The Risk of Reading From Paper

The web has spoiled us for timely content.  While I really enjoy the feel of a book or magazine in my hands, I cannot help but be wary of the content therein if it is technical or health related.

Print and other product publication cycles simply take too long and printed content is at high risk of being irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst.

Cases In Point

Agile 2007 Conference

This year’s Agile Conference is the world’s preeminent conference related to Agile methodology.  Agile 2007 will be held in Washington D.C. and after my experience at the last Agile conference you can bet that I will be there.  This is gold, baby, gold!  Conference dates are August 13th to the 17th.

The call to papers deadline was January 26th.  That’s a full seven months between content submission and content presentation.  Do you think there may be some stale content in there?  This is not atypical of a technical conference content production timeline.  What seems ridiculous at first glance begins to make sense when you consider the logistics behind producing the event.

There is so much planning and organizing that goes into setting up the track schedule that it simply takes a long time to get everything nailed down.  Further, the schedule must be publicly available for a reasonable period of time (several months) in order that attendees will know what they are signing up to attend.

The PDR (Physician’s Desk Reference)

Although the esteemed PDR from Thomson is in it’s 61st edition, it’s value as a printed tome is questionable.  This venerable book is the definitive guide for physicians in referencing medications.  Every doctor in the country has a few of these laying around both her office and home, usually paid for by pharmaceutical companies.

The changing nature of this drug information makes it largely unsuitable for the printed medium.  61 years ago, the FDA didn’t approve and recall drugs at the rates they do now simply because there weren’t that many drugs being developed.  But, in 2006, the FDA approved 97 new drugs.  That means that every 3.7 days a new drug was introduced to the market.

To keep up with this tide of new data, Thomson doesn’t release a new PDA every 4 days.  Heck no, they rely on other data distribution techniques including XML based data feeds, hand held software for the doctors that “calls home” frequently, and more often just the web.  See PDR.net for more alternatives, none of which are paper based.

And?

It seems that more dynamic mediums like RSS, blogs, and even email offer a reliable and timely update model for time-sensitive content.  Does this change what we look for in a tech conference?  Is the data in your latest How To book the latest and greatest?  Just something that makes you go hmm…