Stern report html letter
Dear Sir (cc Sir Nicholas Stern, and anyone else)
We are part of the group which worked to build the website www.theyworkforyou.com because we believe that making information accessible is as important as just posting it on the web.
You have posted up the 600 page Stern Review on the web in only PDF form. You have designed it to be printed out onto a ream of paper and referred to as a hard copy. It is not as useful in its digital form as it could be, for the following reasons.
- The document is only readable at A4 size, and not useable on smaller PDAs that tend to be portable, and are used for reading documents that are in HTML or word-processor form.
- No one knows how to set bookmarks on a page PDF, in case they don't read the document all in one sitting.
- There's an unnecessary lack of hyperlinks between the sections that refer to one another, thus discouraging people from following them.
- It's difficult for someone to cut-and-paste a quotation from the document to back up an on-line debate they may be having with someone.
- It's impossible for someone to send a link to particular section to someone else whom they know would be interested in it.
- The diagrams can't easily be included and reused elsewhere in other presentations or blogs.
- Internet search engines can't link to individual sections which have the terms searched for.
On checking these matters up in a phone call, we were told that if we couldn't read the document on our PDA, then we should simple get a better one that could read it properly. This answer comes to the crux of the issue. While some people with a great deal of interest are able to work around many of the barriers thrown up by your presentation, and say, get another PDA, the point is to make it accessible to as wide an audience as possible -- some of whom would be very interested in this report, but are not aware of it yet because they do not have the time to check it out, or the luck to stumble upon it in the first place.
In case you do not share our opinion that having this comprehensive review in an accessible digital form is as important as we believe it is, what would be your position if copies of important sections were to appear on en.wikisource.org? This would be linked from the wikipedia page for the Stern Review, which itself links to numerous articles about the Stern Review that are all accessible.
