P3D Re: Internet & publications

["Dr. George A. Themelis" <DrT-3d@xxxxxxx>]

A few more thoughts on this subject:

Offering a (small scale) publication via the Internet makes a 
lot of sense for a number of reasons:  First, many publications
today exist in purely digital form (remember Don when
"Stereoscopy" was a typewriter and cut & paste job?... where
did these days go? :-))  So, getting it in the Internet is
very easy... maybe too easy!

Color pictures which make a publication very expensive,
are no problem with the internet.  For example, most pictures
in the "3D Window" are in color (or should I say "colour"? :-))
in the emailed version (pdf file to be read with Acrobat Reader, 
a free software) while in the mailed copy they are black and white.

It is possible to get a better printed copy by printing the
digital publication directly from the subscriber's side.  
Small publications are distributed photocopied, which does
not reproduce pictures well.

Reduced costs.  That's the big item here.  To send our 10
newsletters in the course of the year to England the cost will 
be $1 per issue for shipping, plus $0.60 for copying.  This 
$16/year will be saved if the issue is emailed.

These are the advantages of distributing a publication
electronically.  I can think of a couple of disadvantages, 
and right now I am facing one of them:  The size of the 
publication can be a problem.

To illustrate this point, consider that our last issue of the
Stereogram is 1.5MB.  That's quite a large file size
to transmit through phone-lines.  Some people might not have
a problem but others might have a problem.  What contributes
to this size are the 30 or so pictures.  To reduce the size,
the number of pictures should be reduced, which in turn will
affect the quality of the publication.  I don't know what the 
size of a typical "SS Journal" or "Stereo World" issue is, but 
I imagine much larger.

With the digital scene rapidly changing, the issues of time
and size might only be temporary.  

The bottom line:  The Internet is here to stay and Editors
and publishers must make the most out of it!

George Themelis
http://home.att.net/~drt-3d/