FOLIO Electronic Publishing Defined

Electronic publishing is a rapidly growing area of the PC software
industry. Major industry players who are traditionally strong in other
software categories have recently begun to articulate their strategies for
providing their own electronic publishing solutions.

Terms such as document viewer, electronic paper, and document exchange
format have become commonplace in the vocabulary of the industry. But do
these terms represent electronic publishing? Not quite.

As the industry leader in PC-based electronic publishing, Folio Corporation
believes these phrases, and the solutions they describe, represent the
"horseless carriage" of electronic publishing. They are the old paradigm
of paper being carried forward to the new electronic medium. This tendency
to want to carry the comfortable old model forward is common, but
incremental steps like this only take users part way to the solution they
need.

To take full advantage of the electronic medium for publishing and allow
users to enjoy all of its benefits, the architecture of the publishing
solution itself must offer:

1) the ability to find the right information in the right context
2) the ability to revise the information to suit a particular
   need, and 
3) the ability to share and collaborate on information
   simultaneously in a workgroup

In short, electronic publishing solutions must offer users access,
personalization, and collaboration.

Access, Personalization and Collaboration

Access means using the electronic medium to find the right information much
faster and much more accurately than can be done with paper.

Access is not just viewing information. Viewing can be done on paper --
usually more effectively than with computers. It is important to represent
the elements of the printed page that make sense, but providing the
accurate look and feel of the paper document should be secondary to
helping people find what they need, when they need it. This requires
powerful searching and navigation tools.

Access is not just searching information, although full-text searching is a
critical element of electronic publishing. More accurately, access means
being able to search information both by its structure (fields and tables
of contents) and its contents (words and phrases). True electronic
publishing solutions offer both of these capabilities.

Personalization means gathering information from a variety of sources;
adding personal insights such as footnotes, cross references, marginal
annotations, highlights, and edits; adding graphical elements when needed;
and organizing information into a format that is more useful to specific
individuals and workgroups.

Personalization takes place on paper, but through a cumbersome, linear,
process. The electronic medium offers much more flexibility, but only if
the electronic publishing solution provides a revisable document format.

A static, computerized "picture" of a page or document is even less
flexible, in many respects, than paper. It may be able to be viewed by
many people at once, but it doesn't help those people extract and use the
information that is pertinent to them.

Information is dynamic -- it changes, it gets pulled apart and put back
together for a myriad of different needs. That's why it makes no sense to
carry over the static nature of paper into the electronic medium. A true
electronic publishing solution doesn't mimic the static nature of paper --
it removes that artificial limitation and lets people do what they need to
do with it because it is dynamic like the information it bears.

Collaboration means sharing information in a group for the purpose of
working together. Collaboration helps all individuals in a group work from
a common set of information to make the effort more unified.

Paper can be shared, but only in a linear fashion (i.e. passed along from
person to person, or copied and then distributed.) Computer networks make
it possible to overcome this limitation by making information
simultaneously available to many individuals.

An electronic publishing solution needs to take advantage of this
capability by allowing users to not only access information
simultaneously, but also to personalize it simultaneously as well.
Electronic publishing solutions must be multi-user capable -- supporting
multi-user access and editing with full record-locking, otherwise they
offer little advantage over paper.

Infobases

To provide access, personalization, and collaboration takes database-like
capabilities. But a database, by definition, imposes structures and
limitations that are unnatural to the fluid nature of most information. A
different type of database, called an infobase. provides each of the above
capabilities and is required in an electronic publishing solution.

In 1988, Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, gave the
following definition of an infobase.

"Our ideas about what a document is are still closely tied to the
paper-based origins of documents. Paper, as an information-bearing medium,
is both linear and rigid. Paper documents have a necessary order (a page
at a time from front to back) and are bounded in space. Each item of
information on a paper document is located in exactly one place. These
limitations have been unconsciously and unnecessarily carried over into
computer-based document processing systems. Movies were originally
conceived of as filmed records of stage plays, but later developed their
own unique vocabulary (the jump cut, the dissolve), each term of which
embodies a unique style and meaning. So too can we free ourselves of the
limitations of paper-based documents by inventing the appropriate
representations and interactions.

"Documents will become 'soft' and 'virtual, ' made up of many little
pieces, each with its own separate identity. The document you see on the
screen will really be a kind of view into a large new-wave database of
text, graphics and other data types like audio and video. This database
(perhaps we will call it an infobase) will not necessarily be completely
local. It may be distributed over a LAN or even updated periodically (and
transparently) and automatically over a wide-area network. Just as
information may 'arrive' from many different places, it may also put in
multiple appearances in a variety of contexts defined by and in accordance
with the user's wishes. Making a change to the item in any of its guises
will automatically cause it to change everywhere else."

(Quoted by industry analyst Esther Dyson in her Release 1.0 newsletter)

Folio Electronic Publishing Solutions

Folio Corporation has been providing electronic publishing solutions based
on infobases for more than four years. Folio VIEWS 3.0, released in May,
1993, is the most complete electronic publishing solution available and
was designed specifically to match the specified electronic publishing
needs of corporate, commercial publishing, government, and educational
organizations.

For more information on electronic publishing or Folio VIEWS 3.0, call
(801) 344-3671.

Folio Corp, 2155 North Freedom Blvd, Ste 150, Provo, UT 84604
801-375-3700

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