Motives
Some pushback from Blackmask Online about my PDF series.
“Gotta wonder about the original author’s motives,” says Blackmask. Naw. No need to wonder at all. Just ask. I don’t bite. Not even on Halloween.
For the record, I’ve nothing much against Adobe that I haven’t already laid out for all to see. They irk me, sure, but no more than Microsoft, and no more (to be brutally honest) than the latter days of the Open eBook Forum. (Oh, yeah, am I irked with some of those people.)
My axes to grind with PDF itself (as opposed to with Adobe) are also pretty clearly laid out in my first post. PDF’s accessibility rots. PDF’s futureproofing rots. PDF’s editability rots. All of these things are very, very bad for e-text in the medium-to-long term.
And one thing I didn’t mention but should have: PDF itself—as opposed to PDF readers and writers—cannot realistically be further developed without Adobe’s consent. (I’d like to be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am. Counterarguments welcome.) It’s possible to avoid Adobe proprietary enhancements now, sure. What happens when they do something really cool, and they don’t put it in the open part of the PDF spec, and they don’t allow the open-sorcerers to emulate it?
Since only Adobe can develop and enhance PDF, if you stick with PDF, you are embracing a corpse. I don’t know when PDF will finally be mummified. I only know it will, and I hate the thought of losing all the texts in PDF, and all the effort that went into those texts. I am not at all sanguine, based on my own experience, that publishers are currently farsighted or tech-savvy enough to understand that they need to archive source files previous to a text’s incarnation as PDF.
See, I have no corporate affiliations. None. I don’t work in ebooks; I can’t for another, um, four and a half months. I don’t care who makes money off e-text; I don’t care who goes bust on it as long as they don’t splatter e-text itself with their demise. I don’t care who reads e-text, except that I do believe the more the merrier. I care about the text itself. Always have, always will. You think with my grad-school history I’m applying to info-science school as a lark?
A fair bit of scholarly work and a heck of a lot of experience have gone into text-preservation best practices. Work remains to be done, without question, but I don’t know a single knowledgeable soul claiming that PDF is a superior or even an acceptable electronic-text archival mechanism. I know lots of souls with lots of smarts and lots of experience making the case for markup.
And from my own experience and my own research, I believe them. Those are my motives. (Okay, I admit that my motive for the macabre metaphors throughout this post is simple jealousy of Mark and Bill and their slick Halloween-y color schemes.) What are Blackmask’s?