Druanne Martin, OverDrive's Director of publishing services elaborates:

""With Jamaica and Cleveland, Ohio sharing same time zone (EST), we have our US and Jamaican production teams in sync. Jamaica provides a beautiful and warm climate, literally, for us to build long-term partnerships and to invite our publishing and content clients to come and visit their books in production".

The Jamaican Minister of Industry, Commerce and Technology, Hon. Phillip Paulwell reciprocates:

"We are proud that OverDrive has selected Jamaica to extend its leadership in eBook technology. OverDrive is benefiting from investments Jamaica has made in developing needed infrastructure for IT companies to locate and build skilled workforces here."

There is nothing new in outsourcing back office work (insurance claims processing, air ticket reservations, medical records maintenance) to third world countries, such as (the notable example) India. Research and Development is routinely farmed out to aspiring first world countries such as Israel and Ireland. But OverDrive's Jamaican facility is an example of something more sophisticated and more durable. Western firms are discovering immense pools of skills, talent, innovation, and top notch scientific and other education often offered even by poorest of nations. These multinationals entrust locals now with more than keyboarding and responding to customer queries using fake names. The Jamaican venture is a business partnership. In a way, it is a topsy-turvy world. Digital animation is produced in India and consumed in States. The low compensation of scientists attracts technology and R&D arms of likes of General Electric to Asia and Intel to Israel. In other words, there are budding signs of a reversing brain drain - from West to East.

E-publishing is at forefront of software engineering, e-consumerism, intellectual property technologies, payment systems, conversion applications, mobile Internet, and, basically, every important trend in network and computing and digital content. Its migration to warmer and cheaper climates may be inevitable. OverDrive sounds happy enough.

Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He is a columnist for Central Europe Review, United Press International (UPI) and eBookWeb and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com

There is no doubting that finally e-books will surpass print books as a medium and offer numerous options: hyperlinks within e-book and without it - to web content, reference works, etc., embedded instant shopping and ordering links, divergent, user-interactive, decision driven plotlines, interaction with other e-books (using Bluetooth or another wireless standard), collaborative authoring, gaming and community activities, automatically or periodically updated content, ,multimedia capabilities, database, Favourites and History Maintenance (records of reading habits, shopping habits, interaction with other readers, plot related decisions and much more), automatic and embedded audio conversion and translation capabilities, full wireless piconetworking and scatternetworking capabilities and more.

The same textual content will be available in future in various media. Ostensibly, consumers should gravitate to feature-rich and much cheaper e-book. But they won't - because medium is as important as text message. It is not enough to own same content, or to gain access to same message. Ownership of right medium does count. Print books offer connectivity within an historical context (tradition). E-books are cold and impersonal, alienated and detached. The printed word offers permanence. Digital text is ephemeral (as anyone whose writings perished in recent dot.com bloodbath or Deja takeover by Google can attest). Printed volumes are a whole sensorium, a sensual experience - olfactory and tactile and visual. E-books are one dimensional in comparison. These are differences that cannot be overcome, not even with advent of digital "ink" on digital "paper". They will keep print book alive and publishers' revenues flowing.

People buy printed matter not merely because of its content. If this were true e-books will have won day. Print books are a packaged experience, substance of life. People buy medium as often and as much as they buy message it encapsulates. It is impossible to compete with this mistique. Safe in this knowledge, publishers should let go and impose on e-books "encryption" and "protection" levels as rigorous as they do on their print books. The latter are here to stay alongside former. With proper pricing and a modicum of trust, e-books may even end up promoting old and trusted print versions.

Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He is a columnist for Central Europe Review, United Press International (UPI) and eBookWeb and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com