Re: "Digital Industrial Complex"

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

The PDF is the millstone around the neck of scholarly
communications today.  But it will drag its proponents under the
water soon, and other formats will thrive.

I repeat a core thesis:  the future of scholarly communications
is going to be built on the infrastructure of consumer
publishing.  This is because in a networked world, the number of
nodes connected to a network matter (Metcalfe's Law), and the
consumer market has the big numbers.  Scholarly needs will be
layered on top of consumer infrastructure.  Rather than ask, What
kind of technology should we bring to the platforms, technical
and cultural, of an academic institution?--we should be asking,
How do we meaningfully layer academic needs and interests onto
the platforms of the consumer market, such things as Google, the
iPhone, and Twitter?  And, good lord, how we need those academic
layers:  a day spent researching new consumer media makes one
wonder if anyone out there except the engineers have half a
brain.

Take a look at the beta site for Google Editions.  Now imagine a
world with a billion smartphones, all of which display text
through a browser.  Or go the next step and purchase a Droid at
Verizon and then go to the Google Editions beta site.  Now ask
yourself what you are going to do with all those PDFs whose text
will not reflow to fit a mobile reading device.  Next question:
Since a Droid is clearly inadequate for many aspects of scholarly
communications, how do we supplement the Droid (layering on the
infrastructure) to meet academic requirements?

I addressed some parts of this in "Retrofitting Scholarly
Communications":  http://j.mp/guC35.

Joe Esposito

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 11:59 PM, Ahmed Hindawi
<ahmed.hindawi@hindawi.com> wrote:

> It is amazing that after all these years, we still have PDF as
> strong as it is now. PDF is a digital print format (I cannot
> imagine many sentences where the two words digital and print
> are used as adjectives at the same time). PDF is only slightly
> better than scanned images of book pages! I asked the speakers
> of a scholarly publishing conference session I was recently
> attending to speculate about when we are going to do away with
> pre-paginated digital files and make a real switch to a digital
> format for distribution of digital publications such as ePUB.
> Their answer was basically "not any time soon," with one
> speaker mentioning that one of their clients was advertising
> their new scholarly journal as being "full citable" because it
> has page numbers!
>
> ePUB is an excellent format for distribution of digital
> publications, although not being perfect itself and I hope the
> IDPF will continue to develop it. However, I don't think ePUB
> is a proper archival format and I would advise any publisher to
> markup their digital publications using an appropriate DTD.
> ePUB is almost purely presentational which is not how you want
> to markup any digital document on the
> editorial/production/archival side. The NLM DTD does a proper
> job for journal articles while DocBook is the popular choice
> for books. The incremental cost of coding a book in DocBook
> rather than ePUB and using a conversion tool to generate ePUB
> is not that high, but the publishers should be able to know
> what to ask their vendors to do or to deliver.
>
> Ahmed Hindawi
>
> On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 3:08 AM, Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dan D'Agostino blogged at TeleRead:
>>
>> http://bit.ly/4BAFw9
>>
>> He coins the phrase "digital industrial complex," which means he
>> can take the afternoon off. The topic is unread collections of
>> ebooks.
>>
>> Joe Esposito