Copyright and PDF

This is some copy from Acrobat Services.com from last year. It needs an update. Copyright moved here as the 'creative commons' debate is getting stronger. Update soon, maybe July 04.

The technical possibility of PDF is as a digital equivalent of film. So far this has been effective within prepress but the implications for publishing are not yet clear.

Publishers could offer PDF in resolution suitable for printing but currently this rarely happens. One example is the Media coverage in the Sunday Express, usually about problems for other newspapers.

Through Google it is possible to find occasional pages from the Guardian, but there seems to be no clear policy about this. There is no obvious way to find PDF directly through the Guardian site.

Recently the Guardian offered limited editions of their covers as prints. They could have offered a PDF for download. As an experiment there is a PDF on the Acrobat Services.com site, just to demonstrate a possibility.

Illustration and photography could be sold in the same way as eBooks, through protected PDF. Alternatively there could be sponsorship or subscription. Adobe state that there are over 400 million Readers on the planet. The problems around PDF publishing are probably now about financing the work involved, given the productivity available.

Roy Greenslade wrote in the Guardian on January 13th about 2002 as 'an obvious bad year for newspaper sales'. You had to read almost to the end to find a reference to the web- 'The broadsheet audience may be the one moving fastest towards a screen-based culture'. This may explain why broadsheets have not benefited from tabloid circulation decline. PDF is somewhere between the web and print so may have a role here, possibly with various ways of funding.

By the way, Roy Greenslade refers to the two Express circulation rises and 'unfathomable circulation successes in foreign parts' . This is a rather general statement without any further detail. Probably more will become clear during the year.

The Express website seems to update the media PDF on a Tuesday. Top right corner.

Any comment is welcome

Will Pollard

will@exetreme.com