Digital Book Production and Supply Chain Management: Technology drivers across the book production supply chain, from creator to consumer (C-2-C series)

Five hundred and fifty years after Gutenberg's world-changing inventions of modularisation and mass production, we find the book production industry once again undergoing a technical revolution. The computer and the Internet are popularly given credit as the definitive technologies that are changing the world. But the digital revolution may only be doing many of the things that have been done before. The Internet, for instance, does much of what books already do. This volume describes critical developments in the process for manufacturing words, in the converging technologies of digital print and etext. It looks at ways in which the different players along the supply chain can be, and increasingly are being, interconnected by digital technologies. What is truly new about the new technologies is that through the convergence enabled by the use of sophisticated metadata and metalanguages, content management, process management and financial management can all occur in and around a single electronic file - a book - as it flows from creator to consumer. The material in this volume has been developed as part of a wider collaborative research project entitled "Future Markets and Future Products in the Book Production Industry: a Program of New Knowledge Creation, Supply Chain-wide Awareness and Cultural Change", undertaken by Common Ground Publishing in partnership with RMIT University.