Re: "Digital Industrial Complex"

[Pippa Smart <pippa.smart@googlemail.com>]

True, but then the entire structure of the standard academic 
article is somewhat archaic - providing a one-level discussion of 
the topic (IMRAD format), with - if the user is lucky - a 
background data set or perhaps an additional interactive image.

XML is a great format for multiple re-purposing, but it is also 
(relatively)expensive to create (both from new and from old 
content), and prone to inaccurate tagging (just because it parses 
doesn't mean that the items are correctly tagged - e.g. names 
where there are confusions over family and personal names).

I wonder if developments in the ability to scour PDF (or other 
display-type formats) to identify relevant data will raise the 
relevance of such formats and decrease the need for 
expensive-to-create-and-update formats such as XML ? I'd be 
interested to hear the views of people more involved than I in 
the technical development area. Pippa

*****
Pippa Smart
Research Communication and Publishing Consultant
PSP Consulting
email: pippa.smart@gmail.com
Web: www.pspconsulting.org

2010/1/8 Ahmed Hindawi <ahmed.hindawi@hindawi.com>:

> 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. =A0The topic is unread collections of
>> ebooks.
>>
>> Joe Esposito