Some marketing genius have started selling in the concept of publishing printed documents straight on the web.

This is a bad idea.

Why? To put it as simply as possible: your screen is not made of paper.

To quote IQ Pager, who seem to be a major player in this:

“1. Readability.
The user feels more at home in a traditionally printed format.

First off – that is a lie! A printed A4 does not equal the height of most monitors. As the matter of fact, with the increasing use of widescreen monitors this becomes even more appearant.

2. Faster and easier with no download
You must always download a PDF and open it in Acrobat. It takes time and you save the file on your machine whether you want to or not

Once again – lies. PDF files can open inside the browser, and does not need to be downloaded as a whole for that to happen. But PDF besides the point: A good web based version using the  screen medium, whether it be through Flash, HTML, etc will always be way more user friendly – and no downloads. For printing a good CSS file can format the printed document no matter if the user has A4, A3 or letter format paper.

3. Weighs nothing
If you send out a newsletter, a PDF is very heavy…

Wait a minute Shirley! Are you fucking nuts, dude? If you send out a PDF as your newsletter then you are doing it completely wrong. People want to read their emails, then discard them. Getting people to click a link in an email is HARD. They must really want to read the content. Emails are not supposed to be printed in the first place. E-L-E-C-T-R-O-N-I-C communication, people! IQ Pager uses a flash solution to read PDFs, nothing more. It is overkill.

The sales pitch continues, and it is clear that besides outright lying, they really have no business selling a shitty solution in the first place.

I have worked in the web business for over 11 years, and I come from a background in print design before then. You cannot mix your mediums like this. It is the equivalent of broadcasting an image on the radio – cumbersome and stupid.

For good marketing to work, you need to work with the medium you have chosen. You can not have a film playing in a newspaper (yet), and people accept this. You can not change the size of the paper once printed, nor can you change the size of peoples screens to fit a portrait A4,A3 or billboard in readable size.

Is this point clear? Jeesus F. Christ in a tutu on a pogostick! I can’t believe I have to get pissed off at this crap.

Here is my open letter to all web companies with similar solutions to this:

“Dear flash based PDF reading companies.

Stop. Just please stop. Do not encourage our clients to embrace stupidity. If you have a crappy product, then do not sell it. Just because you could sell the idea it doesn’t mean that you should. Sure, you sell the point of that they don’t have to put the extra effort of making a good presentation on the web of their printed information. That only cheapens what they are trying to communicate. Learn the basics: Print and Web are two different mediums. They should be separate. The key value is always communication. One way, two way, three way communication, it doesn’t matter. Ask yourself: If this solution is so fantastic, then why isn’t it used all over the web instead of HTML? It would save time! “