A serial that is OPEN ACCESS (the ponderous academic term for what you and I, the little people , would be content to simply call "free-to-read" magazines) can hardly afford to provide endless amounts of mailed out printed "offprints" of its longer "feature" articles when it has *little or no income -- so what is the best solution ?
(*Charging - rather than paying - an author to publish their article can only be justified in academia , where there is an expensive (because labour-intensive) process of peer-reviewing articles before they are published.)
Both authors and readers sometimes rather like having a printed out version of feature articles to carry about.
The quick and dirty PDF offprint is free to email worldwide and the end reader pays only for the computer paper and ink to print it out.
But as conventionally printed out on A4 or letter sized pages, a long feature article is a pain to read.
The endless pages of overly-wide lines of text confounding centuries of typography best practises and it still isn't really "printed" in the sense we think journals or books are printed.
I much prefer the fiction-bound *A5 variant (based upon four print pages roughly 8.5 inch tall by 5.5 inch wide on each single letter sized sheet) of the 19th century story paper or feuilleton.
Simply by folding the sheets of paper and re-arranging the page order ("imposing") allowed narrower columns of text reading correctly from the front cover to the back cover.
And : the friction of folded page on page holds it all together, much as conventional newspapers hang together without staple binding.
Pre-imposing the conventional PDF is easily done with cheap or free software (I like Cheap Impostor myself) and the end user needs simply to access the increasingly common office duplex computer printer to make up a little chapbook for the article in one go.
Or , do it at home in two stages on old fashioned simplex computer printers.
Presto --- Bob is your auntie's live-in lover ...
(*Truth be told , I really prefer A6 sized books myself - fits (hides) in any pocket, attractive to read , but until A5 computer paper is readily available I doubt many readers have access to the high quality blade paper cutters needed to make the idea do-able !)
Showing posts with label pdfs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pdfs. Show all posts
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...