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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?"
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.
The first person to boast that they can read the report on their Xoom will Win The Thread, but probably lose the war.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Google tells me it is some sort of governmental meeting about the internet.
http://www.eg8forum.com/en/
Could the summary not have expended a sentence about this?
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.
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.