On 10/7/05, Carl Hartung
I could see this with a first edition, or something. But somehow, I think the time and expense and investment made in producing hard copy books should be limited to those you'd expect would be worth owning decades or even centuries from now. At this stage of the game, with everything going digital, big, heavy "consumable" ("disposable"?) books are now almost offensive to me they are so wasteful.
Who knows? Maybe I've just worked myself up into a lather over nothing... maybe I should chill out, throw caution to the wind and order a couple of extra phone books or something. Maybe that would make me "fit in" better...
I agree completely ... sending the printed material to everyone is just wastage. The less paper the better. Having said that, I am still not as comfortable with online materials as printed. But I can print what I must have. I wonder whether instead of PDF, it might make more sense to send the docs in a portable "wiki" format, such that we could update, make notes, add to at will? I personally would find that much nicer ... PDF is a pain, IMO. Wiki utilizing the search capabilities of the browser, and having the ability to edit the material for my own purposes ... now that would be nice! here is one possible approach: http://www.tiddlywiki.com/ from the site: Welcome to TiddlyWiki, an experimental MicroContent WikiWikiWeb built by JeremyRuston. It's written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to run on any modern browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create personal SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to any WebServer, sent by email or kept on a USB thumb drive to make a WikiOnAStick. This is revision 1.2.35 of TiddlyWiki, and is published under an OpenSourceLicense.