E-Publishing > Advantages

E-Publishing has a number of advantages over conventional (paper) publishing.  Some of these are listed below.  Whether any of these are applicable to you will, of course, depend on your own requirements / applications.

	Interactivity
	Unlike conventional paper publishing, e-publishing technologies allow documents to be interactive, so that you can 'link' different parts of a document, or different documents, together.  Readers of a document can then click on a link to instantly view the related  information or other document.
	Speed of production
	With conventional (paper) publishing, once a document has been written there can be a considerable delay while the document is being printed and bound, and then distributed. However, if suitable tools are used to create the document, it can be virtually instantaneously converted into a form suitable for immediate electronic publishing.
	Accessibility
	Documents which are published on-line are readily available (from the worldwide web, or through a portal to a company intranet) for down-loading. For example, one of our clients has service engineers deployed around the world who need to access service information for various systems on-site in customers' factories.  It would be impossible for the service engineers to carry all the required paper documents (or even the documents on CD-ROMs or DVDs) with them, however they can easily carry laptop computers.  When required, they simply connect to the internet, then download the necessary documents onto their laptops.
	Convenience of Updating
	Updating 'live' printed documents already in the field can be very costly.  If you do not completely re-issue a document, you need to implement procedures for identifying corrections, amendments or errata to the documents' readers.  Such procedures tend to be time-consuming... and can be prone to errors. With e-publishing, re-issuing of a complete document is relatively fast and inexpensive.
	Cost
	The costs of printing, binding and delivering, particularly of large documents, can be considerable. However, it is relatively cheap to 'burn' and dispatch CD-ROMs, which can hold a large amount of information, or to email an 'electronic' document directly to your customers/users. Alternatively, publishing documents for your customers/users on-line is probably the cheapest method, although you need to consider (a) who can access your site, and (b) whether bandwidth problems may arise.