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First-rate PDF debate among TeleBloggers—and a K-12-helpful idea for the format, or at least apps using it
April 3, 2008 | 7:55 pm
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By David Rothman
If you haven’t already, check out the thoughtful debate among TeleBlog community members on the pros and cons of PDF—in the wake of a post quoting one of the format’s defenders. I myself am not a PDF fan but want people of all opinions to feel comfortable here.
Meanwhile, I’ll make a friendly suggestion for the pro-PDF folks; in fact, the same idea could also be used with the .epub standard if this capability isn’t there already. What if PDF offered wiki-type features, so you could change text, even within a DRMed files—while the software tracked the modifications and allowed an instant reversion to the original version, the publisher-blessed one? I know. Publishers want control over their material. But they would do well to listen closely to one of our regulars, Fictbot, who shares my passion for more usable e-book technology.
Ficbot’s complaint
In her gripe, Ficbot notes that she and most other teachers are “notorious for their love of tweaking, and PDF documents are very hard to edit. Sometimes you can copy the text (but you have to reformat it once you get it into the word processor) but sometimes you can’t. Huge pain. I often have to tweak things for my students’ needs. For example, the French program I use with them does not introduce the past tense until the third level, so with nearly all of my classes, I have to change the verb tenses before I print it out.
“What would be a five-second find and replace in a text editor off an open-source document is a much longer process when you’re working off of PDF.”
See why PDF e-books needs to be changeable by ordinary users, especially in K-12, just so the originals aren’t lost in the process and people know what’s going on? Needless to say, shared annotations would help as well—without reliance on Adobe servers.
Your own thoughts, please
Comments, anyone—on my suggestion and Ficbot’s complaint that inspired it? For other PDF issues, stick to the comment area of the earlier post. But for this particular one, the ability to make modifications in PDF files and have them tracked, do your discussion here. Thanks!
Detail: As I recall, John Terpstra, one of the endorsers of the OpenReader standard, was quite keen keen on version-tracking within a reader app. I’m hardly the first to come up with the idea, which of course builds on the existing wiki vision.
Related: Indiana University student’s hassles with PDF, plus defenses of PDF from Wowio designer Gerry Manacsa and an academic publications expert, as well as TeleBlog contributor Todd Jonz among others.
Image credit: CC-licensed photo from Extra Ketchup.
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Comments:
Hi David. Thanks for posting my comment. Just wanted to clarify one thing, before the debate continues, about ‘tweaking’ and how publishers mmay not ‘want’ me to edit their stuff: I am by no means talking about a violation of copyright here. Exceptions for education purposes under fair use notwithstanding, those of us in the primary school market anyway generally use things in such small pieces that even if we were not using it for school, our use would still be legal. I’ll give you an example, I downloaded a sample of a story off a website for teachers that sells larger books of such things. The idea is you can use the free one and see how it goes, and if you like it, you can buy more. So they are expecting you to print these out and distribute them—to your class, anyway. Fair enough. But by choosing PDF, it means any changes I need to make—and I am talking about small changes here, like changing the verb tenses—take ages, not just from a manual labour standpoint but fron an IT standpoint of time lost due to computer crashes. Remember, most schools don’t have state of the art machines here
My view (and I realize others may not share it) is that it’s mine, I bought it, and I should be allowed to do what I want with it, within legal parameters. I don’t like it when I try to use the file in a way that is legally permissable, and then I get stopped by DRM or by articifically imposed technical blocks such as forbidding copying, that violate my fair use rights to use the file in legal ways for my own purposes.
Totally agree with your right to edit–but it’ll help for people to know what’s happening, which my proposal would allow via tracking. Imagine Lynne Chaney, Dick’s novelist wife, rewriting 1984 without the readers knowing. At any rate, many thanks for raising the editing issue in a K-12 context—in keeping with a major mission of the TeleBlog. We want to keep writers, publishers and others connected with the needs of the Real World, especially K-12. Really appreciate your contributions and comments! – David
David, I think accessability is something people really need to think about as regards e-books, the same way ten years ago, everyone was saying the same thing to web designers—just because you CAN make it look pretty and fancy, doesn’t mean you should because half of your website viewers may be using ancient public library computers, that sort of thing. I imagine with Teleread, where your goal is maximum accessability, you would prefer the more open formats? Plain text is still the only universal one for me.
I don’t think any teacher I know will be editing 1984 to use with their classes
But it IS important for teachers to be able to work with the texts they use, and I think the ‘establishment’ has become so strident about ‘ownership’ of every tiny thing in terror that we will all be ‘pirates’ that they are losing sight of the larger needs of society to be able to cunduct themselves in a reasonable way with the stories and songs they are exposed to. I’ll give you an example, I do a song with my SK kids about planting some cabbages, and every verse they do it with a different body part. We followed along with a CD (which we bought from an educational company just for this purpose) and when we were done, I had the children write their own verses using body parts not mentioned in the song. Do you think the publishers of this CD should be coming after the 5-year-olds for not respecting the copyright of their song by *gasp* changing the words? Of course not. That would be completely absurd. But somehow, they seem to feel they can go after grown-ups for this very thing. Fair use is becoming a lost concept, I’m afraid 
Perhaps this is a separate argument than your PDF issue, but I do think that technical barriers which restrict things like DRM’d PDF files which can’t be pasted into a word processor or five-year-olds learning French by playing with a song they know are not a good thing, in general.