Wie mein Buch auf die Welt kommt/ Abstract

Book creating today

The symbiosis of analog and digital publishing

Digital Media are on the rise. They bring traditional book publishing houses as well as editors of newspapers and magazines in distress. Although the technical ability to become his/her own publisher came up with desktop publishing in the 1980s, the electronic book lacked two important conditions for the breakthrough as we can experience it today. On one hand it is the Internet as the global distribu­tion channel and on the other hand the miniaturized version of a computer which we now encounter in the form of E-book readers, tablets and smartphones. The 21st century offers authors unprecedented opportunities of spreading their stories and thoughts within an interested audience. And much faster and cheaper than book publishers can do this. Until recently, publishers were the hurdle that authors had to take in order to publish an article or a book. Of course, not every person who calls her­self/himself a publisher is a good writer, but more and more it is the market which decides this and no longer the publisher. As with any major technical revolution, the eu­phoric expectations meet the resistance and complaints of those who perceive it as a threat to their status. At the time of Gutenberg the printed book was a cata­lyst of violent concerns and criticism itself, as it was faster and much cheaper than the production of hand-written books. Moreover, it challenged the control of the wielders of power over the storage of information and massive distribution per­mitted more levels of society easier access. The previous considerations were carried out mainly from the point of view of publishers and book traders. How do the users see the future of the book? Will this medium with a great past have a future? And what will it look like? It is necessary to investigate the book and to back-trace the relationships as well as differences between the analogous and digital form of the book. After a brief description of media-history of the book, observable innovation and substi­tution processes aredescribed. A brief outline of the challenges by the digital­ization is followed by a description of observable innovation and substitution pro­cesses. Two female authors from Vorarlberg and two authors from German-speaking foreign countries were questioned how they feel about and see the future of the medium book. A case study analyzes which processes take place to generate a finalized tem­plate for the digital printing as well as different e-book formats. The collected no­tes lead into a guideline which describes how to start a book project without ob­structing one's ways. In the final statement the author ventures a differentiated view of the future of publishing. The practical implementation of the theoretical part of the thesis has been carried out in five different editions of the Master Thesis: the analog edition as soft cover and the digital ones as e-book (ePUB and Mobi), PDF and wiki­book.