Furthermore, these can be ‘editions for everyone’: with an ease and richness of utilty which both permits the reader to use them, and gives the reader strong reason to want to use them. In the case of the scholarly edition, we argue that digital methods can produce resources with compelling advantages over their print predecessors. We suggest that a reason for the failure of digital media in these areas is because of the failure of the digital interface: because electronic publication has tried to mimic the book, without surpassing it. But it in other areas of text-based media, the lack of such a compelling advantage has combined with the ability of computerized publishing to produce better books, faster and cheaper, with the result that traditional books are not just surviving, they are prospering.

There are clear compelling advantages in digital music and film, and in some areas of text-based media too (for example, encyclopedias and scholarly journals). The conclusion we derive from this survey across media and genres is that the new, digital media will replace older, analogue media (including print) if and only if there are compelling advantages in the new media. It is notable that there is a considerable gap between the success of the digital form in music and film (where digital media, as in CD-ROM and DVD-ROM, have almost completely driven out older analogue forms) and the relative failure of the digital form in ‘text-based’ media such as the novel, academic monograph, and scholarly edition. This paper surveys the current state of work on electronic publication of academic and literary texts, and of electronic publication of scholarly editions in particular.

The great kapok tree