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]
