Walt at Random

Silly me.

I subscribe to four reasonably active library-related lists (one that I should probably drop), and probably a few others that are so inactive I’ve forgotten I’m subscribed.

Two of those lists–Web4Lib and PUBLIB–are on a little Gmail group to which I send email copies of announcements for new issues of Cites & Insights. (I prepare the announcement in this blog, copy the HTML to the C&I Alert blog and to my “blog” in LISNews, then copy-and-paste the “visible version” to the email. The group currently has three members–these two lists and one individual.)

In recent days, there’s been some kerfuffle on Web4Lib about excessive announcements on that list, primarily those from one punctuation-happy multiblogger who mails to several lists–but I’ve had the sense of some unease about announcements-as-spam in general.

I’m also aware that “deathspotters” wrote off lists as dead years ago–and are now busily writing off email as dead. (OK, so some of them have written off blogs and RSS as dead as well, but at least those two are still recent fatalities. If you don’t have a clear sense of how I feel about the whole “death of…” thing, read the December 2009 EContent or pages 12-16 of the February 2010 Cites & Insights. Better yet, read the whole issue–it’s a good one.)

So, just to be helpful and “lively”…

So I sent a quick note to Web4Lib and PUBLIB saying I’d be helpful–I’d remove Web4Lib from the Gmail announcement group and probably remove PUBLIB as well. After all, there were three other ways people could be informed–and this blog alone has more than 800 subscriptions. (LISNews reaches everybody. Doesn’t it?)

Honestly, I was just trying to be helpful–to eliminate one minor source of “spam” at the possible cost of a few readers.

Not so fast…

I got feedback–some directly on the two lists, some via email. The feedback was consistent: Actually, so far, 100% unanimous: “Don’t.”

That is, don’t stop announcing issues on the lists. Lots of people don’t use RSS but do use lists, and may want to read C&I.

Admittedly, this is a biased sample. Those who are relieved to be rid of that one post a month (more or less) probably wouldn’t bother to say so, and those who aren’t aware of C&I or regard it as worthless trash probably wouldn’t take the time to respond.

I haven’t counted the number of responses. It’s definitely two digits, and that suggests that there may well be three digits worth of readers who benefit from the list announcements.

So I’ll keep them. That decision was made the same day–as I said, the response was quick.

(Will I keep doing C&I indefinitely? Who knows? A new sponsor sure wouldn’t hurt…nor would others joining the triad who’ve already given PayPal contributions for C&I. But that’s a different barrel of monkeys.)

So…being a sometimes-advocate of open and all that, and since Lulu now supports ePub, The Standard Ebook Format…

I thought I’d see whether using it makes any sense for the huge (513pp. 6×9, 191K words) collection of OA articles that may or may not emerge as Open Access and Libraries: Essays from Cites & Insights, 2001-2009.

The project itself is on the back burner for a few weeks while I see whether one possible way of getting an index pans out. Meanwhile, I could see what generating an ePub version was like.

The tools

Checking online and asking around, the only software I could find that matches the probable income from the ePub version–that is, $0–was Calibre, which is really an ebook organization (and viewing) program but also includes routines to convert to ePub from various input formats, including PDF and HTML.

The conversion routine is interesting, because it wants to know what reader the output will be used on. (There’s “default,” which may or may not be Kindle, but also a bunch of individual choices.)

• I had this silly idea that ePub is a device-independent standard. If that’s true, then I don’t get the question.
• More specifically, if I do an ePub version, it will most certainly be intended to be device-independent.

The trials

I decided to try this two ways, in both cases starting with a Word document that’s designed as a 6×9 book with good margins, using Berkeley Oldstyle Book for body text and Friz Quadrata for major headings, with “typical” page headers and footers (centered page # on first page of chapter, page # and book name in italics on other even-numbered pages, chapter name in italics and page # on other odd-numbered pages).

The PDF used for input was prepared using “Save as PDF,” which yields bookmarks and is really great for use on a PDF-supporting viewer. (Unfortunately, it appears to carry a phantom “Arial” that’s not embedded, which means it may not be possible to upload it to Lulu–which requires that all typefaces be embedded. If I “print to PDF” instead, I can set the PDF properties to embed everything, even Arial, but you don’t get bookmarks in that case. Irrelevant for a printed book, relevant for a PDF-download version.)

The HTML was prepared using Word “Save as filtered HTML,” which is the advice given by another service that does ePub conversion (but only to make the ePubs available through that service…not what I need).

• PDF-to-ePub results (as opened in Calibre’s ebook viewer): The type looks great. There’s an optional contents band, but it doesn’t really work. Ebook page breaks are peculiar, and text breaks even more so. The page headers and footers show up in the stream (which becomes something like 1,200 pages from the original 519 including prefatory material).
• HTML-to-ePub results (as opened in Calibre’s ebook viewer): Uggh… The type looks awful, very nearly unreadable, for reasons that escape me. There are no margins. (I think that’s true with the PDF-to-ePub as well.)  On the other hand, the table of contents pane (optional) works just fine–even if there’s an odd pagebreak before the first level-2 heading in each chapter. No extraneous running page headers or footers, and the Friz Quadrata headings are absolutely crisp. The 513-page book turns into 1,800-odd pages (or whatever).

Conclusions?

At this point, I’d be a good deal more embarrassed to offer either variety of ePub than I already am by the semi-clunky HTML versions of Cites & Insights essays…which have odd margins but at least have clean typography and proper flow.

Maybe I’m missing something.

Update 5/9/10: Remainder of post removed as no longer relevant. Here’s what there is of an epub version, but I strongly recommend the free PDF or the $17.50 trade paperback at Lulu.

…but I’ve learned that, almost always, when someone begins a message (blog post, FriendFeed post, tweet, op-ed column, conversation, whatever) with that phrase, they’re about to say something offensive and disrespectful.

[Just a thought.]

When last I discussed the possibility of a book combining all 33 of the Open Access-related essays in Cites & Insights from 2001 through 2009 (plus one “disContent” column from EContent Magazine), the issue was whether it was worth doing an ePub version: Whether anybody would want it.

Now there’s a slightly different issue, one that may derail the effort entirely–and you’ll see what it is if you revisit the original post.

To wit:

• It appears that I can’t really use Word2007′s built-in indexing feature, at least not with “Mark All.” I figured I could generate an index in 5-10 hours through that method–and, indeed, it takes about an hour to go through 50-60 pages.
• Unfortunately, when I save the results after 50-60 pages and reopen the file, it’s unusable: The 519-page book has become 1200+ pages, with the bottom half of each page made up of a multiline, uneditable, page footer that seems to comprise several different page headers. (Hey, at least the first time this happened, it gave me another chance to see that my weekly incremental backups actually work–I could restore last week’s pre-indexed version neatly enough. Call that lemonade.)
• As far as I can tell, it would take at least 50-60 hours for me to do an index separately. I can’t justify that “for the good of the community,” so that’s not going to happen.
• So here’s where it stands: Depending on feedback between now and February 7, I’ll either:

1. Make Open Access and Libraries: Essays from Cites & Insights 2001-2009 available as a free PDF and probably free ePub (unless that conversion turns out to be a hassle), and as a 6×9 paperback for $5 more than the cost of production (yielding $4 a copy for me)–but without an index.
2. Scrap the whole project because it’s so awful to produce a nonfiction book without an index.

Just skimming through the vastness of the book (really: 191,000 words–it’s big), I find the chronological arrangement interesting and slightly useful. And, what the heck, if anybody out there cared, preparing an index would be a great project–I’d certainly mount it on my website if somebody did it.

Do it or dump it?

That’s what it boils down to. The Word version’s in place. All I need is a cover (not difficult) and to do the ePub conversion (and redo the PDF conversion) and upload to Lulu.

Thoughts?

Two developments:

1. An acquaintance with some indexing experience offered to try to index the thing–which requires working from a 2.8MB PDF (to retain pagination). Not sure that will work out: It’s a BIG effort for a wholly unpaid gig that may not be read by that many people… But I’m going to give him a few weeks and see what happens. I have no doubt whatsoever that he’s capable of doing a good job…
2. I think I have a clue what’s causing Word to go berserk (but am not sure): Namely, I was using “Mark All” for terms that appear in one chapter’s running page head, and that may confuse Word beyond redemption. If #1 doesn’t work out, I might try again, avoiding that particular situation. Or I might not. As noted in the comments, there’s also the possibility of post-pub “crowdsourcing” an index.

In sum: The book isn’t going to appear in the next week or two, and probably not until March. I probably will make it available in ePub form (if Calibre does a good conversion), at the same $0 price if Lulu supports that. Meanwhile, off to other stuff!