niq’s soapbox

My publisher wonders if I’d be interested in publishing “derivative short cuts”. Short cuts (here) are digital mini-books covering particular topics. The word “derivative” means using material from the book - hence less work to write.

Well, the basic idea works for me. There are two obvious topics from the book that could be used like this, and it could be even more usefully applied to topics that might have been covered in the book but aren’t.

These “short cuts” apparently ship as PDF with Adobe DRM. This is, apparently, not stupid-fascist DRM: it permits the owner to make copies and read the documents on a range of devices. To me, the crucial questions here are: is Adobe’s spec itself open, and what opensource PDF readers are happy with it? I think I can accept it provided it doesn’t require readers like me to jump through stupid hoops to read it.