Back in April, Andrew Albanese from Publishers Weekly wrote a column deploring the abysmal formatting in the DoJ’s release of the Mueller Report, and publicly requesting that the Digital Public Library of America produce well-formatted ebook editions, which they have now done!
Albanese writes,
To me, this is an important development, because with the DPLA’s
publication, a major barrier to access has been eliminated: unlike the
DOJ’s poor quality PDF, the DPLA e-book edition is a good reading
experience, flowing on any digital device, fully functional, searchable.
And, of course, it’s free. I can’t imagine why every media outlet that
links to the DOJ version, wouldn’t link to this version instead if they
are actually interested in having people actually read the report.Maybe I’m wrong, but I have a feeling that we’re just beginning to scratch
the surface of how important of The Mueller Report will turn out to be.
And citizens can now turn to the place they’ve traditionally turned when
they need access to important, trustworthy information—the library. To me,
this is a pretty big deal, that libraries have picked up where the
government slacked off. I mean, we live in the e-book age. The technology
is cheap, and ubiquitous. There is really no excuse for bad pdfs to be the
standard for how important government information like this is released.
Mueller Report [Digital Public Library of America]