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EG8 Publishes Report In Noninteractive, Nonquotable Format
pbahra writes "You could not come up with a better illustration of the clash of cultures that was the eG8 than the post-forum report. Was the output of the two-day gathering in Paris published on a website so people could link to it? Or perhaps a blog so that people could comment on it? Or even a wiki, so the people who attended could contribute and correct mistakes? No it wasn't. The report is a book. Or rather it is an eBook. Except it isn't even an eBook, in the sense of something that you can read on your Kindle or other eBook reader. It's actually a Flash-based page turner, the sort of thing that was all the rage five years ago. It is a digital facsimile of a book. It is the triumph of design over access. Being Flash, you can't even cut and paste what is in the file. And being Flash it gives complete and total control to the authors. As a user all you get to do is to read it, in exactly the way the authors want you to. It looks good, but you can't do anything with it, except what the authors tell you to do. Metaphor anyone?"
It looks good, but you can't do anything with it ...
... except do a screen-capture and bitmap-to-pdf conversion and republish.
You could always click on the 'Download' button and save as a PDF document - then you can do as you want with it.
Admittedly a blog or wiki would, perhaps, be nicer to use.
Actually, on top of the flash, there is a picture of a floppy disk (who remembers those?). Clicking that lets you save the contents as a pdf, but you still need the flash plugin to "download" it.
Well, you could just reverse-engineer the container. That thing is powerful and with a moderately-skilled person, it's possible to copy raw text out of the demo instead of just reading it.
You could have included a link to the actual book in question...
http://www.eg8forum.com/ebook/
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
According to the webpage of the vendor "all text is available in both flash and HTML formats" so that search engines can find it. Spoofing your browser ID to the googlebot might get you something of greater use.
Also, according to the sourcecode of the page, it does a check for mobile browsers and just drops the PDF directly on them, without trying flash(because, after all, dubiously-reflowable PDFs are far superior to HTML on tiny little screens. Spoofing a mobile browser ID should net you the PDF without the flash, in any case.
So I downloaded it, and then ran pdftotext on it. http://pastebin.com/gXqKceEZ No story here. Just a rant from Ben Rooney. He'll feel like an idiot when he realizes its just a PDF.
Here is the dastardly flash file in question. Pretty straightforward? Rather nice, actually? Scrolling and enlarging is functional and intuitive? My machine is ancient, yet it handled things quite well. Naturally, it won't cross the walled garden of Apple, but I suppose we all pay our little prices for our little vices.
If you are using NoScript, you get a list of HTML files, and no pictures.
Here is the PDF file. You can perform a copy and paste with no trouble? And if you have an impairment that prevents you from reading it, the file is accessible to your text-to-speech software.
The actual text of the files in question seems rather bland, really? There's nothing earth-shattering or unexpected, since the real meat & potatoes of each presentation was verbal, not written.
This post seems much ado about nothing.
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Disregard my rant. I didn't RTFA. The report is available in searchable, highlightable PDF right on the page. PDF isn't the perfect option but on my comp it is only one command away from plaintext.
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