Walt at Random

Another Title Too Important For The Post candidate…

I might as well alienate all my Netflix-using colleagues at once, instead of bit by bit on FF and G+.

Namely:

• We’re on a budget (not having earned income will do that to you), and part of that–and our distance from the nearest telco office–is that we have 1.5Mbps broadband, and would have to pay a LOT more, to a company we despise, to get faster broadband.
• Which means Netflix streaming is useless for us–the picture quality is too poor to even consider.
• Which means I wasn’t happy about the previous rate increase, which got us unlimited streaming–that we can’t and don’t use–along with the three-DVD-with-Blu-ray paln that we do use.
• I complained to Netflix about this.
• So I’m real happy with the forthcoming rate changes: we’ll pay for what we use, and won’t pay for what we can’t use. We get a $4 or $5 monthly decrease for no change in service. Sounds good to me.
• On a broader basis, I have yet to figure out how $16/month is “twice as much” as $10/month, and to the best of my knowledge there is no rental+streaming plan that now costs twice as much as it used to.

Looking at it more broadly:

• I see people saying “Well, I’ll just go to streaming and use Redbox if I want a DVD.” I suspect that’s just fine with Netflix.
• I see people saying “Netflix is trying to push everybody to streaming-only.” If Netflix is doing that in a way that rewards those of us who really just want discs, more power to them.
• Realistically: Next time around, you can pretty well bet that Netflix’ agreements for streaming are going to be, at least in part, based on actual streaming usage. That’s partly true for DVDs: If Netflix has more demand, it spends more on discs–and only one account can use a disc at a time.
• So: If, say, 20% of Netflix users don’t stream at all, then it’s to Netflix’ benefit–and, ultimately, to the subscribers’ benefit–for those 20% not to have streaming: The eventual cost of streaming licenses is likely to be roughly 20% lower.
• Am I sympathetic to those who (a) pay enough to have really high-speed broadband, (b) watch enough TV to “need” both streaming and discs, (c) in some cases even admit that the new rates will still be cheaper than cable, but (d) are complaining bitterly about the new rates? Perhaps less so than I should be. In the long run, I’m pretty sure those folks will be a lot worse off if Netflix insists that everybody have both streaming and discs.

I could be wrong, of course, and I’m sure I’m not going to get much agreement on this. But unless you can convince me that Hollywood would never, ever do something like make streaming licenses usage-dependent (and if you believe that, talk to Pandora and other streaming radio services…), then we’re dealing with economic reality.

Update, July 13: While nobody’s commented directly on this post, it’s pretty clear from watching other streams that I must be an Evil Employee of Netflix to even suggest that this is anything other than:

• Doubling prices! (In the new math, 60% of one plan is now doubling all plans.)
• UnAmerican! (You know, “Life, liberty, and unlimited streaming plus one DVD at a time by mail for $9.99 total”–isn’t that in the Declaration of Independence?)
• Vastly increasing the price of every Netflix service! (I’m apparently hallucinating about saving $4/month)
• A deliberate attempt to force people to stop using DVDs! (And the statements by Evil Netflix Employees that some folks–like me–prefer to stick with DVDs are clearly lies, lies, lies…)
• A huge crisis requiring tens of thousands of semiliterate complaints on Netflix’ Facebook page (many of them along the lines of “This food is terrible…and the portions are so small!”) and the like.

Oh, OK, there is Jenica, but hell, she’s rational anyway, so she doesn’t count.

Anyway: I hereby apologize for trying to add logic to the discussion. I’ll stop now. After all, $6 can buy two lattes or, what, about three days of cable TV, so this is clearly a Very Big Deal.

Serious title for a fairly frivolous post, although the post could turn into a more-serious essay later on…

Social networks

I have no idea how many of these still have me as a resident or member or whatever. (I know Second Life is a Hotel California application, but I may have simply never bothered to delete accounts elsewhere–Orkut, for example).

And, yes, I added one more–need I say which one, or will a “+” suffice? I hadn’t been planning to join for a while, especially not while the initial “let’s all talk about what a cool thing this is” wave of buzz was going on.

See what I’m doing there? No? Oh well…

But a colleague–one I’ve never met but whom I respect enormously–sent me an invitation out of the blue, and I chose to accept it. And, of course, logging, found literally dozens but not yet hundreds of library folk who (a) are in my email contacts list, which only means “at some time either they sent me an email or I sent them an email” and (b) are already in the network.

For now, I’ve set up two named circles–one for library folk, specifically people who either are part of LSW or should be, and another for open access folk and scientists I’m vaguely acquainted with. The latter currently has eight members; the former, currently, 64, but it probably could have more than that. Which, given that I probably haven’t yet spent an hour total in the network, is pretty amazing.

To what extent am I actually social in networks? Of those that I’m aware I’m part of, I’d say:

• FriendFeed: Very active. I spend way too much time here, but it’s become my primary source for new ideas and comments (other than RSS feeds).
• Google+: Mildly active. For now, I’ll probably check once or twice a day, and could see becoming involved in some conversations here.
• Facebook: Barely active. I think my current status is two or three weeks old. I probably comment on someone else’s item as often as twice a week. I do check it at least once a day, but mostly look at recent items from a very small family group and somewhat larger “libclose” group.
• Twitter: Almost entirely a lurker, and even then rarely more than once a day.
• LinkedIn: Technically there, realistically not. As the Big Network for Professional Advancement, the only relationship of LinkedIn to past or present jobs is that it was taking over space that RLG was vacating, little by little, in the final Mountain View offices.
• I don’t know of or can’t remember any others.

Professional affiliation

As I noted in my random impressions of ALA NOLA:

The one meeting I started to attend was the fledgling Retired Members Round Table. Turns out that, quite apart from the $20 dues, it probably isn’t for me–it felt like a way for Involved ALA Members to continue to be Involved ALA Members. Frankly, it made me feel old–whereas my primary professional involvement (and the only ribbon I was wearing), the Library Society of the World, makes me feel, um, less old.

That’s probably unfair to RMRT. It’s quite possible that future gatherings will be vibrant and full of fascinating discussion. But for now it really is clear: My primary professional affiliation is the Library Society of the World, LSW, a disorganization of considerable and mixed repute.

Putting them together

Just for interest, I checked a couple of places.

The primary nexus for LSW at this point is a room in FriendFeed. As of right now, there are 703 FriendFeed folks in the LSW room. Given that FriendFeed really isn’t growing and probably never had more than a million or so regular users, that’s pretty remarkable. Frankly, the small size of FriendFeed is, to me, one of its great strengths…

There’s an LSW group in LinkedIn, with a remarkable 2,006 members–and my initial reaction is “Who are all these people and what do they have to do with LSW?” The button-down business-card nature of LinkedIn seems at odds with the irreverence and informality of LSW, and that shows in the threads on this version of LinkedIn.

Then there’s the LSW site itself, with 162 members and, shall we say, not huge amounts of activity.

At one point, a Meebo room was the hot LSW spot. If it still exists, I’m not aware of it (which mostly means I’m not aware of it).

And there’s “my personal LSW,” the circle on my G+ account, with 64 people to date (some of whom are no longer in FF/LSW, and some of whom might never have been there).

But the current key group is FF. That is, of course, subject to change.

(Is there an LSW page on FaceBook? If so, I think I’d just as soon not know… And I’m pretty sure there’s no LSW Island in Second Life and no LSW MySpace page. But what do I know?)

It’s been a bit less than two months since the latest Cites & Insights appeared.

The next C&I will not appear on July 10, 2011, which would be exactly two months.

Yes, there will be a “next Cites & Insights.” No, I’m not sure when it will appear. But I thought a non-progress report might be in order.

Progress toward making C&I more viable

None. No donations. Two print purchases of the L2.0 Reader (for a total of five purchases to date). Looking at views for the “speedbump” versions of the essays in that compilation, it appears that most people who link to the original essay don’t really care enough about it to either buy the book or type in the new link…assuming that these are really people at all, not just bots and spiders.

On the other hand, readership for the “traditional” issue isn’t bad–more than 900 to date for each essay, combining issue downloads and essay views.

Progress on other fronts

The eventuality that might keep me firmly in the fold for a while longer: Not quite there yet.

My current book project, one I continue to be excited about–and one I really do believe belongs in every public library and many academic libraries: Great. I’m doing the third editorial pass now (conforming to ITI’s style book, even if that means inserting Oxford commas, and making other changes based on an offline “red pen” review of the manuscript). The fourth pass, probably next week, will combine one final paragraph-by-paragraph readthrough and a set of visual tweaks, before submitting the “manuscript” (really a fully-formatted book in PDF and Word form, because of the nature of this project).

Digression, but not really: If you’re a public librarian or academic librarian who thinks “micropublishing”–very short-run books serving family and micro-niche needs, with total editions running from two to maybe 500 copies–is a neat idea, I’d love to have you review and possibly write a blurb for my book. Send me email (waltcrawford at gmail dot com) by August 1, if possible.

I’m deliberately not starting on any C&I essays until that book is on its way to the publisher for editorial review and editing suggestions…

…but I do plan to write the next C&I before I start working on the book after that (which isn’t due until March 2012 and not wanted until then).

Another digression that’s not really a digression: Writing this post is in keeping with my full focus on getting the book done as well and as promptly as possible. For the editing pass I’m doing now, and the one after that, I find that it’s essential to do one chapter at a time, taking a significant break between chapters. This post is being written during one of those breaks.

Best guess

Chances are, the next C&I will appear in late July or early August. It might be dated August 2011; it might be dated August-September 2011. A lot depends on other things that might happen over the next few weeks.

Beyond that? Absent sponsorship or clear evidence that C&I is yielding indirect revenue (e.g., speaking engagements, book sales), C&I needs to return to the priority it had for me early in the millennium: Something I do when I’m enjoying it and not doing something that does yield some income.

Who knows? That might even yield a better, if less frequent, ejournal.

One of the few things unfortunate about going to ALA Annual in New Orleans is that it meant four days without this year’s crop of stone fruit–a crop that’s generally been unusually good.

How good? Last year, there were no Bing cherries at all from local orchards. This year, the Bings are first-rate–and the Brooks cherries aren’t far behind.

New pluot varieties keep popping up, and some of this years’ (such as Flavorosa) are wonderful. Ditto the Modesto apricots, not all that much less glorious than Blenheims.

And then there are peachcots.

Peachcots? We’d never heard of them until a year or two ago. At this point, precisely one vendor at one of the two Farmers’ Markets we go to has them–and for all of one week. We got ours last week. We probably won’t get any more. This is sad.

You can guess the cross from the name: A cross between peach and apricot. What you can’t guess is either the look or the taste.

The look? Smooth skin like an apricot, size larger than most apricots but smaller than most peaches…and color like an apricot with red tinges that’s been rendered using oversaturated artificial colors. An apricot the way Andy Warhol might paint one, or perhaps what you’d get taking a picture of an apricot using high dynamic range filtering.

The taste…heaven. Just plain heaven. Very strong apricot flavor, some peach flavor, almost sweet enough to be candy, with a great texture. As with most apricots, it’s a freestone fruit, which makes cutting and serving easy.

I just finished off lunch with two apricots, ten cherries and a peachcot. The apricots were excellent. The cherries were better. The peachcot…well, it was in a category all its own. I’ll miss them.

Followup, July 8: To our considerable surprise and pleasure, the same booth had peachcots again yesterday. So it will be another week before I start missing them…

I focused on exhibits during ALA Annual 2011, in addition to personal and business meetings. Given the book I’m working on, I was talking to self-publishers, small presses and distributors for independent publishers, but also noting exhibitors who seemed to have something unusual going on—and a few seeming trends in the exhibits as a whole.

Smith & Press (www.smithandpress.com)

This very small publisher produces new versions of very early books—the first offering being Hartmann Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum or Nuremberg Chronicle from 1493—a copy in the private collection of the publisher’s owner. They were showing all three versions being produced: A full-size facsimile limited to 100 copies, hand-bound in an astonishing binding made using the same materials and methods as the original (and costing several thousand dollars), a reference edition facsimile (85% size, 16.25×11.5″, on 70lb. paper in burgundy cloth binding, priced at $369), and an English translation with side-by-side facsimile and translation pages, issued in three volumes at $225 to $325 each (the first two volumes are currently available).

It’s clearly a labor of love, with superb handmade paper for the full-size facsimile and first-rate book paper for all three versions. Here’s the interesting part: The books are printed on…inkjet printers, namely large-format archival printers. (They’re thinking of doing a letterpress version of the full-size facsimile, but note that at that point they’ll have to use watermarks and other means to make it clear that this is a facsimile, not a forgery.)

Fascinating stuff. Beautiful paper, beautiful workmanship, an interesting blend of analog and digital tools.

Self-Publishers

I talked to a number of first-time exhibitors selling self-published books—or, in one case, selling books published by iUniverse.

I asked the iUniverse author for an honest opinion—and got it. The author would never, ever work with the company again—something I’ve heard previously from iUniverse, AuthorHouse and other similar “publishers” who charge hefty up-front fees.

On the other hand, a couple of authors using Outskirts Press were fairly happy with the services. That may not be surprising—while Outskirts is still selling packages, they’re more reasonably priced, and the company seems somewhat more upfront about what they do and don’t do.

Some self-publishers use CreateSpace or Lulu; they were uniformly positive about the experience and understood exactly what they were getting. I was informed of at least one more university press that is now using Lulu as its actual print provider, focusing the press itself on ebooks.

Then there’s PublishAmerica, which was there and whose representative made it appear to be a plausible alternative to Lulu and CreateSpace as a pure-play service provider, with no upfront costs. When I checked a little, I remembered PublishAmerica: It’s a peculiar situation, but not in any way comparable to Lulu or CreateSpace and generally, shall we say, not well-loved by its former authors. I picked up a few books at the exhibit and noted the same truly odd statement on the copyright page of each one, stating that the author’s words had not been changed at all. Since when is total lack of copy editing seen as a good thing? Yes, the author should have the final say, but as someone who’s published more than a dozen books (not including self-published books), I question whether there really are authors whose prose is so superb that it can’t benefit from judicious editing. If there are, I’m guessing they’re not publishing through PublishAmerica.

Small Publishers, Independent Publishers and Distributors

What’s an independent publisher? When I asked that of one distributor, the answer basically boiled down to “everybody but the Big Six”—or, a little more restrictively, every publisher that’s not part of a conglomerate. Chronicle Books? Yes, an independent publisher. Hyperion (part of Disney)? A tougher question.

The definition of small publisher is also getting interesting, given the growing number of publishers that rely on services like CreateSpace and Lulu for actual book production and, in many cases, fulfillment. This is, in my opinion, both a good thing and one of the trends that’s likely to grow in the mixed ebook/pbook future.

Here’s an interesting item: Boom! Studios, an independent publisher, publishes lots of Disney books (collected comic books and others). Disney itself has a Book Group, including Hyperion and several other imprints—but happily licenses some of its creations to other publishers.

Oddities and Trends

Why all the jewelry booths? For that matter, who would be buying sheets—bedsheets, that is—at an ALA annual conference? T-shirts I’m used to, and the vaguely creepy statuary, but it seemed as though there were more jewelry booths than I remember.

I was a little bemused by the Library Ideas, LLC booth. The flagship product is the Freegal Music Service—which I tend to think of as being a Sony product. Mysterious…

I was also impressed or bemused by the number of exhibitors showing book scanners (at least five, and I think that count is too low) and, a different group, book vending machines (I saw at least four, and again I think that’s a partial count). At least four exhibitors offer open-source library system support; that’s a good thing and suggests that the open-source systems (Koha, Evergreen and others) are doing well.

How many online catalogs and integrated library system vendors are out there? For many years, I’ve felt that the answer was the same as life, the universe and everything: 42 (give or take 10%). That still feels about right. Depending on how you add up numbers in the exhibitors index, there are at least 35 such vendors—and I’m pretty sure that’s not all-inclusive.

Then there’s furniture—at least 18 exhibitors—and the vast empty spaces found in so many of the furniture booths and, when I was in the exhibits (almost all day Saturday and about half of Sunday), most very large exhibit spaces (other than book publishers). I’m not sure what to make of this. Furniture vendors need to show their wares, of course. For others, perhaps some of the booths are a bit grander than they need to be.

Which brings me to the “who is this?” issue—booths that I think are badly designed for the exhibit hall. Specifically, booths where the primary or only corporate name display is on one of those really high hanging structures, signs that seem to be at least 18 feet up in the air. In the case of one furniture vendor, I could not identify the vendor when I was at the booth—I had to back away at least 20-30 feet and look up. Yes, I know, drama and all that—but perhaps self-defeating.

Closing Notes

The exhibits were an odd blend of crowded spaces and near-empty aisles, but I think that’s typical. Biggest crowds: As always, book publishers, especially those giving away advance reading copies. But there were also quite a few booths that seemed to have more booth staff than visitors, and a few where the booth staff seemed wholly engrossed in their own conversations, ignoring people passing by. (OK, if I’d been a potential customer instead of some random guy, maybe they would have snapped to attention. Maybe not.)

Trends? You want trends from a library conference exhibit hall? If so, you’ve come to the wrong place.