E-publication

[Florin Iorganda - Upwelling]

Hi,

Quick question ref. online publications. Most of the time we put pdfs for download, and some people put the flipping book type of on-line version. 

About this format, I remember I read some time ago about them, and there were some advices not to publish the classical A4 pdf because it would be too much info and nobody would follow - I cannot find that link anymore. 

Do you have experience with the flipping pages format? Any feed-back on how useful they are? Are they really looked at? 

Thank you,

Florin

[Laurmaa, Timo]

Hi Florin,

 

You may be remembering Jakob Nielsen’s warnings against PDF from ten years ago: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/pdf-unfit-for-human-consumption/

 

Here at the BIS (www.bis.org), we, too, have published thousands of PDFs as “online” publications over the last 17 years. PDF was simply the most cost effective way to publish online something that the authors (and their authoring tools) see as an A4 print-lookalike product. We did look at the flipping book approach many years ago but were not convinced.

 

Now that the mobile display sizes make A4-size PDFs increasingly unfriendly to read, the flipping book seems to offer little towards better readability.

 

Some of our authors are already preparing mentally to the painful transition from A4 thinking towards HTML5. They will need to forget references to page numbers (because pages no longer exist), end-of-page footnotes (again, no pages), the luxury of 21cm for wide tables or for multiple parallel charts. But on the other hand, they will start benefitting from footnotes as pop-ups with unlimited length, dynamic tables with interactivity and instead of just three parallel charts into 21cm, unlimited “swipable” charts. This transition will not happen overnight, but the end of PDF’s life cycle and online-A4 is closer than ever.

 

(see for example http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1312a.htm vs http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1312a.pdf )

 

Regards

Timo

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