Re: "Digital Industrial Complex"

[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