It’s been said for years: “Print is Dead!” No one knows this more than large publishing organizations that are desperately looking into other publishing options. Besides loss in readership for the physically printed word, everyone knows that the world is reading online and getting all materials off line from books, articles, news and more. Not only is online publishing convenient for anyone who owns a computer with internet access, printing online is also environmentally friendly and cost effective too. Companies who publish online eliminate thousands of dollars spent on paper, ink, mailing and more. What’s more, online publishers are saving money as well as the environment. Therefore, businesses are looking for profitable ways to print online. In order for large publishing houses to print online, a substantial investment in publishing software is often the next step.

Large content heavy businesses and companies are using a new XML technology to move all of their existing content into a format that is reusable and adaptable to either create new products or reuse and redistribute existing products. Publishing companies are finding that they too can use this technology to create new products, renew content they already had, save money on paper printing and reach new audiences. The process begins with an XML content server.

Online publishing or electronic publishing means publishing e-books and electronic articles as well as development of digital libraries by way of the Internet. Online publishing is fast becoming a popular mode of disseminating all kinds of publications. Most of the information is encapsulated as e-books, which are electronic or digital versions of printed books. The term e-book is an individual work in a digital format or a hardware device used to read books in a digital format.

Online book publishers commonly bundle information as e-books for distribution among target users. Most of the e-books contain metadata like printed books and includes details about author, title, publisher and copyright date. Online books can also be published in a variety of formats, keeping target readers in view and the type of work to be digitalized. Some of the commonly used formats are image, used mainly for distributing comic books, art books or other visual works; rich text; hyper text markup language or HTML, used mostly in web pages; PostScript or .ps is a page description language used primarily in the electronic and desktop publishing industry for enhancing the quality of a printed page from the actual output of bitmap file.