Guilt-free reading

I wanted to follow up on my article from yesterday about organizations finding various ways to reduce paper waste.

First, a while back, Test Center Contributor Mike Heck got his hands on Adobe Digital Editions (ADE), “a lightweight rich Internet application for easily downloading, organizing, and reading e-books and other digital publications. Beneath the hood is Flash Player 9 and Flex 2, which makes for an especially consumer-friendly experience. This starts with a bookshelf metaphor for organizing publications that you’ve borrowed, purchased, or read.”

Now at this point, it’s difficult for me to be too bullish about e-books. In theory, they’re great: You can carry around dozens of titles on, say, your Sony Reader instead of renting a pack-mule to shlep them for you. But the average consumer probably doesn’t want to invest that kind of money in an electronic gadget, and more important, isn’t ready to abandon the traditional tree-based form factor. With time, I can certainly see that changing, mind you, as members of society continue to grow increasingly comfortable with ingesting data digitally. (I know I can spend a lot more time reading from my monitor than I once could.)

E-books might not be fully embraced for years to come, but with a tool like ADE, I see a lot of promise today for technical documentation, such as white papers and manuals, and even digital versions of magazines. Aesthetically, they can be of the same quality as a paper counterpart — but as Mike notes, ADE lets you embed Flash video, which can be a tremendously useful (or entertaining) addition. Moreover, digital documents are easy to share with others, and, if you really, really need to, you can print them out.

And on a related note (and partially what prompted me to post this): You can sign up for the free weekly InfoWorld Express, a PDF package of some of the top content from InfoWorld.com. It doesn’t come embedded with any video, nor is it of quite as pretty as was our former print product. But it’s quite a useful resource, in case you missed one of our important features, reviews, or opinion pieces during the week.

I’m not sure if I’m allowed to do this, but here’s this week’s InfoWorld Express. Check it out. If you like it, you can sign up to get it free every Friday.

I’d love to know what you think about the pros and cons of digital versions of books, magazines, and other documents versus their paper counterparts. Feel free to comment below.