Elsewhere (liblicense-l), you have said that “every time I see a PDF I reach for my revolver” (I’m pretty sure you did not intend for this particular allusion to be analyzed very closely). Clearly for you the PDF file has become synecdochic for a laggard and risk-averse scholarly publishing community not fully embracing the latest online technology.

This is really your argument here and not the validity of measuring usage with PDF downloads, which is a perfectly reasonable and legitimate practice in most cases, as Doug LaFrenier rightly points out. Although you imply it, I don’t know anyone who argues that downloads measure quality. COUNTER certainly doesn’t.

I will grant you the premise that a lot of STM publishers, having made the transition online, are still bound to the print paradigm in many ways. The PDF file can, but doesn’t necessarily, represent this state of affairs–and may very well, as you say, become “tomorrow’s atavism.” (No demise, however, has ever been more exaggerated than that of print in academic publishing.) But the PDF file is still a good representation of the vast majority of articles and still has value for those who do not want to read articles online (there are legions of these) or spend $350 for a Kindle (there are legions of these, too).

And in a great many cases, as you well know, PDFs are a complement to the interactive, full-text XML/HTML versions. So even if we’re talking about printing PDFs, it’s not always a case of either/or: offline viewing or “integrated digital world.” The two things can and do co-exist very nicely, thank you. More important, they serve users in different ways, as others here have noted.

Finally, you are probably overestimating the desire and the willingness of authors (outside the peer review system where they are credited) to annotate or comment on what they read online (this can be done in a PDF, of course) for the benefit of their fellow readers and researchers. The principles that drive Web 2.0 continue to be misapplied to scholarly publishing. But that’s another blog.”

As a student on an online Master’s course, I’m resigned to wrestling with “surrogate A4″ – including the worst type of all, text-less TIFFs embedded in PDF. I rejoice when I do find scholarly resources that use the web intelligently – blog-wise, wiki-wise. The InnovateOnline journal is one of my current benchmarks for doing this kind of thing well: I can even easily read the HTML-formatted articles on my mobile.

As developers of repository-class systems, though, PDFs are still our bread-and-butter, from the users’ POV: but if we stand our ground and put our case for better ways the tide might eventually turn.

Most of my online reading is more like skimming. Before I go to a graduate seminar, however, I print off articles, scribble on them, underline, circle, write notes (and sometimes expletives) in the margins.

Not just old graduate students like me do this — 20-something grads do it as well.

Instead of starting into our laptops in class, we look and engage with each other. While this type of interaction with the text may not be captured in statistics, this human-to-human type of interaction is a much more valuable form of pedagogy than a human-to-machine interaction.

- Perfectly true from what I experienced. I talked about author service as an important aspect of online publishing end of 2007 on an ALPSP seminar – as a theory at that time. Just a few months later it became evidence.

During the development of the de Gruyter eBooks platform editorial colleagues started occasionally dropping by my office with authors (humanities and linguistics!). Asking for a three minute presentation of how books would be presented in future on our platform.

Authors were absolutely keen on having their books published with the kind of interactive functionality that initially had been developed for electronic journals. And colleagues told me later that demonstrating our eBooks functionality in a beta version helped a lot winning those publication projects.

best – Joachim