Adrian Holovaty has not been posting that often, but when he does it's usually good. His latest item is about a new web-delivery of a newspaper.
I started a long list detailing why I don't like EmPRINT, but I scrapped it. Instead of taking the easy way out by raising standard PDF criticisms -- no permalinks to articles, bad accessibility, nonstandard browsing, etc. -- I'll just say this: EmPRINT is fundamentally flawed because its presentation is fundamentally tied to print newspapers. That is, it's static. Flat. Rigid. It looks the same and acts the same no matter what you do to it.
The conversation has begun. It's great to read the comments at Adrian's blog and over at Buzzmachine where Jeff Jarvis linked to the original post.
The two local papers in my market also use a similar solutions to convert special print sections to web pages. Example 1: The Ledger: Health 2004 Example 2: News Chief: Her Voice
Both of these implementations are awful.
Who is going to read a 'site' like this? What I have always wondered is if the adversting sales staff has the guts to charge advertisers bit extra since, "Your ad will be online!"
As Adrian points out the solutions are stuck in the newspaper convention. The heart of the matter is that all newspapers are geared to provide a print product, a web version is an add-on. The web content mangement tools that papers utilize are forced to pull stories and data from the print systems, so many of the limitations carry over.
The flip side would be to create a printed newspaper using a more dynamic content management system that was first and foremost a web delivery tool, with all the relational database tools necessary.
Of course that would create a great web site, so why would you want to waste the money on print?
