work traditionally done by pre-press shops was first weakened by
the introduction of photocomposition machines. The text and image processing
work began to be executed by advertising agencies and graphic art studies. The
impression costs went on decreasing with the spread of desktop publishing,
copiers, color copiers and digital printing equipment.The text and image
processing work is now provided at low price by desktop publishing shops and
graphic art studios.

Furthermore, digitization accelerated the preparation process of a publication,
because the sub-editor, the artistic designer and the staff responsible for the
make-up can now work at the same time on the same book.

During the ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence held in January 1997, Peter
Leisink, Associate Professor of Labour Studies at the Utrecht University,
Netherlands, explained:

"A survey of the United Kingdom book publishing industry showed that
proofreaders and editors have been externalized and now work as home-based
teleworkers. The vast majority of them had entered self-employment, not as a
first-choice option, but as a result of industry mergers, relocations and
redundancies. These people should actually be regarded as casualized workers,
rather than as self-employed, since they have little autonomy and tend to depend
on only one publishing house for their work."

Digitization makes possible the on-line publishing of educational and scientific
publications, for which the latest information is essential. Some U.S.
universities distribute specific textbooks gathering a selection of chapters
selected in an extensive database and some professors' articles and
commentaries. For a seminar, a very small print run can be prepared upon request
with electronic scientific texts sent to a printer. Electronic publishing could
also keep alive some academic publishers, and publishers issuing documents
relating to very specific and specialized research, for which the printing of a
document in a small number of copies has become more and more difficult for
budgetary reasons.

At present, electronic publishing and "traditional" publishing - such as on-line
bookstores and "traditional" bookstores, or cyberlibraries and "traditional"
libraries - are complementary.

Even if electronic publishing considerably expands over the next few years,
people will still find it convenient to have the paper version of a book or a
magazine, perhaps until the digital books