The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report is out. PDF is free, but...
The thing that caught my eye about the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report is that you can buy it as a printed book (much like the The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States Report, A.K.A. the 9/11 Commission Report), and as a free PDF (again, like the 9/11 Commission Report), but not in any other format. So why use PDFs and no other format, or use an open format to start with?
To start with: PDFs are not an open format. Sure, almost every platform can open them, but the format is still legally closed. It's also a foramt that is designed to emulate the printed page, and as such, it doesn't work too well on e-readers because it's not designed to reflow text, or re-manage page breaks. As such, lines tend to be broken and pages are often half-full. Consider these examples from a PDF constructed from a collection of Wikipedia articles:
You'll notice there are odd line breaks, captions for photos appearing above the photo instead of below it, paragraph line spacing changes, and occasionally you'll see elements from the header (like page number and title) among the text. This all makes the document much harder to read, and less efficient, as you need to change pages more frequently, which is slower with a PDF than a reflow-friendly document, since the reader needs to figure out what page you're looking at next, deconstruct the page's elements, try and figure out if it can eliminate line breaks, where are paragraph breaks supposed to be, and in what order should everything be? This turns a half-second e-Ink screen refresh into a 1-5 second wait for the device to process things.
Now look at a comparison to a reflow-freindly format.
This is an ePub format of Lenin, though it is an older copy than the one currently available for downloading. You'll notice that even on pages where there are bulleted lists, and at three levels of "zoom," the contents are always intact. This creates a much better reading experience.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report is available as a free PDF (in two flavors), a printed book (from several stores, and at a variety of prices, ranging from $30 to $10), and a Kindle book (interestingly enough, the only eReader on the market that could not originally handle PDFs natively; also the Kindle version is more expensive than the print version on Amazon).
This has me wondering: why isn't the report available in more accessible versions, why aren't they free (like the PDF, and why don't other e-book stores have the report? Not everyone knows the PDF is available for free, or how to load PDFs into their Sony Reader, Kobo, Cruz, Libre, Literati, Novel, Nook, or that even the Kindle can read PDFs. Isn't that the reason we have laws governing required instances of Braille, audible crosswalk buttons, and services for the Deaf? Granted, PDFs have accessibility extensions to make things like screen readers handle them better (sometimes even better than websites!), but doesn't it also mean that the government should provide its documents in non-proprietary formats? Or at least commercial formats that are open standards, or other non-patent-encumbered formats? Or at least require that the Government use accessibility tools in their PDFs?
Neither the FCIC's version, or the Government Printing Office's version of the PDF contained even the simplest Accessibility tools, like tagging, language specification, or image alternate text (though the GPO version is at least digitally certified).
So what's up? Does the government no longer care about these kinds of things? Is it too lazy? Does it really expect that if people want to read this report in a format other than a PDF (or if they're blind and they don't want to pay for a braille version and download the free version, as is the privlege of us sighted people) that they will pay for Adobe Acrobat and convert it to a more friendly format (like HTML or RTF), and/or run Adobe's not-entirely-reliable auto-tagger, which sometimes fails completely? It's also worth noting that because the GPO's version is Digitally Certified, you cannot perform some actions on it, such as adding tags for accessibility.
The FCIC is just one example of this. The FCC produces all its documents as PDFs or Word Documents. While this is a little better, it's still only using proprietary document formats. So what's up government? Does accessiblity only apply to printed materials? Should people who don't want to use government contracted software and devices be forced to pay private industry for what they could otherwise get from you for free? I'm not advocating socialism here, I have no problem with private industry, or paying for things. My problem is that if the government is going to make something available for free, it should be available to all citizens for free, not just those who have sight, or are using computers that can read files that their contractors have deigned good enough for their attention. I understand the logic of paying for the Kindle version, since Amazon produced that version of the report, just like I understand Borders and Barnes and Noble charging for the print versions. That all costs money, and the companies performing the work deserve to be paid for that. But the PDF is something they're making availble for free, and I beleive their standards on accessibility in the print world should apply to their digital documents.
Update:
I was able to export the PDF to EPS files, which I need to now recombine into a single file. Though I am attempting to break it up into seven 100 page pieces in order to make it easier for my laptop to handle it.
