Of course, there's no reason academic papers can't be provided in multiple formats; PDF, HTML, ePUB and MOBI should all be doable. I'd like to help SI with this.
Ciphergoth, talk to me! I'm the most technical of the guys Luke has producing his papers and Luke has recently had me investigating the possibility of alternate publication formats. In particular I have looked at the production of HTML formats for display on the website. Definitely possible but based on the various obstacles that would need to be overcome and the time estimate I gave him Luke has put that side project on hold.
If you have an easier or more effective way to produce such alternate formats or want to help do it we would both appreciate it and it would be a great improvement to the website - especially if Luke also gets someone to produce some elegant and website-matching .css to go with the HTML.
I believe you have mentioned elsewhere that you (or your work) has access to some high quality file conversion tools? I was also impressed with the Python scripting you have done for grabbing the sequences.
If you want to look into this further contact me either here or at cameron.taylor [at] singinst.org. I can give you access to source LaTeX documents for you to see if your multiple output ideas will work and compare notes regarding what SingInst specific difficulties there are. If it turns out that there are things we need to do at the LaTeX template and .tex source document level in order to make multiple output possible I can take care of that - at least I am almost certain that Luke will be willing to allocate me to working with you on this to facilitate you giving us multiple output capabilities.
Emails sent!
In our discussion of academic papers, Lukeprog argued that lots of smart people preferred to read ideas in academic paper format. Based on my observations, I mostly disagree. But that's just anecdotal evidence. Let's use Science!
Suppose someone at the Singularity Institute thought up a cool new idea: it could be about rationality, Friendly AI, decision theory, making money, or any of the other topics we discuss here on LW. Explaining it takes about ten pages, and it's nontechnical enough that it can be explained to a general audience of non-mathematicians. Which of the following explanations would you be most likely to actually sit down and read through?
EDIT: To state the obvious, this poll will be biased in favor of blog postings, since it's on a blog. However, I still think it'll provide data that's much better than anecdotal guessing. I've emailed a few rationalist mailing lists to try and counteract this effect.