[LINK] AIIA Green IT eBook

[Tom Worthington]

The Australian Information Industry Association have released "Greening 
Your Business Through Technology: Leading you towards a sustainable 
future through GreenIT" <http://www.aiia.com.au/pages/greenit.aspx>.

This could make a useful contribution to help educate the IT industry 
about environmental issues, including CO2 pollution. However, the 
material needs to be reformatted to make it usable online.

The material for the book was prepared by Scott Evans. Scott consulted 
me and I was delighted to see in the list of "Local GreenIT Training and 
Certification Programs", both the ACS and ANU, courses I designed (now 
also in book form). Also listed are the Box Hill TAFE – GreenIT Course 
and the Excom Education courses. Interest in such courses seems to be 
picking up and I have recently been contacted by universities in Sweden 
and North America about green ICT course design.

The book consists of three PDF files:

1. Greening Your Business Through Technology: 72 pages, 6.3 Mbytes
2. Case Studies: 79 pages, 4.9 Mbytes
3. Appendices: 52 pages, 0.9 Mbytes

Unfortunately the PDF is poorly formatted, with a few unnecessarily 
images making the files about four times the size they need to be. This 
slows down loading of the document. The background image on the cover 
decompresses to 125 Mbytes, making scrolling of the document difficult 
on a low power computer, such as a netbook. The large file size will 
also result in the document causing more greenhouse gas emissions than 
needed, which is ironic for a book about green ICT.

AIIA is planning an online an interactive version. However, they should 
first improve the formatting of the PDF version. With some simple 
changes, such as reducing the size of images and not having vertical 
text, the book could be made much more usable. Also, rather than an 
interactive version, a genuine e-Book using web based formatting, as 
used in the Amazon Kindle and e-Learning systems, would be more useful. 
The material could then be quickly distributed and incorporated in 
training courses. An interactive version could then be produced from 
that (the PDF version of the book is of little educational value). So 
far AIIA have produced a poorly formatted PDF file, not a real eBook.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/people.php?StaffID=140274