Books and eBooks

It is crucially important to learn up-to-date industry standards when providing consulting support to my clients in the airline/airport domain. IATA PSC resolution manual and AHM (Airport Handling Manual) are examples our company purchases every year. It was initially published in print format only. Then we had an additional choice of print format with CD ROM. IATA produced PC-bound licenses afterward and discontinued print format from the 39th edition in 2019. The photo below is the final print format of PSC (Volume two of two). The PC-bound license comes with a software viewer that offers features such as looking up a particular word and putting bookmarks. However, with the printed materials, we can go straight down to the pages even quicker in some cases and easily compare pages going back and forth. I still use the printed one in parallel with the electronic format, as long as the section isn’t too old.      

In the meantime, I personally believe that the electronic format is best suited when we search something through several different contents. Dictionary is a good example. We have had a wide variety of product line-ups of electronic dictionary devices here in Japan since the 1990s. (I don’t seem to find any similar products in foreign countries) These products offered a word searching capability through the different publisher’s dictionaries. They also support search with word combinations and sentences. Contents may include OXFORD, Longman, COBUILD, including their Thesaurus, Collocations, Phrasal verbs, and Idioms. As smartphones become popular, the application supports similar features with paid content. I have awaited an electronic format of the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English for years that is quite handy for non-English natives like me to work on English documentation. I found it in Montreal when I visited IATA headquarter. I have used it since then, from the first to the third edition. I occasionally searched on the web but didn’t know they published ebooks until recently. The material costs three times as much as the paper edition in Japanese currency. But I firmly believe I will purchase one very soon.

Hisanori Sato
VP Transportation& Tourism