RE: "Digital Industrial Complex"

["Nat Gustafson-Sundell" <n-gustafson-sundell@northwestern.edu>]

>From personal tests, it seems like only about 1 in 4 academic 
PDFs are tagged correctly to re-flow well.  Might just be my 
sample, but the library industry platforms seem to provide the 
best material - a recent OCLC publication in PDF flowed 
perfectly.  My impression is that Adobe is working on PDF -- 
we'll see how well they can adapt PDF, and if publishers do the 
work to make sure PDFs flow correctly, before another format 
challenges the universality of PDF.  The library listservs 
(NGC4LIB, LIS-E-RESOURCES, ERIL) tend to include discussions of 
mobile device related access issues in more depth if anyone is 
interested.

I started reading a Springer eBook recently in PDF and it flows 
perfectly, so there's one commercial publisher doing the work to 
make PDF work well. It would be interesting to know why they 
don't offer the content in EPUB or something else?  Can it be 
less expensive to add the tags to PDF than to convert the content 
to a separate format entirely?  Many of the EPUBS from Google 
Books I've seen are worse than the plain old PDFs they offer in 
terms of readability (because they seem to have relied on 
un-reviewed OCR to convert the text), although the EPUBS use less 
memory and the pages turn more quickly.

Seems like journal and book publishing are on different paths. 
University publishers of books have several cooperative 
initiatives cooking and I wouldn't be surprised to see academic 
books move to a massive shared platform.  Perhaps a side benefit 
will be the adoption of a universal format supported for ongoing 
development -- would be nice if something was both open and 
adapted to academic needs, which tend to be much greater than 
consumer needs (thus, for example, the massive, ongoing 
investments universities make in metadata creation ... leads back 
to why a semantic format like DocBook, adapted also to 
presentation or quickly convertible, must be the future).  I 
don't follow the news on university ebook publishing closely 
enough, but maybe will start now.  Journal publication seems to 
be a patchwork without a trend.


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph Esposito
Sent: Friday, January 08, 2010 6:00 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: "Digital Industrial Complex"

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