Walt at Random

The comma placement is deliberate. May’s been a somewhat slow month for posts here (although still ahead of my original two-a-week estimate), certainly much slower than April. And some posts might leave readers thinking that I’m sitting here brooding, waiting for comments, and essentially doing nothing but fretting over C&I.

Gone missing or worse, in other words.

Fortunately, that’s not true. Oh, I’d still love to see some sponsorship, and I still invite comments, and I’m still not quite sure how C&I is going to look in the future…

But, in fact, I haven’t been blogging because I’ve been active–making much faster (and, I think, better) progress on my next “real” book than I anticipated.

Part of that progress, oddly enough, will yield a self-pub. book in the very near future, one that might herald one aspect of C&I’s future. More about that when it happens. It’s something I thought about doing a long time ago, but at this point the self-pub. becomes part of the professional book preparation (in an odd way), which makes it well worth the effort.

Otherwise…well, I really should use the ALA conference scheduler, I suppose, and draw up a skeleton schedule for the time I’ll be in New Orleans–that’s just a month away! I know I’m looking forward to it (and, oddly enough, to the red-eye and the several hours I’ll be at SFO before the red-eye: I’m leaving from the brand-new Terminal Two, and that alone should be worth a couple hours of exploration); I don’t know what I’ll be doing. Yet.

I don’t believe we’ll have a 10th anniversary C&I gathering, since–other than one local offering to find a location–there has been precisely no indications of interest in such a gathering. I assume the Bloggers Salon is defunct, which is a shame, so I’m not sure where I’ll run into people (maybe the LITA Happy Hour, if I go–but I’m no longer a LITA member either), but I’ll certainly be spending a fair amount of time in the exhibits. (And, should vendors be so inclined, which they usually aren’t, I’d certainly look at reception invitations favorably.)

Anyway: Onward, upward, sideways–this project is going very well.

Big title, little post–and if that makes you think of a moderately recent Randy Newman song, so be it.

This is a minor thought or three on two things encountered while reading a bunch of books on self-publishing and skimming one on ebook design, as part of the work I’m doing on a future book…

Thought the First

Writing a book on a topic does not make you The Expert on that topic. And “reading everything ever written on a topic” doesn’t make you The Expert on that topic either–although making such a claim suggests a weak link with reality, since for all but the narrowest topics it’s an impossible goal.

Maybe that’s all that need be said here.

Thought the second

Maybe it’s reasonable to question your expertise about X when you pretty clearly loathe X, and your expertise on book design in a book I regard as horribly designed.

I won’t name names here, and I know book design is very much a matter of personal taste. However, when a writer sets out to tell me how to use Word to do something, and it becomes abundantly clear that the writer (a) doesn’t like Word, (b) REALLY doesn’t like Word, (c) hasn’t really used it for more than a decade, (d) doesn’t understand Word…well, maybe it’s not surprising that the author then spends twice as much space on using InDesign (which every real writer should, of course, use) as a Great HTML Editor.

And when loads of supposed expertise on how books (ebooks in this case) really should work and all the detailed XHTML-level editing you should do to make them right appears in a book that (a) uses Bradley Hand for headings, (b) uses a body typeface that is not only sans, but a sans that apparently doesn’t have a proper italic version (namely, italic text within the book always has slanted-normal “a”s–with the lower bowl and upper left curve–rather than the simpler a without the upper curve that’s part of every proper italic typeface I’ve ever seen)…could be Verdana, could be Arial, both of which seem to have this defect…

Well, maybe I shouldn’t take your work seriously at all. Oh, and while it’s supposedly about designing for all ereaders, it’s…interesting…that, in a relatively short book, the author finds it necessary to go through the coding and examples for every. single. typeface. that’s. installed. on. the. iPad. Including Zapfino… (Geez. If it wasn’t set in 12 point type with a full 4 points extra leading, the book would really be short.)

Minor (or not so minor) unrelated items:

• Dear Academic Journals: Sending me emails (from specific journal “editors”) asking me to review specific scholarly papers within a week’s turnaround, after zero advance vetting, with no prior agreement on my part to serve as a referee–and on topics consistently well outside even the broadest scope of my possible expertise–serve mostly to remove any question about the nature of your operation. “Refereed by random email recipients” is not the mark of a quality OA journal, and I hasten to add that there are many quality OA journals that do adhere to proper standards.
• Speaking of which, have I mentioned recently that everybody really should buy my terrific, world-changing, concise overview from ALA Editions, Open Access: What You Need to Know Now? 30,000 words of my best work–with the advantage of professional editing, copyediting and indexing–in a neat little package. You can buy an “eEditions” ebook bundle–a .zip file containg ePDF, ePub, Kindle and MobiPocket versions–or, if you’re so inclined, buy a Kindle edition as a direct Amazon Kindle download.
• I was reminded again this week of that important internet truth: “Don’t feed the trolls.” And two corollaries: “Learn to recognize a troll” and “Don’t become a troll–at least not too often.”
• An interesting week, beginning under the weather (some odd combo of upper respiratory virus/flu and something like food poisoning–I’m mostly better now) and continuing with crucial next steps in two Real Book projects. To wit, the first half of the advance for my 2012 project was deposited to my account (and the countersigned contract is in the mail), while the signed contract for my 2011 project (which might not actually appear until 2012) arrived yesterday (and the countersigned copy will go out in today’s mail). I continue to be excited about both projects…and am more than 1/3 of the way through the rough draft for the 2011 project, one I truly believe will be worth having for nearly every public library.
• And there’s a new Cites & Insights issue…a two-month combo to leave some room to think about C&I and work on other stuff.
• An odd little Slate article about rules for punctuation and quotation marks that asserts that British style is “logical” and U.S. style isn’t. The writer seems to be saying that stuff on the web represents better editorial practice than copyedited material. To me, the U.S. rule is the “flyspeck rule.” To wit: Too often, a period or comma following a closing quotation mark–especially when using proportional type, which today means “almost all the time”–looks like a flyspeck on the page, an accident rather than a purposeful mark. Yes, that’s an aesthetic argument; I also believe it’s a reasonable one. It’s fair to say that I plan to continue following U.S. rules here, and that I find the British practice no more logical than the U.S. practice. Oh, and as for the Oxford comma (properly the “serial comma,” what I think of as the penultimate comma, as it follows the penultimate item in a list)? Call me an AP man in this case–I prefer not to use the serial comma unless it’s needed to reduce ambiguity. (Note that: I do use serial commas when required to reduce ambiguity.) As it happens, I’m being inconsistent, since the serial comma is less commonly used in Britain and in other languages.

Hmm. Maybe not quite as random as I thought. Perhaps worth noting: I wouldn’t argue with a copyeditor on serial commas–and, in fact, I normally make a point of not going back to my original manuscript when reviewing galleys, assuming that professional editors usually know what they’re doing–but I think I’d be dismayed if I published through a UK publisher and saw a bunch of flyspecks at the end of quoted material.

 

I occasionally post something here (or write something as a Bibs & Blather in Cites & Insights) about possible Major Projects I’ve considered, abandoned, or whatever.

As I look back, it appears that I haven’t actually done a coherent list of possible projects since February 2009; I’ve just noted individual things along the way. Given events of the past two weeks, I think an update is in order.

Or, rather, two updates.

1. Updating the February 2009 list

Here’s what I said in February 2009 as to possible projects at this point–not including my fifth choice, “treat semi-retirement more seriously,” which could have been worded “remove the semi- from semi-retired; take up golf or gardening or yelling at kids to get offa my lawn or, more realistically, get heavily involved with the local Friends of Libraries”:

Here’s the list, in alphabetic order for want of any better:

1. Balanced Libraries, Second Edition (incorporating Library 2.0 & “Library 2.0″)
2. Blogging for Libraries – A replacement for Public Library Blogs and Academic Library Blogs but done in a very different way.
3. The Liblog Landscape Revisited - Some differences in approach, but largely an one- or two-year update.
4. Library as short-run publisher – A workshop and book on no-cost print-on-demand publishing for public (and academic) libraries, for their own purposes and to aid patrons (e.g., genealogists and others).

And here’s what’s happened with each of the four:

1. Nothing so far. I did a major follow-up to the original essay. So far, combining those two and other essays into a book doesn’t seem like either a great or a terrible idea. Maybe closer to “terrible.”
2. Didn’t happen, not going to happen, no way.
3. Sigh. I did this. Twice. The first one sold badly (21 copies to date, as compared to 69 for the original). The second one barely sold at all (it’s still stuck at two-digit total sales, but hope springs…well, maybe not eternal). I am not doing a 2011 version, even though the semi-comprehensive nature of the 2010 version almost calls out for continuing study. Without upfront funding, that’s just not gonna happen. See #4 and the rest of this post, along with people directly telling me that not only wouldn’t they pay for the book but they really didn’t give a damn about the whole thing, to understand why. I’m a slow learner, obviously, but not wholly incorrigible.
4. Here, I got somewhat positive feedback–but ran up against issues with workshops and bigger issues with trying to do it as a self-published work. I concluded that it only made sense if it could get a wide library audience, which meant having a reputable library publisher behind it, and that maybe it was a little premature. Well, I now have a highly reputable library publisher behind it, and I no longer think it’s premature. Which leads us to…

2. Where things stand as of now

• I’m starting serious work on a new book project based on idea #4, not necessarily for libraries as publishers (although that might make sense in some cases) but for libraries as facilitators for community members. I believe it’s going to be a great, relatively brief, book (that could lead to workshops if there’s demand) that will be immediately useful for nearly every public library and possibly many academic libraries. It will be published by a major library publisher with a good track record for reasonable pricing, good publicity and good editorial quality–but it will also be an example of what it espouses (walking the talk), as the typography and layout will be done by me, using Word2010 and a .dotx template that will be readily available for use by others. This project will get the bulk of my extra time from now through early fall; not sure when it will appear, but hoping for the first half of 2012. I’m excited about this one: I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, I think the conditions are better now than ever before, and those I’ve talked to–including my wife, not always enthusiastic about these projects–is reasonably enthusiastic about the possibilities.
• While #2 above is dead in the water, I will be working on a somewhat related project, primarily this fall and next winter: the actual experience of (primarily public) libraries in social networks (primarily Twitter and Facebook), based on a combination of broad research, requests for feedback and comments from libraries, and other resources. I believe this one will also be immediately useful to most public and many academic libraries.  (No, it will not be 170 pages of tables and charts, although there will be some tables.) It will be published by another leading library publisher with a good track record for editorial quality, good publicity and books that aren’t wildly expensive. No idea of the schedule; guessing latter half of 2012.
• I’m pondering some possible major changes to the way Cites & Insights operates, although I’ve made no firm decisions yet. Some changes might be visible as early as this summer.
• There’s one new thing that seems likely to come to pass, but I’m not willing to talk about it until it’s a done deal. If it happens, chances are you’ll see something late this summer or early this fall…

I suspect that I’ll start fomenting new “big project” ideas around the time I’m polishing the submission draft for the second book noted above; as long as I can find at least one good topic a year that meets three tests, I’ll keep looking for and working on them. The three tests:

1. It’s something I believe I can do well that either hasn’t been done before or hasn’t been done nearly as well as I believe I can do it.
2. It’s something I believe will add value to the library community.
3. It’s something a library publisher (or, I suppose, some other “traditional” publisher) will put under contract. After my experiences with self-publishing, I’m becoming a great believer in “Show me the contract!” as a way of testing likely marketability…and of letting the experts do the marketing (and help polish my books through editing).

In case it isn’t obvious from all this: I may be discouraged about a few situations and apparent failures, but I’m not giving up–and the two book contracts surely help keep me upbeat and moving forward!

This is a story about the significance of layout and paying at least nominal attention. Maybe it won’t matter to other people. I wonder…

Background

When I go to the library, I usually pick up three books: One genre (alternating mystery & sf/f), one “mainstream” fiction, one nonfiction.

This week, the “mainstream” fiction was a book that looked intriguing in a subgenre that can be fun, the political thriller: “Capital Offense” by Kathleen Antrim. I’d never heard of her, but the flap copy made it look at least mildly interesting. So I checked it out.

Primary: The Problems

Started reading it. The prose isn’t polished, but I’m not sure I’d do any better writing fiction, so I’m not judging that just yet.

But something was bothering me–getting in the way of fully enjoying the story. I knew there had been something odd about the title sheet (no obvious publisher name on the verso, the silly “No part of this book” copyright claim that’s both unenforceable and legally false…and the fact that a badly-formatted CiP record was on its own recto page). But, hey…

Then I looked at the pages I was reading and realized the problem–or, rather, problems.

The typeface is a typical, conservative serif, which I haven’t attempted to identify. The text is fully justified. Margins are a little narrow (body width is 28 picas; I think 24-26 picas looks nicer, especially for a 6×9 hardback), but not so much so as to be terrible.

But…

• There’s no kerning. At all. “Warner”–which appears all the time, as that’s the name of one of the two primary characters–looks a little odd. “You” or “Yours” looks really strange, with the “Y” stranded well to the left of the rest of the word…
• There’s no hyphenation–that is, words are never broken across lines. The result is sometimes   very     wide  spacing  erratically   between words–maybe not as bad as this line, but pretty bad. (Actually, it is that bad sometimes: I see spots where two or even three characters on one line appear over a between-word space on the next line down. And there are rivulets of white where overly-wide spacing happens on three or more successive lines.)
• There are loads of bad breaks–single words on their own lines at the bottom of paragraphs, which create a somewhat jumbled page, especially when paragraphs tend to be short.
• Dashes appear as either two or three hyphens, not as em or en dashes.
• Relatively minor, but the running page header and footer appear on otherwise-blank verso pages (the book starts each section and chapter on the recto), which is just odd. You get a blank page with “Kathleen Antrim” at the top left corner and a page number centered at the bottom.

In some ways, I’m almost surprised that quote marks aren’t inch signs. On the other hand, widows and orphans–single lines of multiline paragraphs either at the top of one page or at the bottom–are avoided.

Would the average reader notice this? I’m not sure. I do suspect that many readers would find that this novel reads more slowly and is more distancing than it might otherwise be. For me, it’s not quite a showstopper, but certainly gets in the way.

And here’s the thing: Most of this–kerning, hyphenation, using em dashes instead of double-hyphens–is handled automatically by truly sophisticated high-dollar software such as, oh, Microsoft Word. Automatically. Yes, even Word2000. I know that for a fact. You can go back and look at Cites & Insights 1:1 if you want proof.

Yes, bad breaks require a little manual work (although I’m guessing some DTP software handles them automatically), although not really a lot.

So how did this ghastly layout–or, rather, non-layout–happen?

1stBooks

The “publisher” is 1stBooks Library, at least for the first edition in 2001. (If you look in WorldCat, you’ll mostly see iBooks, which picked it up a little later.)

1stBooks is either a self-publisher or a vanity press, depending on your definition, and one that offers to lay out your books. Apparently, at least in 2001, this is their definition of laying out your book–for a minimum of $999. (1stBooks is now a division of AuthorHouse, which does very much the same thing, albeit sometimes at a slightly lower price.)

Oddly enough, the flap copy on the jacket is kerned and does use em dashes (as does the CiP record, although it’s distinctly unkerned). Since that copy is set flush left, the lack of hyphenation isn’t particularly important.

Maybe It Doesn’t Matter?

Antrim did decently with this book, supposedly selling 10,000 copies before iBooks picked it up. It looks as though 138 libraries in WorldCat own it, primarily the iBooks edition(s), which is far from best-seller level but not bad. It’s probably in my library (Livermore Public) because Antrim’s local (Pleasanton, I think): the copy is autographed, although oddly enough “To Terry”

I think it does matter. If I go forward with one project (still waiting for word from the publisher), part of the result will be an easy guide to making book pages look better, copyfitting if you will. I’d guess that it would take me one or two days, at worst, to go through this 290-page book fixing bad breaks. Most of the problems–lack of kerning, lack of hyphenation, lack of em dashes–would require no work other than checking a few settings in Word. Well, and a global edit for the strange triple dashes…

If you look at this book and don’t find the problems I’m finding, check the imprint: Most likely, you’re looking at an iBooks copy, and they may have done some plausibly professional layout, or at least allowed software to do the minimal work.

As for the book itself? I’m past the Pearl limit, and it’s definitely a page-turner if I ignore the sometimes clumsy writing (here, again, I’m not sure I’d do as well) and the always clumsy layout. So far, no overall opinion. Or maybe I’m being kind. (When I looked up some sources, I get Antrim’s apparent surprise at finding that the spouses of U.S. presidents aren’t legally accountable to anybody in the government. This is a surprise? That there’s no Spouse Act in the Constitution?)

Last Friday, as promised (sometimes as a secondary topic) in posts on March 28, 2011, March 25, 2011, March 15, 2011, February 14, 2011, January 22, 2011, January 4, 2011, January 2, 2011, December 28, 2010, December 6, 2010, November 4, 2010, and the original announcement on November 1, 2010 [omitting a number of other mentions of the limited-edition book], and on the front page of Cites & Insights December 2010, I removed disContent: The Complete Collection from sale.

This apparently took Jason Griffey by surprise, since–after never commenting on any of the dozen previous notes–he posted this comment on the April 1 post’s FriendFeed subject-line repost:

Question: why retire a print on demand title? I’m curious…even if it didn’t sell as you’d hoped, why not allow it to stay as a choice?

I snapped just a little when I read that, since I had the impression that I’d given at least one or two previous notices that the book would disappear and why that was so. I felt that Griffey was being deliberately provocative. My response was a trifle hostile; you can read it and the rest of the interchange, if you wish, here.

This post really isn’t about that discussion. There’s no reason Griffey or anybody else should pay attention to any of these posts; that’s entirely their choice. Paying such remarkably selective attention…well, maybe I’m guilty of uncharitable reaction, but I’m not offering an apology.

What I am offering is some other reasons that print on demand titles can and will be retired. These may be of interest, particularly to those who assume that they can move to just-in-time collections because, you know, if anybody ever really wants something, they can just order up a copy, particularly whenif PoD systems are spread through every village and town.

This is certainly an incomplete list; it’s really a top-of-my-head post.

Reasons Self-Publishers Might Retire PoD Titles

• Ongoing costs associated with the titles. Right now, Lulu doesn’t charge for maintaining PoD offerings indefinitely, an admirable policy that might continue or might not. CreateSpace does have an annual fee for all but the most basic level of availability; when that annual fee exceeds the annual revenue from a title, sane authors might very well retire those titles. I haven’t researched other PoD resources, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see annual carrying fees.
• Obsolescence. I would be inclined to retire titles that I felt were outdated enough to be curiosities as currently-for-sale books (as opposed to library holdings or used copies). So, I suspect, would others–which might or might not mean that new editions would appear.
• Frustration/Irritation. I’ve retired some Lulu books because I found the lack of response irritating and frustrating, and lack the marketing knowhow to do much about it. I’d bet that some other self-publishing authors feel the same way.
• Explicitly limited editions. One of the (IMHO) absurd premises in Andersonomics or Freeconomics is that, for more than a tiny handful of well-known authors and maybe a larger group of musical groups, your devoted fans will pay for special limited editions, enough to make up for your other work being free. Limited editions have no additional value if they’re not limited. In this particular case, the book was a really neat item but also a test case. Breaking my promise to retire it on April 1, 2011 (originally March 1, 2011) would have been, well, breaking my promise.
• Death or retirement. I don’t know whether Lulu has some cleanup process when authors’ PayPal connections or email addresses cease to function, either because authors have died or have given up on online or Lulu without bothering to do cleanup work. If they don’t, they should.
• Disappearing services. This is a biggie, as it could result in the retirement of hundreds of thousands or even millions of titles at once. I’m certain there are already PoD operations that have gone out of business. I doubt that either CreateSpace or Lulu is enormously profitable. I’m guessing that very few authors host their own PoD systems (including all the fulfillment issues); to do so is to become a small publisher, with significant capital outlay. When the service disappears, all titles on that service are immediate retired until/unless the author finds another PoD service. Which authors probably won’t bother to do for titles that aren’t yielding significant sales.
• Whim. When a book is made available as a PoD book, there is no explicit or implicit promise to libraries or anyone else that it will always be available. An author may properly choose to retire a book for any reason whatsoever or for no reason whatsoever.

Ah, but PoD isn’t just about self-publishers.

Reasons Publishers Might Retire PoD Titles

Pay particular attention to the final bullet here…

• Ongoing maintenance costs. Yes, the cost of server space is trivial, too small to even measure for most PoD items (since a book-length PDF is unlikely to be more than 2-3 megabytes for a text book)–but there are other costs, including those of maintaining accounting for the book and some level of availability information. Once PoD sales fall below a certain level, publishers might well choose to retire the items.
• Some of the same reasons as self-publishers. Specifically obsolescence and disappearing services–and, to be sure, disappearing publishers.
• New reversion clauses. Sooner or later–and I’m guessing smart authors are looking into it now–authors will come up with new reversion clauses for books that remain “in print” through PoD but are neither being promoted nor have significant sales. Many book contracts have reversion clauses so that, once a book is out of print, the author regains full rights in the book and can take it to another publisher or self-publish it. This is particularly crucial when publishers let authors down, by failing to promote or adequately support titles. With PoD, it’s possible for a book to be “in print” permanently even though the publisher really isn’t supporting it…and authors need new reversion clauses. (I haven’t attempted to do this in contracts yet, but might. One possible form: When physical inventory is less than X copies and fewer than X copies per six-month accounting period have been sold on PoD, reversion takes effect…) Reversion requires that the publisher’s PoD version be retired.

I’ve probably missed a bunch of others. The key here is that PoD is no guarantee that a book will be available forever; it’s just a print fulfillment methodology.

Yesterday, I received an advance copy of Open Access: What You Need to Know Now.

In case you haven’t ordered it yet for your library (and maybe for some of your librarians), you really should–certainly for every public library and every special library that serves researchers, and I think most public libraries should also be aware of these things.

ISBN 978-0-8389-1106-8. $45 ($40.50 for ALA members).

I pretty much knew how it was going to look–after all, the “galleys” were in the form of a PDF, lacking only the (very good six-page) index and cover. I had a pretty good idea what the cover would look like, since this is an ALA Editions Special Report, with a uniform cover design differing only in primary color. It looks great, actually–set in Palatino Linotype with headings and quoted material in Avenir.

It’s 76 pages long, 8.5×11″–and the more I think about it, the more I think that has its advantages, particularly for a book like this one. Namely, it looks short and easy to read–in some ways, even shorter than it actually is. (It’s 30,000 words. If I reformat the text as a 6×9 paperback, it would be almost exactly the same thickness as First Have Something to Say–around 130 pages with index.)

I’d like to think it is easy to read (I certainly tried to write clearly), but there’s also quite a bit of meat here, including lots of ways to find out more about open access.

The back cover has wonderful blurbs from three people I regard as important for open access–the same three people who reviewed the draft version and gave me considerable help in making the final version better. They know how much improvement there was…

Here’s what they have to say:

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.:

“Open Access: What You Need to Know Now is an insightful, concise overview of the open access movement by one of librarianship’s best authors. Highly recommended.”

Dorothea Salo:

“Walt calmly and lucidly lays out the complexities and perplexities of the open-access movement in this evenhanded guide. Recommended for all librarians interested in serials, scholarly communication, or the future of research and research libraries.”

Peter Suber:

“Walt Crawford has done something difficult and useful. He’s written a short, accurate, independent introduction to open access. I recommend it to researchers and libraries everywhere, and hope it corrects misunderstandings that have held back this good idea for years.”

I am, of course, extremely grateful for these kind words, particularly coming from people who’ve done more than I have to move OA forward.

I do believe this is both the right length and the right time.

In some ways, this may be the most important book I’ve ever written. It deserves wide reading, within the library field and among researchers and funders.

Update: I’m informed that there is also a Kindle edition available right this very minute, for those who prefer ebooks–and it’s only $36.

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On a side note, this is my first non-self-published book in eight years. It was a pleasure to work with ALA Editions. And for those who think professional publishers always take forever to get anything done, I would note that it took no more than four months from the time I sent ALA Editions the manuscript to the time the book emerged in print. That’s part of the Special Reports idea, and it works.

Oh, and I don’t believe it will be eight more years before my next book from a “real” publisher (as opposed to surreal publishers like Cites & Insights Books). More on that when something happens.

I know that I’m never going to run out of new reading, even at the increased pace I seem to be reaching (that is, a book a week or thereabouts, counting as “book” only, well, actual books)–but sometimes I want to take a fresh look at memories of bygone years.

I’ve been thinking about one group of writers I think of as the humorist/essayists, although that’s probably the wrong term. These are folks I read, as much as I could find, some decades ago and enjoyed thoroughly–and I’m wondering whether they’ll stand up to rereading.

Who? Five names comes to mind immediately, but one of the five is a ringer: He’s my age and only well known as an essayist in fairly recent years, and I mostly want to read more of his writing.

Three really are from bygone days: SJ Perelman, James Thurber and Robert Benchley. One is somewhere in between: Woody Allen. The ringer is Steve Martin.

I have a feeling I’m forgetting some of the greats from 40 years ago, when I was doing a lot of this reading; maybe they’ll come to me while browsing the shelves (a combination of short stories, since Livermore shelves those separately, and other classifications–maybe 813.54 or thereabouts? That’s an ignorant guess, since I don’t know Dewey worth a damn).

Turns out Livermore doesn’t own any Perelman–maybe he’s faded away more than I thought. The others are fairly well represented (at least three of them also in films, to be sure). My best guess: The first three will still be funny, Steve Martin will still be great, and Woody Allen…….well, I’m not sure how he’ll fare.

I’m pretty sure the political humorists–Art Buchwald and the lot–won’t have aged very well, and I’ve forgotten most of them.

These are idle musings, but I will start rereading some of this stuff soon. I never subscribed to The New Yorker, home base for much of the best of this sort of writing; maybe I should change that.

There is, to be sure, a solution for Livermore’s lack of Perelman–and for Livermore’s lack of Barbara Fister (I’ve grown to respect her writing and thinking so much that I really want to try her crime novels, but I want to read one before I go out and buy them), for that matter: Link+, the fairly large library cooperative in Northern California that’s surprisingly well integrated into the local catalog. I’ve never used it; that’s about to change, I think.

Amazing: A post about books.

(Yes, I have some thoughts about the current ebook kerfuffle–and about the extent to which public libraries have pushed ebooks and ereaders despite the lack of ownership that was almost certain to lead to stuff like this. But I don’t know when or whether I’ll post anything about it…there are others much closer to the situation, and at least one of them has already said “Why is anybody surprised by this?,” which is a good starting point for a longer conversation.)

I am delighted to announce that my new book (and first book from a “real publisher” in eight years) will be out in March–and is available for preorder now.

Open Access: What You Need to Know Now offers a concise overview of OA in a 80-page, 8.5×11″ ALA Editions Special Report. Here’s what the order page says:

Academic libraries routinely struggle to afford access to expensive journals, and patrons may not be able to obtain every scholarly paper they need. Is Open Access (OA) the answer? In this ALA Editions Special Report, Crawford helps readers understand what OA is (and isn’t), as he concisely

• Analyzes the factors that have brought us to the current state of breakdown, including the skyrocketing costs of science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM) journals; consolidation of publishers and diminishing price competition; and shrinking library budgets
• Summarizes the benefits and drawbacks of different OA models, such as “Green,” “Gold,” Gratis,” “Libre,” and various hybrid forms
• Discusses ways to retain peer-review, and methods for managing OA in the library, including making OA scholarly publishing available to the general public

Addressing the subject from the library perspective while taking a realistic view of corporate interests, Crawford presents a coherent review of what Open Access is today and what it may become.

I believe this book fills a need–not only in the library community but beyond. It’s a reasonably fast read but also a set of resources for further use.

Dorothea Salo, Peter Suber and Charles W. Bailey, Jr., all deserve credit for reading the draft version, offering honest suggestions and criticism and leading to a much better final version. Dorothea in particular was usefully frank, as I’d expect.

The book is available now for preorder. It costs $45.

Psst. Wanna buy a book of mine for only $10? A book with none of those fancy-dancy wraparound cover photos?

Well, here’s your chance–although I’m not sure how long it will last:

Refining Your PoD Book: Quick Notes on Typography and Copyfitting

It’s 38 whole pages long. It’s 6×9. The cover is…well, it’s one of Lulu’s freebie backgrounds and templates, and as with many of those, it seems to have a lot of room for text on the back cover. I’ve never used a Lulu cover before (as opposed to either uploading front & back images or uploading a wraparound image), and I’ll probably never use one again…but the circumstances this time are, well, unusual.

Why does this book(let) exist?

Two overlapping reasons:

• My wife agreed to speak at a local genealogical/history society about how she went about self-publishing two books on her family’s history. The people doing the inviting also wanted me to spend a few minutes talking about the actual Lulu process–I think I have ten minutes. And, of course, they want PowerPoint. So my wife suggested that I take a dummy book through the stages of project definition and uploading, maybe canceling it at the last step, capturing screenshots along the way for PPT.
• I’ve written a preliminary proposal–which needs refining–to do a book on how public libraries (or libraries in general) can help tell the stories in their communities by facilitating self-publishing, without spending serious money on software. That means using Word (or OpenOffice) and some form of PDF generator, but nothing more (except, I suppose, some sort of image editor to build a good-looking cover).  If I did that book, a portion of it would be on the steps between finishing the manuscript (including editing and proofreading) and having a book–including appropriate use of templates and styles, typographic choices within Office2007 (I’ll update that to Office2010 if/when there’s a book contract), type size and leading, justification…and the wonderful world of copyfitting.

I decided to use a very crude version of that portion as my “dummy book.” No, it’s not Copyfitting for Dummies–I suspect I’d get sued the minute a book with that title was available on Lulu. It’s also not, how you say, terribly polished.

So now I’ll actually upload the promised free template (turns out Word2007 really doesn’t have any decent general-purpose book templates, and Lulu’s templates are on the crude side) and put all the PNG files (prepared using Snipping Tool, which I really, really like) into PPT slides…and then write up a 10-minute set of notes for the 16 slides (some of which might disappear).

So, you know, I’m not exactly promoting the book–but I’m also leaving it available, at least for now. At 38 pages, there’s not enough spine for spine text. Oh, and if you have a curious fascination (or want to offer advice on how I should do this better or why I shouldn’t do it at all) but aren’t ready to spend $10+shipping, the PDF is a free download. Free strikes me as a plausible price.

Just a quick note along the way as to how various forms of using Andersonomics to keep most of my content free are working out:

• Number of copies of The Liblog Landscape 2007-2010 sold in last four weeks: Zero.
• Number of copies of the signed limited-edition disContent: The Complete Collection sold in last eight weeks: Zero. [Number of weeks remaining: Six. Number of copies still available: 97.]
• Amount of donations received via pay-what-it’s-worth links for Cites & Insights within the last eight months: Zero.
• Oh, I forgot this one: You get great highly-paid speaking invitations when you give away good content. Number of speaking invitations within the last eight months (or number of paid/expenses-reimbursed invitations within the last 18 months): Zero.

Interest in doing more publicity posts to try to engender some interest in either of the two books: Zero.

Meanwhile, the proofs for my first traditionally-published book in eight years look really good… and yes, I’m working on some other book proposals for traditional publishers.

Belief in “freeconomics” as a reasonable way for a non-rockstar with a fairly strong readership to make content free and still make enough money to even pay for new versions of Office or annual website hosting: Zero.

Seems like this is the time people are posting their reading accomplishments for 2010–lists of books or at least counts of books read.

Which seems like a good idea.

But I don’t have one, because that’s one of many areas of my life that just aren’t that organized. I have a teeny-tiny Books database, but it’s just for authors and series that I either want to follow but not check out more than once, or maybe want to avoid having read one of them.

Maybe that would be a 2011 Resolution, if I was given to Resolutions: Keep track of the books I’ve read.

My guess is that I read roughly 50-52 books last year, but it could have been slightly lower than that. The basis for the guess:

• Livermore Public’s borrowing period is four weeks. I get three books at a time, so my goal for the year was, presumably, to read at least 39 books (13 four-week periods, three books each).
• I’ve almost always gone back after three weeks, not four, but “almost” may mean that I’ve only taken out, say, 16×3 books, not 17×3. I did renew one book during the year, but made up for that.
• I gave up on one book partway through. But I also read two books (other than my own) that didn’t come from the library.

Book equivalents? No idea. I currently take something like 22 magazines (18 subscriptions, four as a result of memberships), and that includes all three of the “major” science fiction magazines, two issues of which are at least the equivalent of a book–so those three alone account for 18 book-equivalents (actually, there are only 26 issues, but 10 of those are double issues, each of which has a book’s worth of content). The others aren’t quite as text-heavy.

Hmm. Worth keeping track of reading? Maybe. Maybe not: Laziness calls. Oh, if you care about the fiction/nonfiction breakdown, that’s easy: One-third nonfiction, one-third “genre fiction” (split between mysteries and SF), one-third “mainstream” fiction.

Incidentally, for anybody so bored that they’re still reading, the one time I gave up on a book (The Black Swan), it was because I found the author insufferable. Right now, I’m reading a nonfiction book where I disagree with the author on many counts and think he’s foolish on some–but he’s also engaging and writes reasonably well, so this one I’ll finish.

Enough idle posting. Back to reading other people’s online content…and working on The Next Big Essay.

The book: iCon: Steve Jobs, the greatest second act in the history of business. By Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon, published 2005.

I figured the first word in the title was a play on icon, not some “con” indication, given that Jeffrey S. Young is a founding editor of Macworld and wrote the “classic hagiobiography” Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward. At worst, you figure the book will try to make Jobs’ fairly consistent behavior toward colleagues, friends and competitors (from the time he screwed Wozniak out of several hundred dollars by flat-out lying to him and his initial refusal to admit he’d fathered a daughter forward) some set of minor flaws wholly outweighed by his magnificence–after all, even the jacket copy calls Jobs in the early Apple era “avatar of the computer revolution” and calls him “the most influential figure of the age–a master of three industries: movies, music, and computers” and “the Digital King.”

What I got in the book is more interesting than what I expected–and it really appears to be two different books.

The first book, which takes up the first 230 pages and runs through Jobs’ triumphs at Pixar, is excellent: Well written, well edited, reasonably well balanced given the writers, mostly covering territory I’d already seen covered elsewhere but with a fair amount of panache. Yes, there’s too much discussion of Disney’s internal problems for a book that’s supposedly about Jobs, but that’s OK.

Then there’s Part Three, Defining the Future, the last 90-odd pages. It’s a flat-out mess: Badly written, with constantly shifting tenses, repetition and more; apparently unedited; veering into pure Jobs worship before too long. (Note that the book came out after the iPod and before the iPhone.) The writers seem to predict that the Mac Mini would restore Apple’s rightful dominance in the computer marketplace, that Pages would destroy Microsoft Word, and that “Steve Jobs is going to best Bill Gates”–that’s a direct quote, and it’s the full sentence. Oh, and that the flaws of “our heroes” aren’t important: “it’s not the flaws we need to remember but the achievements.”

Why such a disconnect between the polish of the first 240 pages and the fanboy draft mode of the last 91? I’m not sure. A few chapters deal with events within a year of the book’s publication, and may simply have been rushed to completion. Otherwise, I just don’t know. I do know this: I really felt as though I was reading a different book by different authors–and I was disappointed. Not because they wind up with a fatuous “Steve Conquers All” finale, but because the book falls apart in the final chapters.

Just for fun, I looked at reviews of the book available via Worldcat and on Amazon. I should not have been surprised: Most reviews seem to be by people for whom Steve Jobs Can Do No Wrong, and savage the writers for including the details of his earlier years, some of them even seeming to suggest that these are vicious lies by monstrous writers out to slander The Jobs.

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Updated 3:50 p.m. 11/27: “Page” corrected to “Pages” in antepenultimate paragraph (how often do you get to use that word?). Thanks to Dorothea S. for pointing out the typo.

Once again, it’s a good thing: Few posts because energy spent on other things. To wit:

The first draft of The Project–that is, “Open Access: What You Need to Know,” an ALA Editions Special Report that will appear in 2011–is complete, and starting today/tomorrow I’ll do the Big Changes: Integrating a fair amount of new material (some of it from “a dozen or so” delicious entries that turn out to be, oog, 88 of them), refining organization, clarifying, aiming toward a second draft that’s probably publishable. That won’t be what I submit to the publisher, but the third (and final) draft should be mostly refinement. (Given that blog posts are “not quite first drafts” and most C&I essays are roughly 1.5th drafts, doing three drafts is unusual for me.)

The Other Project–current working title “The Way We Blog: English-Language Liblogs 2007-2010″–gets a little attention when I’m not working on the book, and got a lot during a few days while letting the first draft sit (complete) before revisiting it. Now up to 1,250 liblogs and another 1,262 excluded candidates. A few (anywhere from 5 to 20) more hours of data gathering to do, before setting it aside until it’s time to start the analysis and writing, probably after C&I resumes and the book is complete.

A couple of changes at home (OK, finally getting an HDTV after discussing it for 2-3 years) have taken up quite a bit of time, and that’s not quite done.

I’m learning a lot along the way in The Other Project, as I expanded it from “liblogs that show up in one of the typical places” to “liblogs the existence of which I can discover.” For example:

• There’s a large and extremely vigorous group of liblogs almost none of which show up in the typical places (they have their own typical places), namely kidlit and tween/teen/YA lit blogs (I’m only including ones clearly by library people–not all the others). I mean extremely vigorous. I wonder when some of these people sleep…
• I’d already apologized for an intemperate post a couple of years ago about what program is used by most libloggers. Turns out, I suspect, that the only answer is the usual one: “It depends.” For example, Blogger seems pretty clearly to be the platform of choice for many or most of these book review blogs, even while WordPress is pretty clearly the platform of choice for experienced tech, etc., liblogs. But that’s preliminary.
• A few blog templates (or individual choices) seem to go out of their way to discourage reading more than either the most recent post or the most recent handful of posts–e.g., blogs with neither archives nor “older post” controls, or blogs that show “older posts” one. post. at. a. time, with no monthly or weekly archive functions. Such is life.
• Relatively few bloggers are adopting light-text-on-dark templates (although I was astonished to see a highly-touted new WordPress template that’s exactly that)…but there are some, and one or two that use the even worse black-text-on-dark or purple-text-on-black template, or something other that actively resists reading. I usually take the hint.

So there’s an update, such as it is. Now, off to make sense of those 88 items tagged “OA” in delicious. I would have sworn it was only a dozen or so…

Oh, by the way: Lulu’s summer free delivery sale ends either today or tomorrow.

The good news: I’ve started in on The New Project (a fast-turnaround, relatively brief book for a real library publisher, on a topic I’m quite comfortable with–more later). First of six chapters has a good rough draft in place. Second of six chapters has the first half of a very good rough draft, and I expect to do the second half tomorrow.

The odd news: I haven’t entirely set aside the Liblog Project (here’s the most recent post, which links to the others). It was the kind of thing I could work on after mowing the lawn in 88F weather (which was too tiring to focus on real writing) and in logical pauses during the writing. Here’s what’s happened:

• I decided to change the boundaries for the “deep look” so that it includes blogs with GPR of 3 (of which there were apparently 83, but really 81) and, after looking at them more, blogs with only one post during March-May 2010 (of which there were 67). So I’ve added the comment counts and length totals for 2010 and, where not already there, earlier post counts, comment counts and length totals for March-May 2007, 2008 and 2009 as appropriate.
• While doing that, I started cutting-and-pasting blogrolls that appeared to be library-oriented and consisted only of blog links (there’s a new breed of blogroll that includes the latest headline and date for each blog; WAY too much work to strip down to links, and glancing at most of them says all or nearly all are already in the study).
• So far, 22 of the 148 blogs had usable blogrolls (that weren’t obviously all repeats). The list of unsorted, unchecked candidates is 543 blogs. After Chapter 2 is done (and the Wednesday hike, and other stuff, and maybe Chapter 3), I’ll do the sort/dedupe/check step and, assuming anything’s left, check the remaining candidates. If I get more than, say, 4 or 5 new-to-me liblogs out of that process, I might continue picking up blogrolls. If not, not.

I also realized that I really have four groups of liblogs and that some portions of the analysis and narrative ought to treat them as four separate groups, not just two groups. As things stand, the four groups–which don’t include the 720 “not liblogs” that will be treated summarily–look like this:

• Group 1: Fairly active and fairly visible blogs. Liblogs with a Google Page Rank of 4 or higher that have at least three posts between March 1 and May 31, 2010. So far, there are 394 of those.
• Group 2: Less active or less visible blogs. Liblogs with Google Page Rank 3 or that had only one or two posts during the quarter. So far, there are 156 of those. The combination of Groups 1 and 2 constitutes the Deep Look pool, 550 liblogs in total. (So the comment somebody made that “there seem to be around 500 active liblogs” seems to be right enough for jazz…)
• Group 3: Probably alive but relatively inactive or invisible. Basically, these are all the liblogs that don’t qualify for the Deep Look but that seem to still be around. That includes active blogs with Google Page Rank lower than 3, blogs with no posts during the quarter but at least one post since December 1, 2009, and blogs with no posts during the half-year between December 1 and May 31, but with at least one post since May 31, 2010. There are 210 of these.
• Group 4: Canceled or deeply moribund. (Canceled blogs only appear here if they didn’t qualify for Group 1 or Group 2: A liblog that’s explicitly canceled during or after March 1-May 31 is considered active for that quarter. There are a small handful of those.) These are blogs with either explicit cancellations prior to March 1, 2010 or no sign of activity for at least seven or eight months (that is, nothing since November 2009, given that testing was done in late July and early August 2010). There are 310 of these–and that doesn’t include, to be sure, a few hundred blogs that have disappeared entirely or gone behind firewalls.

I may be almost done with the data gathering. Data analysis and writing up an interesting narrative–and I think there will be lots of interesting things out of this very broad look–will come, well, when it comes.

Now, back to the book project…

As for Cites & Insights, where I’m still apparently on a writing break: There will certainly be a September 2010 issue. Whether it will appear in late August or early September: Still unknown. Whether it will be new material or a large chunk of But Still They Blog: Still unknown.

[Whether even the tiny trip we were planning this month will happen: Still unknown. That's a whole different can of worms. Meanwhile, I think we're now safely above 95% electric generation for the year, since the total from PG&E is now down below 150kWh and the photovoltaic system has generated considerably more than 3,000 kWh...even though, thanks partly to a neighboring palm tree that keeps feeding lots of pollen to our cars and to the panels, we never did reach 18kWh per day.]