As you might imagine, I spend a lot of time paging through PDFs. When I’m looking into a topic — as I’ve been doing with SXIP this afternoon — I tend to download and at least skim through everything I can find.
Typically, this involves clicking on a lot of PDFs. Instead of having to hunt down all those PDFs, what I’d really like is a zip file of everything available that I could download. That’s kind of weird from a normal web perspective, but the goal I’m trying to achieve is knowing when I’m done reading everything available. I want to think, “all right, I’ve found all the data, and now I don’t need to hunt for more on this site.”
That’s quite a bit of spoon-feeding, sure. But the day I can download a zip file of all the relevant PDFs instead of one-by-one will be an exciting day.
Conferences
Conferences (of the analyst type and others) have this figured out: there’s typically a CD or a jump drive available with all the presentations. I love getting all that stuff on in digital format on my machine. One thing I’ve noticed with those conference CD’s and drives though is that they usually don’t include the bio sheets that you get in your conference packets. I keep meaning to suggest including those on the CDs/USB drives to the AR folks: perhaps this blog post can get the ball rolling. Ideally, instead of getting a folder of papers, agendas, etc., I’d love to just get emailed a zip file, or given a CD or USB drive, of everything in digital format. Going paperless would be great, and it’s certainly more valuable for post analysis, thinking, and blog posting.
Sucking Content
From the client end, I suppose there’s some curl/script type thing you could do to scan a site and pull down all the PDFs. That’d be dandy as well.
Update: ah-ha! The community/dev site for SXIP has a zip file of all their docs. Yuh!
Downloading all PDFs
Cote wants to be able to download all PDFs about a topic easily. I absolutely concur. I tend to grab…