Since the 1970s, the traditional publishing chain has drastically changed. The printing work done by pre-press shops was first disrupted by new photocomposition machines. Text and image processing began to be handed over to advertising and graphic art agencies. Impression costs went on decreasing with desktop publishing, copiers, color copiers and digital printing equipment.
In 1997, text and image processing was provided at a low price by desktop publishing shops and graphic art studios. Digitization accelerated the publication process. Editors, designers and other contributors could all work at the same time on the same book.
Digitization also made possible the online publishing of educational and scientific publications, which appeared as a far better solution than print books, because they could be regularly updated with the latest information. Some universities began distributing their own textbooks online, with chapters selected in an extensive database, and articles and commentaries from professors. For a seminar, a small print could be made upon request with a selection of online articles sent to a printer.
Electronic publishing allowed some academic publishers to keep running their business, with lower costs and quick access. This way, small publishers went on publishing specialized books, for which the printing in a small number of copies had become more and more difficult over the years due to budgetary reasons. These books could now be regularly updated and their readers benefit from the latest version. Readers didn't need to wait any more for a new printed edition, often postponed if not cancelled because of commercial constraints.
Electronic publishing and traditional publishing became complementary. The frontier between the two supports - electronic and paper - was vanishing. Most recent print media already stemmed from an electronic version anyway, on a word processor, a spreadsheet or a database. More and more documents became only electronic. And more and more print books were scanned to be included in digital bookstores and libraries.
At the end of the 1990s, there were no reliable statistics yet proving that the large-scale use of computers and electronic documents would make us paperless and save some tress, as hoped by all of us who believe in nature preservation. We were still in a transition period. Many people still needed a print version for easier reading, or to keep track of a document in case the electronic file was accidentally deleted, or to have some paper support for their documentation or archives.
1997: LOGOS DICTIONARY
[Overview]
Logos is a leading translation company located in Modena, Italy. In 1997, Logos had 200 in-house translators in Modena and 2,500 free-lance translators worldwide, who processed around 200 texts per day. The company made a bold move at the time, and decided to put on the web all the linguistic tools used by its translators, for the internet community to freely use them as well. The linguistic tools were the Logos Dictionary, a multilingual dictionary with 7 billion words (in Fall 1998); the Logos Wordtheque, a multilingual library with 300 billion words extracted from translated novels, technical manuals and other texts; the Logos Linguistic Resources, a database of 500 glossaries; and the Logos Universal Conjugator, a database for verbs in 17 languages.
[In Depth (published in 1999)]