In recent years we have witnessed an authentic boom in projects on Internet, now in decline. Each project, inasmuch as it possesses content creation, can - or at least ought to - be considered as a publishing project in itself, whatever its aims, nature or creator. As things stand, it is a good time to point out the scant dynamism on Internet of the traditional publishers; by traditional, I mean those that base their business on publishing on paper.

What is the reason for such a lack of appetite by the traditional publishing world for digital projects? Without doubt the frequent lack of clear business ideas for content on Internet, the limited technological capability to digitalize content and the lack of universally accepted standards for multimedia transmission of content have hindered it. Hopefully, in the coming years, once we have got over the current stage of implosion of e-projects, we shall witness a greater proliferation.

The importance of digital content is particularly evident in the field of education. This importance lies in the need to access information quickly and handle it effectively. This is so in the different stages of the educational process: in the preparation of materials and teaching sessions, as reference and consultation material; during the giving of the training sessions, as back-up material, and also later in students' learning and revision as reference material.

All this is true in the field of education, primary, secondary and higher, although in the first two it is especially useful as back up and reference material, whereas in higher education it has greater relevance as reference material. At least this is the situation in accordance with the digital content currently in existence.

But let's take it step by step. As far as curricular material is concerned, this is where we see the greatest digital gap, almost certainly due to the fear of losses in what is without doubt one of the largest publishing cakes. There are very few cases of educational systems promoting the creation of content in digital format, and fewer still of a curricular nature. Some examples can be found in primary and secondary state education networks, which promote the detailed production of material that could be considered curricular. In the university sector, it is conspicuous for its total absence, with a few honorable exceptions such as Cervantes Virtual and Lluís Vives (which groups together university publishing services), both of them virtual libraries of university publications. The chief opportunities here will not be so much for web formats as for electronic book formats.

With regard to reference and back-up materials, this is where projects have most probably been more highly developed, almost certainly thanks to their application in professional fields outside education. Thus, if we look at universal materials like encyclopedias we find projects (i.e. works) like Enciclonet in Spanish, Britannica.com in English, or Grec.net net in Catalan. Enciclonet is a case in point of a good product that has not been developed by a traditional publisher, but has been digital right from the start (CD-ROM and Internet). The traditional publishers have got a lot to learn.

The last two especially are, by nature, unique information platforms, given that they allow simultaneous access to sources of universal knowledge in a single search result, always with an encyclopedia as the central vertebral column (on Britannica.com, Internet webs, press articles and even an almost worldwide diary of events are added to the result, whilst Grec.net adds webs, news items from the last few years, photographs and a library of books).

In more specific areas we find some examples in which the traditional publishers have also played a relevant part, such as the cases of the digital linguistic resources and resources of the legal world. In the linguistic field however, such resources are often dispersed, and we thus find monolingual and multilingual dictionaries on Diccionarios.com, intelligent translation systems at the Universidad de Alicante, and many other linguistic resources in all the languages of the world on www.yourdictionary.com.

A particular area especially relevant and successful is the law, where paying for content is the order of the day, unlike in other fields. Even such traditional publishers like Aranzadi or Bosch, have been successful in the creation of content in digital format. This is surely one of the most successful sectors of the "old guard". But here as well, the purely virtual have also succeeded for the moment, as with vlex.com.

To conclude, the adaptation of the traditional publishing world to the new technologies is slow, and in order for it to succeed the publishers will have to consider certain objectives like specialization in single content, the integration of content in cross searching to make it easy to access, maximum quality and brand prestige, finding an income model to make it viable, and ensuring in turn an efficient process of updating the content. All this should be taking place at the same time as content is digitalized and the necessary synergies with off-line activities are sought, to avoid the duplication of processes and to integrate content in a single database for Internet rather than for traditional activity.

Published on: Educaweb.com.