I’m glad to know I’m not the only one worrying about this. Working in government, I wonder how much our pdfs are an expansive maginot line of a communication.
However, the _act_ of publishing a white paper is significant; and key passages can be crucial; even if most goes unread. This wouldn’t apply to a slide deck or a Twitter thread.
My instinct tells me this is all about notable activity. There should be other ways to get to that.
When I ran the publishing operation at OECD, we put a huge amount of effort into offering reports as web pages, embeddable pages (so others could include them on their websites and blogs), e-Pub (great for mobile devices) and, yes, PDFs. Given this choice, which format did readers prefer (as measured by downloads and visits)? PDFs by a ratio of huge to very little. Why? Because they are easy to store, print and share - plus the content you are discussing is on the same page as the file your colleague has got. However, I'm with you on novel outputs vs 'reports'. One of our big successes at OECD was the Better Life Index, an interactive tool to explore the question of how to measure the 'quality of life' (as opposed to the GDP 'quantity of life' approach.) As for the challenge of 'filing in a corner of the internet', I left the OECD to create Policy Commons, a tool that scours the corners of the internet to make think tank content easier to find and use. So far, we've assembled 3.2 million reports from 7,500 organizations into a searchable database that's already being used by around 40 major universities and policy institutions on a daily basis. Do check it out! Toby Green, Publisher, Policy Commons
I’m glad to know I’m not the only one worrying about this. Working in government, I wonder how much our pdfs are an expansive maginot line of a communication.
However, the _act_ of publishing a white paper is significant; and key passages can be crucial; even if most goes unread. This wouldn’t apply to a slide deck or a Twitter thread.
My instinct tells me this is all about notable activity. There should be other ways to get to that.
When I ran the publishing operation at OECD, we put a huge amount of effort into offering reports as web pages, embeddable pages (so others could include them on their websites and blogs), e-Pub (great for mobile devices) and, yes, PDFs. Given this choice, which format did readers prefer (as measured by downloads and visits)? PDFs by a ratio of huge to very little. Why? Because they are easy to store, print and share - plus the content you are discussing is on the same page as the file your colleague has got. However, I'm with you on novel outputs vs 'reports'. One of our big successes at OECD was the Better Life Index, an interactive tool to explore the question of how to measure the 'quality of life' (as opposed to the GDP 'quantity of life' approach.) As for the challenge of 'filing in a corner of the internet', I left the OECD to create Policy Commons, a tool that scours the corners of the internet to make think tank content easier to find and use. So far, we've assembled 3.2 million reports from 7,500 organizations into a searchable database that's already being used by around 40 major universities and policy institutions on a daily basis. Do check it out! Toby Green, Publisher, Policy Commons