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Digital publishing is still in its infancy, but it is useful to relate what might be called the prologue to the history of digital publishing in French in Quebec. This article presents the actors who have contributed, and continue to contribute, to the transition from print to digital culture in Quebec. It offers a panoramic view of this transition in the various publishing genres from newspapers and magazines, to journals, books, theses, dictionaries, bibliographical databases, and legal texts. A typology of the actors working in these different genres emerges, comprising publisher, aggregator (general or specialist), distributor, production technician, retailer, and librarian. The builders of Quebec's digital publishing milieu are acknowledged through brief descriptions of their projects and enterprises. Many of them have displayed a notable capacity to engage in the development of new models for the production and diffusion of culture and research. The quality of their products, services, and expertise has been recognized several times over through international partnerships and co-operative ventures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses both print and electronic book versions available for the works of Roman philosopher and political theorist Marcus Tullius Cicero. Texts by Cicero were traditionally used for two purposes, for the study of Latin language and culture, and by more experienced scholars in fields such as rhetoric and political philosophy. A discussion of the history of printed works of Cicero from the nineteenth-century to the present, including topics such as the digitalization of books by Project Gutenberg, Amazon.com, and how Portable Document Format (PDF) files changed the effectiveness of reading electronic books, is presented.

The article provides an overview of the history of the Scholarly Digital Editions, a small academic publisher focused on producing electronic versions of scholarly books. Topics considered include the sale of electronic texts on CD-ROMs, the advent of the World Wide Web, and the author's work on the Canterbury Tales Project, scholarly research which started with the Hengwrt manuscript held at the National Library of Wales of Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Scholarly Digital Editions was founded in 2000 to publish the findings of the Canterbury Tales Project and similar scholarly works.

This essay discusses the technological and social impacts of electronic books and electronic publishing. The authors examine the ways that intellectuals in the humanities fields interact with computerized information resources. The article calls for increased users studies to determine the ways that reading has changed when one interacts with digital texts rather than printed ones. Some of the topics discussed include the methods that scholars in the humanities conduct their research, the design and construction of online information resources, and how humanities scholars are different than scientists in the ways that they approach research tasks.