Publications going Digital

This post has to do with all of my journal articles, books and other writings going digital. It relates to Korea's information society only in that this transition has occurred while I've been working for the Fulbright Commission here in Seoul.

Last week I walked across the street to DHL with new copies of two of my books, Television's Window on the World and The Telecommunications Revolution in Korea. Following the explicit instructions provided on the website of the Google Books Partner program, I shipped them via DHL to Google in California. I now expect that they will be available to read, to anyone in the world with an internet connection, within a matter of weeks. You see, the publishers of the books, Greenwood Press and Oxford University Press, have reverted the copyright to me as author. That gives me the freedom to join the Google Books Partner program and to make the books 100% browseable via the web.

I'm delighted with this development. These two books, in particular, are ones that I want to make available to everyone, including people from developing countries. The first book was an outgrowth of my doctoral dissertation at Stanford, which I completed in 1978, and the book was published in 1984. The second came after two years of research in Korea during the early 1990s with financial support from Dacom Corporation and the cooperation of a multitude of Korean colleagues. Both of the books were influenced tremendously by my doctoral training at Stanford from 1974-1978. While I was at Stanford, it was a leading center for research and training on the role of communication in development, along with the obvious fact that Silicon Valley developed next door, owing to the influence of Stanford.

When I was in graduate school, South Korea was widely acknowledged to be a "developing country." Today, it is one of the world's advanced economies, in large part because of (1) education and (2) the IT revolution that it so enthusiastically embraced.

I've also placed digital copies (PDF) of two of my journal articles on my personal website. Given the current developments in Iran and the influence of the internet on politics in Korea, these may be of interest to some of you. My intent is to place publicly available copies of all my publications on the internet as soon as is practical. I'd welcome comments from any of you that find these publications of interest.