ISPUB.COM The Internet Journal of Medical Informatics Volume 2 Number 2 1 of 9 Perception of Authors in e-Publishing N Shiratuddin, Z Othman, K Ahmad, S Hassan Citation N Shiratuddin, Z Othman, K Ahmad, S Hassan. Perception of Authors in e-Publishing. The Internet Journal of Medical Informatics. 2005 Volume 2 Number 2. Abstract Electronic and printed publication, have their own strengths value. Both formats are required for greater information dispersal. In this digital economy era, Internet becomes popular as a medium to market and share information. Hence, this paper describes the model for publishing and marketing Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) ePublication. A publishing model, which consists of eleven stages, was followed to ensure quality publication. This project was confined to educational environment and a virtual centre called Electronic Information Centre (eInfoC) was developed to collaborate with an independent electronic publisher (eloka.com). The objective of this paper is to report authors' perception on models developed and several issues about satisfaction. At lastly, the findings show that the e-Publishing model that was suggested in this project was well accepted by 80% of the authors. All these results seem to indicate that eBooks do have a positive future in higher educational environment. INTRODUCTION One of the major tasks carried by academicians is to write and publish the works. As one of the higher education institutions, Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) also publishes books, research reports, journals, modules and other material for academic purposes. The existing practice is to publish in printed and bound forms for several years. The existing academic publications in UUM are in printed and bound forms, which pose some disadvantages (Norshuhada et al., 2003a). In addition, the publications have not been widely promoted or marketed and as a result their accessibility has been very limited. Electronic Information Centre (eInfoC) has been proposed to overcome the limitations in publishing UUM's owned publications. eInfoC is a virtual centre that collaborates with eloka.com, the first Malaysian electronic publisher. Besides publishing the electronic content, eInfoC is also selling and marketing them. The electronic contents that are published and marketed are electronic books (eBooks), electronic journals (eJournals), electronic research reports (eResearch- reports), and electronic lecture modules (eLecture-modules). The processes of publishing and marketing the materials electronically are helped by eloka.com which acts as a ePublisher. Furthermore, to gathered more knowledge, information must be online and can be reach anytime. The advantages of electronic publishing was describe by Powell and Loebbecke (1999), (Norshuhada et al., 2003,b,c) and Collins, J (2005). Bonime and Pohlman (1998); Ralins (1991) and Roa (2004) also discusses the benefit of eBooks. In this paper the existing traditional publication process are being discussed. Next, the current of e-Publishing process is described and followed by proposed of e-Publishing process. This brings us to explain about the author perception on models developed and issues emerged. For this purpose, a number of hypotheses were formulated: H1: The proposed e-Publishing model well 1. accepted by more than 60% of the authors; H2: More than 60% of the authors are interested to 2. publish electronically; H3: More than 60% of the authors are likely to sell 3. their work in electronic format; H4: More than 60% of the authors are more 4. satisfied with e-Publishing than traditional publishing. The final part of this paper discusses our findings and then concludes what we have accomplished so far. TRADITIONAL PUBLICATION MODEL In the traditional publishing model, the publishing schedule is directly linked to the schedule controlling the editorial process. There is a single schedule to manage the title from commissioning to final publishing. From a production perspective the work is handled in large units, complete