Maximum Entropy: On Resolving one of the Greater Mysteries in Our Information Universe

So where is the CD-ROM for this Springer ebook title - Entropy and energy?

If you follow the link to SpringerLink  (or my MyiLibrary version) to the actual ebook you won’t find it there (or really any clear indication from the contents view that anything is missing (you’d need to get some indication or reference to that in the text and then you’d still need to ask the right people to connect with the material).

If you go to  http://extras.springer.com/2005/978-3-540-24281-9  – voila! Now our Springer rep had to point me to that site when I inquired about the missing CD-ROM material and how that could be accessed. She suggested that we could just create a link in the note field of our bibliographic record for now until they can do better in the future…a good deal of needless energy to expend on our end, I’d say (and still somewhat confusing for the user if they don’t see the note in the record).

So for those with Springer ebooks, you should look to http://extras.springer.com/ with the ISBN for the book if you need to find a CD-ROM or other ‘extra’ material to go with your Springer book in ebook format. This is at least until Springer integrates/articulates the extra material with the ebook (sometime in the future).

You’d think in a more digital universe it’d be easier to bring all electronic material together (after all, it seems like it is far more complicated to arrange the electronic data on a physical medium and then bring one physical medium (the CD) together with another physical medium (the book).

Hopefully the coincidence of humour in using this title (Entropy and Energy) is not lost here as it seems rather arbitrary (or perhaps not) for our electronic information universe to be arranged (or disarranged) so. It was one thing for there to be incongruity with physical and electronic mediums, but I’m sure we can all do better in a digital information universe than this and have everyone spend a good deal less energy in trying to bring it all together.

Don’t get me wrong with this post that this is just an issue with Springer. Springer has shown it is a progressive publisher, especially in terms of publishing one of the largest STM DRM-free ebook collections (see Springer Launches DRM-free E-book Repository) and I certainly enjoyed having someone from Springer speak on the ebook panel I moderated at the 2008 SLA/MLA PrariePartnerships Conference to raise awareness and set expectations very high in what we could expect for ebooks. However, I don’t think we are doing ourselves any favours by not integrating our systems and simplifying our interfaces. We need to start pulling this all together and start by doing it in the right places.