The E-book project started with help from the DLF of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in the beginning of 2014. The goal of this project is to regularly publish a digital journal of the East Asian Art Section of the University of Zurich. The first digital volume will present a selection of early Japanese woodblock prints from an ongoing survey project. This survey worked on cataloging several hundred important Japanese prints from a private collection. Giving projects like these an easy opportunity to publish their results is one of the important aims of the E-book project. Other contents that are planned to be published in the form of an E-Book are outstanding master theses from the last years.

The main task in creating E-books lies in converting content into the epub format. This format uses the xhtml language which is similar to the standard html language used when creating webpages. The display options that can be changed by the reader to his liking demand a rather flexible definition of the layout. Therefore a lot of work has to be put into the adjustment of the content to the various E-book readers that exist.

The first number “Early Masters of Woodblock Printing: Selection from the R. Collection, Part I” contains a catalogue of thirty woodblock prints from early ukiyo-e artists like Hishikawa Moronobu, Ishikawa Toyonobu, Nishikawa Sukenobu, Torii Kiyomasu II and especially Okumura Masanobu. The E-book is in the final stage of editing and will be published in May 2015.