One of the big questions in my professional life
at the moment is what is print good for and what is better online. Printed
matter has some very useful properties – it’s portable, browsable and offers
the opportunity to easily set different elements, for example pictures, text,
diagrams, side by side in a format our eyes can easily take in.
Thinking about this interesting question, I
realised that in another area of my life the value of print is very clear
despite an increasingly digital presence – believe it or not, knitting.
These days I looks at knitting blogs ranging
from people sharing projects to those organising face-to-face events such as I knit london with their marvellous Knifta awards. I use sites to find out
about and order yarns, needles and other must have accessories for the
obsessive knitter. I’ve never blogged about knitting myself but I do have a
related Facebook application and now Tweet project updates.
What doesn’t work online is the humble pattern.
Knitting patterns need to be portable, you want to be able to annotate them,
you often need text (or coded instructions) alongside both pictures and
graphical instructions and when planning you want to be able to compare several
side-by-side. Paper works well for these tasks, which is why my collection of
knitting books is growing and I subscribe to various magazines.
PDFs only works for free patterns, because to
judge a pattern you need to look right through it and if someone let’s me see
the whole PDF then they have nothing of value to sell me. A couple of models
may present themselves as solutions – high quality content subscription
services perhaps, I'm certainly pondering the possibilties.
Then today I received one of the mags I
subscribe to and realised there is an urgent need for an interim solution. It
contained a 16-page free pattern for a knitted wedding cake. What a waste of
paper. So please knitting mag publishers – start offering me a pdf or page turner alternative now.
