----- Original Message ----- From: "Jed Rothwell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]>; <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, July 23, 2007 12:47 AM Subject: Re: [Vo]:Re: Ed/Jed-Mitchell dispute (was Re: Requesting comments to this comment)
> Michel Jullian wrote: > >>Jed wrote: >> >>> There are none in dispute. We will accept any or all. >> >>You are hereby sentenced to add "in the form of his choice", because readers >>don't give a damn about the format in which they can access a previously >>unavailable resource . . . > > That is incorrect. Readers care a lot about format, and even more about > presentation quality. I know a lot more about this subject than you do. I > have distributed 800,000 previously unavailable papers about cold fusion, so > I know what readers want. Messy, low-quality papers at LENR-CANR attract very > few readers, whereas good papers are downloaded thousands of times a year. If > you upload fax-machine quality low-res scanned images of a paper, with > sideways, blacked-out overexposed figures and spelling mistakes, you will be > lucky if 5 people a week read it. Convert that same paper to a proper format > and if the content is any good, hundreds of people will download it every > week. > > I enumerated the reasons why I think this standard is best. If you see a > technical problem on that list of reasons, let's hear it. Otherwise, don't > tell me how to do my job. I have been publishing technical information for > decades, and I do not take kindly to amateur kvetching. Jed, your standard is indeed best for online publishing, this kvetching amateur doesn't deny this. But please clarify: is LENR.org a publishing house or a library? If it is an online library as advertised, I respectfully submit that its role is not to edit/improve the original work, especially not against the will of its author. As a professional technical information publisher but, as you will certainly agree, an amateur librarian, you could take example on Google Books, or Amazon Look/Search Inside, who provide high quality scanned images of the original works, see e.g. http://books.google.com/books?id=O5f3L2GfXBQC&hl=en ("Relativity: the special and the general theory" By Albert Einstein) and try the search function, you'll see it is quite usable. Would you agree to a searchable image pdf format of this kind of quality? Would Mitchell? Of course you realize that apart from its technical merits (quality/fidelity/searchability), this format has the additional advantage of being a neutral ground where you and Mitchell could meet without any of you "winning" or "losing" this regrettable dispute. Just my 2 cents Michel
