— What Does It Mean to Publish?

In Chapter 1, I suggested again and again that websites are publications. Many

web developers have difficulty accepting that proposition. Websites are made up

of so many components and many of those components would never be seen in

book, or flyer, or whatever else we might normally call a publication. The

problem is that we tend to define things by describing them at their core and not

on their fringes. It is true a book is a blocky thing with pages and words and

chapters and things like that. But an audio book is also a book, as is a MOBI

(Kindle) or ePub (NOOK) file. The purpose of this chapter is to examine some of

the ramifications of publishing. The chapter attempts to answer the question,

“What does it mean to publish?” in a way that makes it clear websites are

published documents.