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A is for Archive's

Margaret I. Carr

An ePublishing Asset

T-zero's Archives from June 1998 are now accessible with a simple mouse-click on the Archives link at the top left of the Main page. Kudos to Alison Hawke for a job well done in making it so much easier to find what you are looking for in the old issues! Alison's expertise in html is outstanding! She has also written an html class for WVU (starts April 19th) and, having had an advance peek at the lessons, I think it will take a lot of the mystery (and apprehension!) out of the subject.

One of my favorite 'paper' magazines periodically sells back issues at a reduced price. They give "running out of warehouse space to store them" as the reason. They do not mention the Inventory tax or the changes in the method of valuing inventory that have shortened the 'life' of so many books.

How fortunate we are with electronic storage. We can keep our old issues available indefinitely at a relatively low cost. One accessible copy plus a backup is all we need. Neither rodents nor insects can damage them and age will not yellow the pages.

The reader who discovers a new favorite can easily access back copies and need not build new shelves to store them. One of my shelves, that in the past afforded endless hours of entertainment for my cats as they removed paperback books, has now been sub-divided into an unappealing (for cats) storage area for floppy boxes and a CD area. By the time it is full I should have more e-books in that three-foot space than I have paper books in all the boxes in my garage. Even better, if I want to recommend a book to a friend next year it will still be available without having to search used bookstores!

Distribution is another advantage. When I found a list of the major book distributors and saw that the average 'discount' was about 65% I began to wonder how any 'paper' publishers manage to stay in business.

ePublishing is a topic of interest to many writers and you can expect to see articles about it and reviews of e-books here. Let me know if there are particular aspects you want to know more about and we will try to find the answers for you.