Once upon a time, if someone wanted their ideas, whether fact or fiction, to be seen in writing, they had to go through the long, tenuous process of publishing, which cost a good deal of time and money, and was a gamble at all points in the process. Today, however, individuals can instead choose to self publish their works through the World Wide Web, allowing for minimal work to exposure time lapse, and a more one-on-one approach to reading.
e-Publishing is a powerful medium, and its siren-call is a hard one to resist. "..the new media’s appeal to writers goes beyond dollars," Paul Roberts writes, "There’s the allure of a sexy new technology, sharpened by a fear of professional obsolescence. The fact is, multimedia can do things the printed page never even dreamed about. It’s digital, which means that obscene amounts of data can be encoded and stored of a four-inch wafer-thin laser disc. It’s also interactive, which means that all those digitized artifacts--hundreds of photos and graphics, video clips, my own wee texts--can be linked together in a kind of electronic-semantic web." (Tribble & Trubek, 390-391).
Yet despite its innovations, e-publishing is still a young medium, and possibly it is far too new of an outlet to truly be one in which an up-and-coming author should rely. And yet, it is indeed a medium with many pros and cons over traditional publishing.
For example, when one goes to a traditional publisher, unless they have been published before, it becomes dramatically difficult to convince the publisher that their work is worth the effort. That is because there are many costs that go into paper-based publishing, such as the costs of ink and paper, labor costs, and distribution costs.
However, if one does become published, they then have a good chance of becoming well known within this country, due to the widespread reach that successful publishing houses have over distribution rights. Most major publishers virtually have carte blanche when it comes to selling their books to most bookstore chains. If they say "sell this book, it’s good." most stores will acquiesce without complaint.
Unfortunately, today’s print world still falls into the trap that Plato claimed all writing invariably will, when he said "If you ask [works of writing] a question they preserve a solemn silence" (Tribble & Trubek, pg 362). Writing is a very static, unchanging process, not allowing for almost any interactivity. If a reader does not understand exactly what a writer is trying to say, that is their problem, and they probably will solve it by no longer reading from that author.
On the other hand, one of the few benefits of e-publishing solves this problem. In almost all cases, the reader has complete accessibility to the author, and is fully capable of asking questions and carrying on full debates and conversations on the topic of the writing, through the many communication methods the internet employs, such as e-mail, or message boards, or online journals. So not only can a reader learn to appreciate an author’s works better through the internet, but they can even become close correspondents with them.
Also with internet based publishing, almost any author can easily be published and exposed to the world on a broad market with minimal costs. With the internet, it becomes an exercise in simplicity to find an author’s works, and become more enriched because of it. The widespread use of the internet to become an author’s voice has created a damoclean sword, however, in the fact that truly anyone can publish themselves. Frankly, there are far more people who cannot write well, but do not know it, than people who can write well and do. And in my opinion, when reading something that is not good at all, it somehow feels like an assault on my intelligence directly, and turns me off incredibly.
Another fallacy to consider in the argument towards e-publishing is the idea that the internet provides one with far more exposure than standard publishing. While it is true that an online source is accessible virtually around the globe, that does not mean that everyone, or even anyone actually wants to view it. When publishing on paper, a piece has the potential to reach thousands if not millions of readers. Internet based writing however, may not even reach as many readers as one hundred.
One more point to take into consideration when deciding between web-based or paper-based publishing, is the least thought of, yet most important position that the paper companies employ: the proofreader. When publishing the old fashioned way, there is someone there to read the manuscript, and point out all the errors, whether they be contextual, grammatical, or continuity related. Internet based operations rarely have this much needed help, and as a result it will become rare to find a well written, mistake free piece on the world wide web. This same truth holds for fact checking as well. The internet has become a crutch for researchers, as information is easy to find online. However, most of this information is dubious at best in quality, or is on a site which disappears practically overnight, without any prior notice.
Finally, another point to consider is that of the medium that the words actually appear on. Still today many individuals find it grating and difficult to read long stretches of text on a computer monitor. Plus, many enjoy the tactile impressions given still today by actual books, such as the feel or smell of the paper and ink process, or the binding pieces.
On this point, many either agree or disagree with me. George Landow finds himself in the opposing camp when he illustrates a conference in which Edward Tufte attempted to explain my point: "[Tufte] reminded his audience how many sensual pleasures books offer that computers do not. To make his point, he lovingly displayed Ben Jonson’s own copy of Euclid, and his remarks made quite clear that he presented this leather-bound volume from his own collection as the standard against which reading on computer screens should be judged. Upon the briefest consideration, using this exquisite, association-laden object to represent our experience of books appears intensely problematic. First, as everyone in the audience immediately recognized, this book, unlike most we use, is a unique object, and object quite unlike almost all we encounter in our daily experience of reading." (Tribble & Trubek, 215).
While Landow’s criticism of Tufte is well-founded, his overall point is not. Tufte obviously made a grave mistake when he chose to illustrate the sensory greatness of books over computer text with a singular example. That does not detract from the fact, however, that all books have a tactile responsiveness to them that makes them highly desired over a computer screen.
There are many pros and cons to each method. How important to you as a writer is widespread exposure, compared to individual cognition? Perhaps the internet, despite its firm hold on our culture, is simply too young of a medium to effectively interpose old fashioned printed text.

• Landow, George. "Twenty Minutes into the future, or How are we moving beyond this book?". Tribble and Trubek. 214-226
• Plato. "Phraedrus". Tribble and Trubek. 360-364.
• Roberts, Paul. "Virtual Grub Street: Sorrows of a Multimedia Hack". Tribble and Trubek. 389-399.
• Tribble, Evelyn B, and Trubek, Anne, eds. Writing Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital Age. New York et al. Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 2003