How things have changed during the last decade!

As the co-founder of the Internet portal historicum.net (www.historicum.net), the co-publisher of the online journals sehepunkte (www.sehepunkte.de), zeitenblicke (www.zeitenblicke.de), Francia (http://www.perspectivia.net/content/publikationen/francia) und lesepunkte (www.lesepunkte.de), which are now well established in the specialist community, the organiser of the publication platform perspectivia.net (www.perspectivia.net) and, last but not least, the initiator of the new website recensio.net (www.recensio.net), I have played an active part in the development of electronic publishing in the German-speaking countries in recent years as well as in the debate on open access. Things were far from easy at the outset. I can remember being invited to a conference as a young outside lecturer and greeted with the words: »Ah, here comes the database!« At that time, in the late 1990s, many people in the field had no idea of how quickly the ›new media‹ would change their personal and professional lives. While normality has returned to many areas in the meantime, there are still battles to be waged. The debate about open access, copyright and Google’s monopoly, for instance, is by no means over. In fact, this debate is merely a part of a fundamental process of social change which is calling the old familiar models of literary production and reception into question and replacing them with new ones. When I travel on the underground in Paris, I see more and more people using their iPad, iPod touch or other reading devices to read books and newspapers. The triumphant advance of e-books appears to be unstoppable. At the same time, libraries are taking on a different character. They are developing into ›social spaces‹ which are used more to meet and communicate with other people than to read books and specialist literature. Taking account of developments over the past ten years, I have divided my presentation today into three parts. A look back at the progress made by electronic publishing in the humanities since the dawn of the new millennium will be followed by an examination of the status quo. In the third part, finally, I will address a number of problems and look at the prospects offered by future developments