Wo writes:

It’s great that John Burgess makes all his interesting drafts of papers and books available online. It would even be better though if he’d publish them in a format that I can actually read (without having to buy a certain software). So if you’re John Burgess or somebody else publishing on the web, please convert your documents to pdf or ps before uploading them.

I’ve been noticing a few people putting documents online in Word format, with John Burgess being one of the more prominent examples. I think this is a pretty bad idea, but its effects can be ameliorated somewhat. The Microsoft Word Viewer is available free, and will let you at least read these articles. At least, if you are running a Windows system it will. There should be a Word Viewer for Macs, but I couldn’t find one in 30 seconds of looking around.

I fully agree with Wo’s main point though. It isn’t that hard to convert docs to PDF and it greatly increases your potential readership.