Cross media and e-publishing

Since the invention of Gutenberg’s printing technology, paper has been the predominant medium for the distribution of information. However, in the last century new technology such as like radio and television has emerged, partly complementing and partly replacing paper. In the 1990s the Internet established itself as another major distribution channel for information. The multiple distribution channels make it necessary to efficiently serve the different formats of the media. These efforts are termed Cross Media. Over the past few decades Cross Media and ePublishing have become regarded as important success factors not only for publishing houses and media companies but almost for any company regardless of sector. While there are many sophisticated concepts within Cross Media, a rather down-toearth facet - the printability of Internet documents – has been investigated in this study. For example, does it make sense to offer a rotogravure, high gloss brochure that one gets in a car-dealer show room for download and print-out on an ordinary black and white home printer. Should companies offer optimized plain black and white print-outs that reduced print-out time and costs for the end user? Should companies offer even multiple formats to suit the different needs of customers. Our analysis can be taken as an indicator of the degree of maturity and awareness of Cross Media and ePublishing – if these rather simple issues are not perfectly solved then Cross Media can be regarded as still in its very beginnings. Therefore, we analysed the print-outs of institutions and companies of several industries and compared the results within the industries as well as between them.