Some have asked for an online version of our books.
At first this seems attractive - I definitely have the skills and
knowledge for producing web content with 17 years experience lecturing
in Computer Science specialising in digital media and web programming.
However, when you examine the details it
soon proves to be impractical. As an example, lets examine our latest
book as I have considered this carefully and will do so for each book.
For South West Tasmania, edition 5, it has 224 colour pages. It takes 4
hours using a medium speed colour laser printer to print the entire
book - I know as
we have to print a copy (at the last day of production) of every page
for the printer to ensure they have the pages in the correct place. As
for size, the weight on ordinary paper is 1600gm (the published book is
around 430gm) and also the thickness of the pile of paper is 50mm high
as opposed to 13mm for a book - not attractive to put into a pack! Next
if you dont have a laser printer
and use an inkjet - well inkjets are even slower for printing and also
on most the ink runs when it gets wet. Basically no contest when you
look at the issue in detail as the printed book is lighter in weight
and when you consider total printing costs (printer purchase, paper
cost plus ink cartridges)
it is around the same price - there is no real cost saving unless
you can use someone elses printer! As for those who argue they will
just
print out the pages they want - well they can do what I do and just
tear out the pages they need - that is still lighter than a computer
printout and the ink wont run etc! Environmentally, the printed book
is better as well as it has much less paper waste, less impact as ink
is filled from large
bottles with no cartridges to dispose of etc, commercial offset
printing has less wastage per printed page than desktop printers.
Next lets look at the files sizes - most of those requesting an on-line
version seem to assume it is
not important. The compressed pdf files for South West Tasmania are
601M in size
(raw file sizes before compression are around 2G - 2000M!!). Now I dont
know about your internet connection but we are on ADSL and based on
some 20M files I have downloaded it would take around 16 hours to
download a file of that size. Some might be prepared to wait that long
but most would find download times like that impractical. The
alternative is to make the file sizes smaller - yes I could spend
around 5 days
re-processing all the original photographs (took 5 days to do for the
book) - you cant just downsize
tiff CMYK images (as required for offset printing) into RGB jpeg files
(JPEG is best for web transmission as file sizes are much smaller) -
the
conversion to RGB just does
not work as the images go very flat and lifeless - coversions from RGB
to CMYK work well but the revrese conversion is poor as 4 colours is
downsampled to 3 colours. This would decrease
the file size to roughly between 50M and 100M at a guess. While some
will say there are
plenty of tools to reformat the photos automatically, its not possible
to convert CMYK to RGB and get good results - try it yourself.
In reality I have
to return to the original images and scans (many are transparencies)
and repeat
all the processing steps - spotting out all dust and dirt,
straightening skylines by rotating and cropping then also cropping the
photos to fit the book space - you cant do any of those steps
automatically and I did not save the intermediate results (maybe next
time I should save them). Then each
image has to
be individually deleted and reinserted into the desktop publishing
program - as I
said around 5 days work. The end result, a smaller file
size probably practical for downloading. Of course the images could be
reduced in detail even further to
look fine on a screen but then they would look poor when printed and
I am not prepared to publish second rate quality. As for the maps, they
cannot be reduced in size and they take up around 20M on their own so
they are not insignificant in download times - these are not simple
maps with big blocks of colour and a few lines, the maps are covered in
details with hundreds of lines and other information plus they include
multiple (17) fonts to draw the objects and text.
Another possibility is to sell individual chapters on the web - yes
file sizes for each chapter might be feasible (average about 60M) but I
feel it is
important that all readers must read the introductory chapters
particularly the Preparation & Planning and Safety chapters (30M).
Having
seen many poorly equiped or unprepared walkers over the years it is
critical that the information in those sections is provided to all
readers. Even if those chapters were free, due to download times (about
40 minutes on ADSL) I
suspect very few would bother to download and read them so breaking the
book into small chapters for web sales is not necessarily a good idea.
After considering the above reasons, it is overall, not practical for
most at present so I am not putting in the hours to
make our guides available on-line until technology improves further.
Printed books still have a place - for references that can be used
exclusively
electronically such as a manuals, and help files, digital content only
is fine. However
if you
have to print the book out to use it, then commercially printed books
are both better for the environment and easier overall. For books with
lots of photographs and complicated
maps the web is
also simply not fast enough yet for data transmission. I will review
this policy as we
publish
each book and I am sure that at some stage the web will speed up and
perhaps compression techniques for pdf files will improve further
making on-line publication practical. Our first step will probably be
to publish some books on CD/DVD as file sizes there are unimportant but
as
there has been extremely few requests for books this way (none!), we
have not
yet created such a product - most forget it takes many hours of work to
create these products and there has to be sufficient demand. As it is,
the demand (sales) for walking guides is quite small - printed walking
books are only
just viable anyway and some of them dont make a profit.
