Comments on: Retrofitting Scholarly Communications

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:07:42 +0000

I don’t know if there’s enough of a market by itself–you have to sell lots and lots of a device to bring the cost of manufacturing down to a reasonable level (which is why the iPhone costs $99 and the Kindle costs $300 plus). But I’d be willing to bet there will be a more general market for ruggedized devices as these sorts of things catch on, and perhaps scientists (and cooks) can get what they need in combination with other industries.

I’m still strongly of the opinion that stand-alone e-readers are a niche product at best, but ruggedized tablets or phones or, given the way most kids treat things, gameboys make a lot of sense.

By: Christina Pikas

Christina Pikas — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 02:53:03 +0000

@David – this is the reason I hand copy recipes instead of taking my laptop or iphone into the kitchen (no working printer in the house, alas). Some refrigerators come with displays and there are specialty devices that are more “rugged” for the kitchen. Do you think there’s a market for a rugged ereader for lab use for protocols?

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:11:41 +0000

One thing to think about is the environment in which the material is going to be used. As part of a science publishing house, much of what we publish are lab manuals and science protocols. These are essentially cookbook-type instructions for various lab techniques. Would you really want to keep your expensive and delicate e-book reader on the lab bench next to you while working with caustic chemicals, radioactive/carcinogenic substances and large quantities of potentially spillable liquids?

Most people print out the article or run off a Xerox copy of the pages from the manual they’re going to use rather than risk this sort of destruction/contamination in the laboratory environment, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. Besides, it’s hard to work a touchscreen while you’re wearing gloves.

By: Brandon A Nordin

Brandon A Nordin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:11:52 +0000

Horses for courses?
Digital delivery/local print works well for certain document types (individual articles from scholarly journals, conference proceedings or specific documents from archival files) but no one surely wants to print and read book length works as an unbound stack of laser printed pages…unless they absolutely have to. In the end too, routine printing on desktop lasers and (God forbid) inkjets of most book length works is vastly more expensive given cost of consumables. It’s here that I expect the ereader to excel, especially as it evolves from today’s near-prototype models with improved packaging and technology.

Shorter composite works are where this model excels. At the American Chemical Society, publisher of 36 STM Journals, our audience will download something on the order of 60 million + articles this year – many in PDF format which will be locally printed for individual use. This distribution model has not just essentially replaced traditional journal distribution, but vastly extended the global reach and usage of these peer reviewed materials from a decade ago. The instant gratification of 24/7 access and instant retreival is disintermediating the library from this content pathway (except as funder) and increasing the relationship between enduser, author, and publisher.

Hey Joe: Brady sure seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it?

By: Kaveh

Kaveh — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:06:33 +0000

All publishers should create ePub and all eBook readers should render ePub. PDFs could be automatically generated from the ePub. We are small company and we are writing an ePub reader for iPhone. It’ working nicely, including complex math. Surely the bigger companies should do even better.

By: materialsdave

materialsdave — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:56:56 +0000

I like your “Web 0.5″ analogy–I’ve always thought of online publishing of PDFs as a “digital photocopier”.

We’re running a poll over at http://MaterialsViews.com on how people read papers today. Not unsurprisingly, printing out PDFs is in the lead, but a significant minority are reading PDF files on screen.

I’m looking forward to more widespread adoption of ebook-type readers in the academic community, and what we’ll then be able to do with functionalized, connected papers.

By: ePub Gaining Acceptance @ e-Book Reader News

ePub Gaining Acceptance @ e-Book Reader News — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:47:05 +0000

[...] announcement that it will soon only sell ebooks in ePub. Joseph Esposito has an excellent post at the Scholarly Kitchen on what the growing acceptance of ePub is going to mean to academic publishers. Google’s [...]