PRESS

Feeding off a PDF’s lifeforce

It’s not hard to see the advantages that browser-based opinion has over downloadable opinion; just go to a well-disciplined forum, perhaps with a tight-knit base of passionate frequent posters, and you can get not only all the latest news, updated by the minute, but coverage from dozens of different viewpoints, each one having the potential – just like additional external news that might surface during the discussion – to influence the others and frequently evolve the discussion.

In contrast, with a PDF you run the risk of getting outdated news in something that’s released once every few months, containing coverage from half a dozen people about much less material, thus potentially dissuading those who don’t care about the topics covered by said material. No-one likes specialist cliques, and it can be a bit dispiriting when you announce a new issue and wonder how many people have actually remembered that you exist.

For clarification, I’m talking about pre-Disposable endeavours here – since the webby side of DM is still under internal discussion it’s not open for comparison here – I once spent time writing for a PDF ‘zine where I churned out dozens of reviews before I saw the finished PDF; by the time Issue 1 was released I probably had enough content for issues 2-4. Meanwhile, nearly every online thing I’ve helped out with has been wonderfully efficient; since the production time is a lot quicker, there’s a lot less pressure to get things right. PDFs can take forever to make in terms of getting the layouts right, and getting enough material to fill the kind of page counts that don’t exist on blogs and HTML ‘zines is a nuisance that shouldn’t – and doesn’t – have to be tolerated. Web sites have a lot less boundaries, and so it’s important to make the most of the opportunities this presents, or else you might as well stick to your unwieldy, arcane PDFs.

qazimod