For those of you who are not too enamored of the Adobe PDF format, I'm certain this is bound to raise hackles. I can sum up my feelings about the following announcement in two expletives: Yuck! and (sigh). From Reuters,
Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo, as the new service is known, presents publishers with an alternative to conventional subscriptions, which, if widely adopted, could open up a new model based on free, ad-supported publishing, analysts said.
The service allows publishers to generate revenue by including text-based ads linked to the specific content of an Adobe PDF page. The advertisements can only run in a side panel separated from the publication's actual content.
Supporting or Corrupting Free Digital Content
I can see this being used in all sorts of nefarious ways (like any advertising), but I also think that in principle it's not a bad idea if it can help publishers and journal editors recover some of the (sometimes enormous) costs of producing good digital (and free) content. In rhetoric and composition, I think we have failed to support our journals and presses very well and (in my more cynical moments) think that there's a crisis looming. There are fewer and fewer outlets for more and more authors, but the pressures to publish are growing. What will people do?
Just this week, for example, I found out that for a non-profit, open access journal to get a table at CCCC it's going to cost $850, and, if you want a table, a chair, and trash can, probably twice that much. And these kinds of fees are being levied by our own organization on the very journals and presses that publish our (supposedly) important scholarship. That's biting the hand that feeds you.
CCCC table costs
That's terrible. It's pushing out the small publishing organizations in favor of the larger commercial vendors. CCCC should consider having table "grants" for small non-profits to alleviate those costs.
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Charlie | cyberdash