browser on virtually any computer, or downloaded to certain e-book devices. For the foreseeable future, most e-publishing will involve scientific, technical, professional and academic information as well as some original fiction work. Librarians and others involved in digital asset management will have to preserve at least some of this material for future reference, since it is expected that original works will be created and many of these may only exist in electronic form. E-books are not an historical artifact/anomaly, but a new form of content conveyance – important for certain constituencies and also important from the perspective of maintaining a record, especially since many works will be in e-book format only. Growth, while steady, may be slow due to competing technical standards, digital rights management, definitional issues and re-structuring within traditional publishing as creators, existing publishing houses and software companies position and re-position themselves in a changing market. A critical and perhaps underestimated set of issues concerns user acceptance.