THE RISE OF DIGITAL PUBLISHING

Digital publishing has been a very significant trend in recent years, as the traditional publishing industry has been hijacked by new technology. Digital or online publishing is the practice by which people use periodical e-books, white papers, reports, and other types of information that are often long-form and available online or on electronic device.

Digital publishing has allowed writers to self-publish their work such as nonfiction resource, fictional novels, short stories, multimedia magazines and plays, and had made it easier for reader to access a wider range of content.

Overview 

Digital publishing started way back in 1971, a university of Illinois student, Michael Hart, was given access to the university’s mainframe computer system, which was connected to an internet where he developed a system called Project Gutenberg. This system allowed users to read books on a computer. The internet became widely available and accessible. In the late 1990s, e-readers were developed, leading to the rise of what we know today as Digital Publishing. 

Advantages of Digital Publishing

1. Online publishing platforms, makes it easier for your work to reach a wide range of publicity, by optimizing your materials for good SEO practices so that people searching for your kind of work can easily find it.
2. Digital publishing has democratized the publishing industry, allowing everyone with an internet access to publish their work. This has led to increase in self-publishing and independent publishing, and also the emergence of new platforms.
3. Everyone loves instant gratification, with the advent of e-readers, and the availability of e-books on mobile devices, readers can choose from virtually unlimited selection of books, be it an out-of-print or a hard-to-find titles, online publishing makes it easy to navigate.
4. Digital publishing is a significant investment.

Disadvantages of Digital Publishing

1. It has decrease the quality of published work. There is a lot of low-quality contents, poorly vetted books. Due to everyone been able to self-publish.
2. Digital publishing is limited to certain platforms or devices, which can limit the reach of the content.
3. Digital publishing can be easily pirated, this is a major concern to lot of publisher and authors.
4. Digital publishing relies solely on the internet (technology), which are unreliable. A bridge in connection can lead to loss, or making it difficult or impossible to access the content.

Key Players on the Rise of Digital Publishing

1. Amazon: Is a widely used and biggest player in the publishing space, with millions of books available through its Kindle store, Kindle direct, and Kindle e-readers are well designed and user friendly. This is the far biggest Publishing platforms. 
2. Apple iBooks: It’s available to all Apple’s, devices making it easy to continue where you left off, no matter what device you are using. But the selection of books is much smaller than Amazon.
3. Adobe: Is the largest manufactures of Digital Publishing, the company offers digital publishing that includes folios, a set of tools and hosted services that lets publishers create and distributes their work on tablet devices.

There are lots of digital publishing which include, McGraw Hill, Pearson, RELX PLC, Xerox, Bertelsmann, HarperCollins, Wiley, Radom House, Alphabet INC, to mention but a few, that has impacted to the rise of digital publishing.