Electronic publications are increasingly replacing physical media but to date standards have evolved to mimic these physical media. Accordingly it is beneficial to provide electronic publication software systems and/or software applications to enable new paradigms that provide consumers, authors, publishers, retailers, and others with new models for releasing digital content from editorial and authorship viewpoints; new models for providing digital rights management with licensing, re-assignable rights and the ability to issue sub-rights or issue partial licenses with predetermined validity; new models for publishers to release revised editions, errata, new additions, etc; engaging social network type collaborative behavior within work and private environments with associated content (annotations) to the original release content; and supporting discussion and information dissemination within a wide variety of environments from education to business to book clubs etc. The invention also supports distributing electronic content with fingerprinting allowing unique identification of sources of non-authorised content.