S1000D Bike Pack PDF on the ASD Web Site

Some of you may have noticed that a short while ago a PDF file of the Bike Pack was made available on the S1000D.org web site. In fairness I needed to bring this to your attention since it represents perhaps the 'official' way of producing a 'book' from the Bike Pack Data Modules.

In looking through this PDF file you will find that it generally conforms to the 'one data module is one chapter' principle (as shown in the specification itself) although they do are not called chapters in this case.

Personally I find that this method of generating a 'book' from the Bike Pack does not do the material justice in that it does not contain the various linked material in a single series of identifiable pages. Of course the PDF has probably been produced using a Publication Module as the basis which gives you a much close approximation of the IETP principle.

What do you think?

I ask this question because if we are aiming at paper output I feel that it should be much closer to the concept of the traditional handbook. In an IETP you can obviously jump from one location to another and the 'story' will still hang together.

Where you have a procedure in a book it is generally preferable for the end user not to have to jump around even if it does mean duplicated material. In S1000D the duplicated material is likely to come from a single data module so from a publication maintenance point of view it is not really an issue.

So what do you think?

The Mekon Book

Something that I probably omitted to highlight properly within the introduction section in the PDF file which came out of the Mekon BookBuild application is the question of the copyright of the material.

On the front page there is a sample copyright statement (it says so) but immediately following that is a statement that the content of the book is "taken from the S1000D Bike Pack version 2.3 as supplied by ASD and the content copyright resides with them."

This whole question of copyright where the material has been made publicly available for demonstration purposes probably needs clarification.