If there is an objective shared by museums, libraries, and archives-groups dedicated to organizing digital archival materials to make them resources for knowledge-it would be the desire to store these digitally archived cultural information resources for public use as "documentary heritage." Museums are characterized by the storage of physical collections of objects. Through the archiving process, those collections might become visible image data, losing the significance of physical storage. However, individual archival collections with metadata spread worldwide are less valuable as network information resources that can be accessed by people outside the museum's geographic region. Libraries, meanwhile, feature literal, two-dimensional collections such as printed media and postal media that can be archived with ease. However, today, libraries tend to manage network media and their major activities are intended to shift to non-literal collections as in museums. Archives also feature original literal collections, but are different from libraries in that they tend to feature all original materials, rather than a combination of original, reproduction, primary, and secondary sources. Consequently, different concepts for collections have inhibited the standardization of metadata formats. However, ongoing developments in networking technology have introduced the conceptual reference model to enable mutual understanding of various collections irrespective of the kind of institutions that gather and preserve these collections.

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In this paper, we describe the current status and issues of e-book services in Japanese public libraries. Currently, e-book services have only been introduced in 30 public libraries. Many issues have already been identified, including clarification of accounting standards for e-books, standardization of public library systems and publisher contract rules regarding e-books, guarantee of the public library budget regarding e-book service, increase of genres and title numbers of e-books by publishers, improvement of accessibility function of e-books, and so on. In the future, in order to nurture the spread of e-book services in public libraries, cooperation between public libraries, publishers, wholesale e-booksellers, and system vendors is important.

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Voyager Japan, Inc., is a digital publishing company. In 1993, we released a digital publishing tool called "Expanded Book." In 2000, we released a proprietary e-book format, "dotBook" (.book) .Since 2011, we have been using EPUB, a popular open standard for e-books, instead of our own dotBook because of EPUB's popularity. We developed a browser-based EPUB reader, "BinB," and a web-based digital publishing service, "Romancer." Romancer is a sub-compact digital publishing platform developed by the author. Romancer enables anyone to convert a Microsoft Word Document to a reflowable EPUB format, and from a PDF or sequence of images to a fixed-layout EPUB. Currently, users are free to download and sell converted e-books, or to publish them using Voyager's BinB system. We also publish paper and digital books, including original titles by Voyager. In this article, I examine digital publishing cases from production to sales, using the Romancer platform.

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Modern times have been called a sudden increase period of media. Services like Facebook and Twitter led to the spread of social networking services (SNS) , dramatically reducing the cost and difficulty of sending information: people now send information for free and share that information widely. Since the establishment of SNS on the country, enterprise, and group levels, individuals are able to offer information which, until now, was the realm of the newspaper "oligopoly," putting information on a home page immediately without letting major media through. Whenever there is a society that can be connected to the Internet, the individual now collects and spreads the first information on a subject or event. The individual becomes a target of interest and even maintains the sending power over the information, a condition previously only enjoyed by the conventional press industry. This has left the traditional media in a situation that cannot be ignored and must be changed to meet the times.

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To be responsible stewards of our world, the industrial sphere is required to engage in environmental conservation, especially when it comes to climate change. This is true for all businesses, including those that produce digital and physical books: electronic-books (e-books) and paper-books (p-books) , respectively. Japan's printing related companies are developing Product Category Rules (PCRs) and participating in ISO international standardization for the carbon footprint of products (CFP) regarding e-book and p-book production. In this report, I will introduce the activities the printing industry in Japan is engaging in to monitor and control environmental impact. Because printing is utilized for many products, the printing industry needed to establish a PCR for calculating CFP. The "Publishing & Commercial Printing (work in process) " PCR was established in 2009 and later revised in 2014 in order to reduce collecting data for calculation due to the spread of CFP. A PCR for e-media, including e-books, was established in 2013. The ISO international standard for CFP of print media products, including p-books, was published in 2013; a similar standard for e-media is under development. Comparing the life cycle assessment (LCA) results of e-books and p-books showed the hot spots for each value chain.

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Malaysian printing industry has played a major role as the main media for education, communication and dissemination of knowledge and information. It is expected that Malaysian printing and publishing business will continue its positive growth as the nation aspires to be fully developed and industrialized by 2020. The industry is constantly working to improve turnaround time, and many have invested in state-of-the-art technology to provide in-house finishing and bindery services. Many printers and publishers also stay abreast of new developments in the printing and publishing technology and this has greatly increased efficiency and productivity, as well as export competitiveness. This paper is to provide an overview of the current status of Malaysian Printing industry by discussing the key aspects of the printing industries as needed. Furthermore, an overview of the challenges of faced by book printing and publishing industry also discussed. References, an appendix on the history of the industry, and a suggested reading list are provided for further study.
Key words: Printing, Publishing, Printing Industry, e-book, Digital Printing

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While the sales volume of electronic books (e-books) in Japan is expanding, it accounted for less than one-tenth of that of print books in 2013. In this study, our objective is to validate four hypotheses about e-book usage in order to develop strategies to promote e-book usage. We conducted a consumer survey to identify the differences between e-book and print book readers. In this study, we examine the degree of readers' interest in books in general, their awareness of the advantages and disadvantages of e-books, and the media they use for gathering information. By using a two-sample t-test, our analysis indicates that, although e-book readers are not very satisfied with print books, they are more interested in books than print-book readers. E-book readers place a higher value on the usefulness and usability of e-books than readers of print books do, while print book readers do not perceive a need for e-books in their daily lives. Further, e-book readers collect information through print books, magazines, and the Internet more frequently than print book readers do. Finally, we offer some suggestions for e-book related corporations for promoting e-book usage.

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Bakusho (airing) is a conventional method of preserving Chinese books and has been widely recognized as a method for removing humidity and pests. We hypothesized that there is another important purpose for this method: to volatilize organic acids that deteriorate the paper in books by surrounding the books with free airflow. This study investigated that possibility. First, the deacidification effect of bakusho was investigated. Bamboo paper, paper-mulberry paper, coated paper, and uncoated printing paper were subjected to moist heat treatment at 80°C and 65% RH for up to 16 weeks to accelerate aging. Lightness, tensile strength, folding endurance, and pH decreased most remarkably with bamboo paper that was moist heat-treated in an open state; however, it decreased less than equivalent paper treated in a sealed state, suggesting that exposure to air prevented paper deterioration. Next, after dry heat treatment at 105°C for 72 hours, a mock-up book made of bamboo paper was subjected to bakusho. Bakusho increased pH with exposure time. A shorter cycle of repeated heat treatment and bakusho maintained a higher pH. Bakusho performed in flowing air seemed more effective at recovering pH; the bamboo paper recovered pH earlier than when bakusho was performed in stationary air. However, bakusho treatment did not recover folding endurance that decreased during dry heat treatment.

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