Walt at Random

First there’s Cites & Insights.

Or, rather, there isn’t–any news on that front, that is. I published an unusual two-month issue on May 10, 2011. I didn’t plan to do any work on C&I for at least a month. That’s exactly how it’s worked out.

All’s quiet on the C&I front. In the long run, that’s not tenable. In the short run…well, there will be an issue that includes August 2011 as part of its stated date. Just when, I have no idea. At that point, I’ll probably remove any mention of “monthly” from the site pages and masthead–until/unless there’s a reason to restore planned monthly publication.

Then there’s Library 2.0: A Cites & Insights Reader. The status of that effort:

• As an example of micropublishing with little or no budget, and as a series of screen captures (hurray for Windows7′s Clipping Tool!), it’s great…except that we changed the template after the book was uploaded. I may update the book with the new template. I may not.
• As an easy way for people to support C&I and get a really good combination of essays…well, I’d like to thank the three (3) people who have, to date, downloaded PDF versions. No paperback copies sold except for my proof copy. Not quite enough to date to pay for two lunches at my favorite Chinese restaurant, but close…
• As an indicator of whether people really cared about the Library 2.0 essays, given that the first of them continued to be downloaded more than most current issues, well… the book appeared on May 27, at which point I instituted “speed bumps” for the original essays. You can still get them for free, but it takes additional steps. Here’s what I’ve seen since then: 106 downloads of 6:2 (yielding the single PDF page describing the book and providing the new temporary names), 29 of 11:2 (ditto)…and 108 downloads of the temporary version of 6:2. And, as noted above, three people who cared enough about the essays and C&I to pay $5.99 for 6:2, 11:2 and others in between and after. So “cared enough” to hand-copy another link is one thing; “cared enough” to spend the price of two lattes is quite another. Interesting. Not terribly surprising. Early yet. We shall see.

ALA2011? I’ll be there. I’ve prepared a tentative schedule. I’m still extremely open to suggestions.

And so on…actually, you could think of this post as mostly a reminder that:

1. Cites & Insights hasn’t completely gone away yet.
2. There won’t be a new C&I before ALA2011.

PS: Given FF and other discussions of the past week or two, it would be tempting to talk about fair contracts for articles and books–and I’m beginning to recognize that I’m lucky enough to deal with extremely honorable companies at this point. But that’s another discussion…

Remember these paragraphs in a recent post?

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.

Well, it’s happened, so here’s more about it…although “it” isn’t quite as complete as I was hoping, and may change in the future.

Library 2.0: A Cites & Insights Reader

You can either click on the link above (which gets you to the book page, which may or may not include the download purchase link) or go to my “author spotlight” page (previously called my store), at http://stores.lulu.com/waltcrawford, where you’ll find a brief description and buttons to purchase either the paperback or the PDF download.

The book includes five essays on Library 2.0 that appeared in Cites & Insights between 2006 and 2011, with no textual changes from the original essay but arranged in a single-column, 6×9″ with wide margins, format for easy reading. There’s a people-and-sources index.

The book includes:

• Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0”: Volume 6 Issue 2, Midwinter 2006
• Beyond Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0”: Volume 6 Issue 3, February 2006.
• Library 2.0 Debased: Volume 8 Issue 3, March 2008
• Library 2.0 Revisited: Volume 9 Issue 9, August 2009
• Five Years Later: Library 2.0 and Balance: Volume 11, Issues 2 and 3, February and March 2011

The paperback costs $13.99. The PDF download costs $5.99. Both prices are set to yield $4.00 net to help keep Cites & Insights going.

The issues and essays online have been replaced by an announcement for the book–and the new, temporary, addresses for the original issues and essays. Given that the first essay continues to be downloaded more than most contemporary issues, and that I’ve never seen a dime’s worth of revenue or, for that matter, recognition that it’s still being used, I feel that this is a reasonable “speed bump,” at least until I find a revenue stream for C&I.

What’s Missing

My original plan was–and still is–to make this C&I Reader, possibly the first of several, available in a variety of ebook formats in addition to PDF (even though the 6×9 PDF should work beautifully on any netbook, notebook or desktop and on most e-readers with 6″ or larger screens).

But this book is also deliberately an example of micropublishing with little or no budget: The PDF is generated directly by Word2010 (as a PDF/A), not using Acrobat–and I could probably have prepared the book using LibreOffice. And the cover didn’t use graphics software: It’s entirely created using Lulu’s Cover Wizard and built-in themes. So I wasn’t going to go out and spend money on conversion tools for EPUB and Kindle PRC, especially given that I don’t expect to see huge amounts of revenue.

Theoretically, if I take the Word document, strip out running page headers and footers, and save as filtered HTML, Calibre should be able to convert it (with an added cover image from a separate file) to either EPUB or PRC (actually MOBI, but that’s supposedly the same format).

And, indeed, when I did this, the EPUB looked great in Calibre’s simulated ebook reader–I was pleasantly surprised by how well it worked. The MOBI version wasn’t quite as good (all text had been converted to “serif” even though all headings in the original are in a sans typeface), but it was good enough.

Well…the EPUB may have looked great in Calibre, but Lulu’s upload process (to submit an EPUB to the iBookstore, with Apple taking 30% and Lulu taking 20% of the remainder, so to get roughly $4 I’d have to charge $6.99 or $7.99) said it was error-filled, listing errors that I don’t even understand. Oh, Lulu would be happy to fix them…for a price.

And my attempt to create a Kindle Direct Publishing account, so I could try the MOBI/PRC version (which would need a $5.99 price to yield around $4), failed. I may try again, although at this point I have little faith that Kindle will like the Calibre-created MOBI file any better than Lulu liked the Calibre-created EPUB file. (There’s also B&N’s PubIt process. Maybe later.)

In other words, it’s still the Wild West out there: ebook formats are nowhere near as easy to generate or deal with as nasty old PDF. That will change, but we’re not there yet.

I may try again later. We’ll see.

There may be more C&I Readers, depending on what happens with this one. There may not. I have no definite plans. Doing this one enabled me to show exactly how a micropublisher works with a service provider in step-by-step illustrations; that’s worthwhile in any case.

And if there are howls of pain or rage because it’s no longer a single click to pick up Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0″ for free (yes, I have pointers to the new addresses…but I reserve the right to change those pointers and addresses periodically), well, show me the money. One correspondent has suggested that I should sponsor C&I myself…which sounds great, but since it’s already in a negative-revenue situation, I’m not sure how this improves matters. I haven’t eliminated the free versions, and I haven’t attempted to negate the CC licenses. I’m just trying to encourage a few people to pick up a neat bundle of the whole story as told here…and contribute a truly trivial sum to help keep C&I going.

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.

It’s now roughly three weeks since “When an essay falls in the forest…,” two weeks since “Cites & Insights: Any point in updating?” and a little more than a week since publishing Cites & Insights 11:6 (June/July 2011), including the lead Bibs & Blather “Where do we go from here?”

As far as I can tell, 528 people have clicked through to the first post, 357 to the second, and 460 have encountered the Bibs & Blather (370 issue downloads, 90 pageviews for the essay itself). I received four responses to the first, three to the second and one to the issue & essay. Of those eight responses, two seemed to be unaware that I even provide HTML versions of C&I essays and one was Steve Lawson’s “nothing you do is worth paying for” response. So, in my Candide/Pollyanna mood (my usual preference), and adding in at least five or six others who’ve made their support for C&I clear (Mark L., Fred G., Angel R. and others who purchased the disContent collection or contributed to C&I), I can use the 99:1 rule and say “there could be 1,000100 people who get something worthwhile out of C&I, but 99% of them won’t bother saying so.”

I count four people basically saying I’m doing good stuff–and, in some cases, that timeliness isn’t what they expect from C&I. Since timeliness has never been a regular part of C&I’s operating procedure, that’s fine–it mostly says that the latest Zeitgeist essay was a waste of my time.

But then there are those who feel that C&I should be nothing more than a blog–or that it’s always been a blog. The latter assertion is, to me, nonsensical. The former…

C&I as a series of blog posts

One of my possible outcomes was to shift C&I to a “web-first” model. Here’s what I mean by that:

• I’d write essays using a new, more robust, web-oriented Word template, tweaked from the current web template to be a little more native-friendly. Referenced web items would be links, which they aren’t now.
• Then I’d combine those essays into the print template, retaining links (to the extent that PDF supports live links).
• I’d still publish the PDF and the HTML separates at the same time, but the text might differ (since I’d be doing final trims & copyediting on the PDF, not the HTML). So the PDF would be the canonical text–but the HTML would also be fully edited, but frequently longer and with a few different words.
• I might do a separate additional Walt at Random post for each essay in an issue, in addition to the overall issue announcement. But those posts would provide the title, the same summary as in the issue announcement, and maybe the first two paragraphs of an essay–not the entire essay.

That’s clearly not turning C&I into a blog, that is, a series of blog posts.

Could I do the latter? Sure–and here’s what I think would happen:

• I wouldn’t start a Cites & Insights blog. The posts would appear in Walt at Random. I’m not about to pay even more for domains; given that donations to date don’t even cover hosting & domain fees for C&I (and W.a.R.), it doesn’t make sense.
• The current issue might be fully represented–but probably as 44 posts, not seven.
• The previous issue? Wouldn’t happen at all–I just wouldn’t write essays that long and involving that much labor as blog posts, which I (and, I think, most readers) think of as far more ephemeral and less likely to keep gaining readers over the long haul than C&I issues & essays do. The April issue? “Writing about Reading” probably wouldn’t happen (it could be five posts, but it’s wildly improbable that I’d put in the effort to make the connections); the others might, but as fifteen little posts instead of three longer essays. March? Certainly no Five Years Later essay (and there goes February in its entirety) and I probably wouldn’t put in the effort for the T&QT either. Did I mention that February would certainly not have happened at all? January: Maybe…but as 42 little posts, and not including the Liblog Landscape chapter.
• In other words: Given not only no revenue but no realistic chance of revenue, and the overwhelming likelihood that most posts would receive about the same readership as C&I essays do in their first week, not the 90% or more of readership that comes later, big essays with loads of synthesis & organization just would not happen. I’d save that energy for books (through regular publishers), paid articles (if any), or other stuff. I think that would be the only reasonable course of action.

Let’s put it this way: If C&I became a series of blog posts, period, you could pretty much assume that anything currently carrying the label “Perspective” (except Offtopic Perspectives–those already appear as blog posts, one disc at a time) would disappear. So would anything beginning “On” and (accidentally) not carrying the Perspective label. So would Making it Work, Copyright Currents (in both cases, except for the occasional possible little tidbit) and more.

Is that the future that would best serve C&I readers? I’d like to think otherwise. I’d like to think that the long pieces–the ones that involve organization, analysis, synthesis and commentary–really do add value. I’m 99.9% certain that those long pieces will not work as blog posts–they’re too long and won’t get the long-term readership.

Next steps

I’ve already decided on a breather--but if I’m going to try for a Kickstarter campaign, I’d need to make that decision soon, so that it could be complete before the next likely issue date for C&I (that is, mid-July).

Part of me, the realist beneath the Candide surface, suspects that a Kickstarter campaign is a waste of energy and will result in my being metaphorically Kickteethed–that is, that it will be lucky to yield even high three digits of commitment. And that might be discouraging enough to make me give up entirely.

So I’m thinking about that. [See update at end of post] A modest sponsorship would save the day. A few more donations wouldn’t hurt.

[Paragraph removed here because it was stupid and hurtful. That happens at times, and I apologize.]

Meanwhile…

Meanwhile, it’s back to work on my next book–which meets all three of my standing criteria for big projects and the new, crucial, fourth criterion:

1. The project has to be one I’m interested in.
2. It has to be something where I’m certain I can add real value.
3. It has to be something I believe will serve (or at least entertain) hundreds or thousands within the library field.
4. A library publisher with whom I’d like to work has to agree with me, and demonstrate a commitment to the book through an advance.

Not including my recent, mostly-failed, experiments in self-publishing (I regard Balanced Libraries as a modest success, but even that might have reached five to ten times as many people via ALA Editions or Information Today, Inc.), I published seven books in the 1980s, six in the 1990s and one in the 2000s. I’ve already matched the record for the 2000s, with two more books under contract. Will I have six books (through real publishers) in the 2010s? Dunno, but I’ll certainly make it halfway there…and, in every case, I’m certain it will be a project I’m interested, something where I add real value, and something that will serve hundreds or thousands within the library field. Heck, the current project should serve tens or hundreds of thousands within library communities–but that’s another story.

Update, May 21, 2011:

After spending some extended time looking at Kickstarter, publishing-related projects, the kinds of rewards that appear to work, etc., etc.:

I’ve abandoned the idea of a Kickstarter campaign. Whatever it is, Cites & Insights is neither literary nor a zine nor handcrafted (in the sense it would need to be). The fit with the kind of publishing projects that seem to do well in Kickstarter is very poor.

Additionally, since I’m not an artist or in a position to offer special handcrafted rewards, the rewards I’d need to offer for a Kickstarter campaign to make any sense would wind up taking a substantial portion of any pledges. That assumes that there would be a significant number of pledges–that there’s a community out there I’m not aware of that’s eager to fund Cites & Insights if I just did the right little video explaining it all (did I mention that I’m not a videographer?)

So that’s off the table. Everything else is still on the table. Comments still welcome.

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.

Cites & Insights 11:6, June/July 2011, is now available for downloading at http://citesandinsights.info/civ11i6.pdf

Barring a pleasant surprise, this is the final issue before ALA. The first essay in the 28-page issue (PDF as usual, but all essays except the last are also available in HTML form from http://citesandinsights.info/) may help explain why that is.

Contents

Bibs & Blather (pp. 1-2)

Where do we go from here?

Trends & Quick Takes (pp. 2-9)

Eight mini-commentaries and three quick takes.

disContent (pp. 9-12)

A twofer: Two of my favorite “disContent” columns.

Interesting & Peculiar Products (pp. 12-20)

Twentyone product discussions (where “product” is interpreted loosely) and two editor’s choice/roundups.

The CD-ROM Project (pp. 20-23)

The subtitle says it (almost) all: Some Work, Many Don’t. The two that worked are both excellent–but so were some of the eight that didn’t.

My Back Pages (pp. 23-28)

One essay that’s way too long for MBP and five other chunks of snark.

My somewhat downbeat previous post has been up for nearly a week–and has yielded three responses. But hey, it’s Friday, so I’m not going to read that level of response as “almost nobody gives a damn.”

Instead, I’d like to focus on the second part of the post regarding possible changes in Cites & Insights if it makes sense to continue C&I. I’ll quote the whole discussion, but precede it with a tight summary and one new possibility:

• I could write C&I essays in “Web-first” fashion, using a cleaner Web-oriented template in Word for each essay. The PDF issue would still be the canonical form and might differ slightly (some words and paragraphs from the Web essays might be missing in the PDF).
• New: I could also do an ePub version of Cites & Insights. It looks as though, if I turn off page headers and footers (and, of course, switch to a single column), Calibre does a plausible job of converting Word’s “simple HTML” output to ePub–not perfect, but not terrible.
• And if I had some inkling of possible support–either through sponsorship or through Kickstarter, if I thought that would work–I could “free the text” by changing to a CC BY license, requiring only attribution.

Or, if C&I has become a big yawn or a place you open, check to see if you’re mentioned and then leave, well, it would take four bimonthly issues to reach the magic Gross number (or the Buffy number, if you prefer) and call it a day.

Opinions? Comments? Sponsorship possibilities?

Here’s the previous discussion:

I’ve been pondering a revamp that would make C&I “web-first” in some ways: That is, essays would be prepared (still using Word) using a template tuned for the web, with HTML versions posted after they’re edited–possibly (possibly?) even on a rolling basis before an issue is complete. I might even make essays or the issue as a whole available in ePub format, if future conversions work out better than in the past.

The canonical C&I would still be the PDF, I think, and it would still be designed to be space-efficient in printed form. I say “canonical” because copyfitting could result in some words and, occasionally, sections of composite essays being changed or removed to achieve the almost-exactly-to-the-end-of-an-even-number-of-pages goal.

If I do all this, which would involve some deliberate effort, I might also do one other thing to make C&I more web-native: Adopt a new CC license, dropping the “-NC” so that the only requirement is attribution.

If I had new sponsorship–or thought I could successfully adopt a “by the issue” sponsorship/ad model that would yield, say, $5,000/year in revenue–I’d be encouraged to make this package of changes and refresh C&I’s overall design in the process. I’m also wondering whether it’s worth trying a Kickstarter approach to pay for the next, say, 18 months of C&I…

I’ve never used public numbers for what I’m actually looking for in C&I sponsorship. Here’s a possible set, more modest than I’d like, but hey:

To underwrite a single issue without explicit advertising and without a sponsorship line on the home page (but with sponsorship noted on the first and last page of each issue and the closing paragraph of each HTML essay): $400. For a full year of such underwriting: $4,000.

With explicit advertising–up to a full page in the PDF issue, up to a text paragraph in the HTML: $600. For a full year, $6,000.

C&I home page sponsorship–with a credit line and possibly banner, but without actual issue underwriting: $250/month or $2,500/year

Home page and issue underwriting without display ads but with other forms of credit (the ideal): $500 for an issue, $5,000 for the year. For all of this and ads in the issues: $700 for an issue, $7,000 for the year.

All of these are negotiable. If I go the Kickstarter route (and am accepted, and achieve the goal), those who provided high donations would be the sponsors, and there would be no advertising.

Thoughts? Responses? Should I just let C&I dwindle off to nothingness…(that is, would I add more value to the field by spending my time with the Friends group bookstore–just as I’d certainly add more value to our household budget by spending that time greeting people at the local Walmart, if I was willing to do that…)

…was it really published?

It’s not quite that bad, but the response–or, rather, the lack of response–to the primary essay in the May 2011 Cites & Insights, namely “The Zeitgeist: 26 is Not the Issue,” has me puzzled. And that, along with a possible sponsorship that seems to have gone sideways, has me wondering about the future of C&I once again, in both questioning and possibly positive ways.

The numbers and the links

Normally, there’s a pretty good spike in C&I site visits the day I announce a new issue and the next day, trailing off over the following few days to its “normal” level. The “normal” level–or, rather, the daily average–for 2011 to date is 400 sessions per day, 991 pageviews per day, 28,367 PDF downloads through 4/29 (that’s 238 per day) and, excluding PDFs and the home page, about 521 article (html) views per day.

Realistically, the normal level is around 300-350 sessions per day; the first-day spikes this year have been as high as 700.

I can usually get a good sense of early interest by looking at the first week’s numbers for a new issue and its essays–but also by seeing who’s mentioned an essay in a blog post or elsewhere. I was hoping for reasonably good impact for this Zeitgeist essay–I thought the timing was good, I felt as though I’d done a really good job on it, I thought it was still pertinent.

But…the first week’s numbers were, while not pathetic, pretty poor. As for mentions elsewhere, other than one blog repeating the issue announcement, I saw none–and still see none.

I just checked the record for the first 23 days of each issue that actually appeared this year:

• February 2011: 729 issue downloads and 506 essay views for the lead essay, “Five Years Later: Library 2.0 and Balance.” Those are great numbers–and as of today, it’s up to 1,196 issue downloads 923 essay views.
• March 2011: 383 issue downloads and 326 essay views for the longest essay, the continuation of the Library 2.0 essay. Not great, but not terrible; there really wasn’t any first-day surge for this issue.
• April 2011: 448 issue downloads and 168 essay views for the primary essay, Writing about Reading. 448 issue downloads for the first 23 days is still quite respectable…
• May 2011: 319 issue downloads and 150 essay views for “The Zeitgeist…” That’s a total of 469, That’s only three-quarters as high as the next lowest figure (for Writing about Reading).

I don’t believe the sum of essay views and issue downloads passed 400 until this week. More to the point, the essay not only didn’t have any effect on the ongoing conversation regarding HarperCollins and related issues (and it is an ongoing conversation), it seems to have been wholly ignored.

(Just for fun, I looked at the comparable period for 2010. Sessions are down about 9% in 2011; pageviews are down about 7%; PDF downloads are almost identical–maybe down 2%. HTML pageviews are down significantly.)

This essay was unusual in that it was, I thought, timely. Indeed, I would have held the issue for at least another week if the essay hadn’t been timely.

Now, I know the reality here: I propose, you dispose. But I’m wondering what’s happening…

tl;dr? LWS? NAV? TOF;GA? NNW?

Five possibilities are abbreviated above. Expanding slightly:

• tl;dr=Too long, didn’t read? Maybe. I tried to be as succinct as possible while covering nearly 100 source documents and including key text. The result is about 20,000 words. Is that actually too long for people to read? Maybe so.
• LWS=Last Week’s Shiny? While there has continued to be some discussion of issues related to HarperCollins “26 and you’re out,” the Shiny Thing seems to have moved to, well, McMaster’s. (No, I don’t plan to do an essay related to that particular brouhaha.) Maybe I should abandon any attempts for timeliness; maybe the attention spans don’t extend beyond a week or two.
• NAV=No Added Value? Possibly the first couple hundred people who read the Zeitgeist piece decided that I wasn’t really adding anything valuable, and thus didn’t bother to suggest that other people might want to read it. That’s certainly possible, and raises the more general question of whether I’m continuing to add value at all. Maybe this one’s a bad example…
• TOF;GA=Tired Old Fart;Go Away. The most discouraging possibility–that most people who used to read C&I, or who might benefit from it, have concluded that I’m a tired old fart who should really go join the local Friends of the Library and stop bothering them. I really, truly don’t want to believe this one…
• NNW=Not Native to the Web. While the essay itself was and is available as an HTML page, it’s not polished HTML, because it’s generated as a byproduct of the primary publication, a PDF produced in Word. Because the primary publication is a PDF optimized for print, links aren’t live (and generally don’t appear as links). Maybe that’s a growing issue.

Reactions and possibilities

I’m looking for reactions. I suppose the lack of any reactions, if that’s what happens, is itself a reaction of sorts.

If the general sense is tl;dr, that might influence future essays in C&I….but that conflicts with other readership numbers. Maybe it’s just too long for this particular issue?

If the general sense is LWS, well, I can live with that: In general, C&I has always been a little less than top-of-the-news current, and I’ve found that leaving time for reflection has been useful in many cases. Maybe that should be my general rule.

If the general sense is NAV–that’s harder to deal with, but I’d look at specifics.

If the general sense is TOF;GA–then that’s what I should do.

Then there’s NNW. And here there are some possibilities, if I believe it makes sense to continue C&I. I’ve been pondering a revamp that would make C&I “web-first” in some ways: That is, essays would be prepared (still using Word) using a template tuned for the web, with HTML versions posted after they’re edited–possibly (possibly?) even on a rolling basis before an issue is complete. I might even make essays or the issue as a whole available in ePub format, if future conversions work out better than in the past.

The canonical C&I would still be the PDF, I think, and it would still be designed to be space-efficient in printed form. I say “canonical” because copyfitting could result in some words and, occasionally, sections of composite essays being changed or removed to achieve the almost-exactly-to-the-end-of-an-even-number-of-pages goal.

If I do all this, which would involve some deliberate effort, I might also do one other thing to make C&I more web-native: Adopt a new CC license, dropping the “-NC” so that the only requirement is attribution.

If I had new sponsorship–or thought I could successfully adopt a “by the issue” sponsorship/ad model that would yield, say, $5,000/year in revenue–I’d be encouraged to make this package of changes and refresh C&I’s overall design in the process. I’m also wondering whether it’s worth trying a Kickstarter approach to pay for the next, say, 18 months of C&I…

I’ve never used public numbers for what I’m actually looking for in C&I sponsorship. Here’s a possible set, more modest than I’d like, but hey:

To underwrite a single issue without explicit advertising and without a sponsorship line on the home page (but with sponsorship noted on the first and last page of each issue and the closing paragraph of each HTML essay): $400. For a full year of such underwriting: $4,000.

With explicit advertising–up to a full page in the PDF issue, up to a text paragraph in the HTML: $600. For a full year, $6,000.

C&I home page sponsorship–with a credit line and possibly banner, but without actual issue underwriting: $250/month or $2,500/year

Home page and issue underwriting without display ads but with other forms of credit (the ideal): $500 for an issue, $5,000 for the year. For all of this and ads in the issues: $700 for an issue, $7,000 for the year.

All of these are negotiable. If I go the Kickstarter route (and am accepted, and achieve the goal), those who provided high donations would be the sponsors, and there would be no advertising.

Thoughts? Responses? Should I just let C&I dwindle off to nothingness…(that is, would I add more value to the field by spending my time with the Friends group bookstore–just as I’d certainly add more value to our household budget by spending that time greeting people at the local Walmart, if I was willing to do that…)

Yeah, I know: 1,396 words in this post. tl;dr. Such is life.

Not, unfortunately, in the mode of the song from Brigadoon…

I issued the new C&I today. Badly, getting some links wrong and with one readily-fixable typo in the issue’s banner. Maybe I should have waited until tomorrow (for various reasons, I got very little sleep last night–partly a cat who’d just had dental work done, partly that stupid brainteaser, partly…); I’m not sure it would have made much difference.

Otherwise, the fun’s all been on FriendFeed, and what fun it has been.

There’s a temptation to beat a strategic retreat…for a few days or for good. That’s unlikely, although a timeout for a few hours might happen (and I think some smarter people, like Jenica, have the right idea in just withdrawing for a few hours at times. I am not in any way being ironic or nasty in calling Jenica “smarter people”).

There’s also the temptation to change a section in this post, the one about “Not the swan song.” Maybe it should be. Probably not.

On the other hand, I did get a generous donation, so that the C&I PayPal total for the year is now in the three digits…and Michael Golrick’s offered to find a location if I actually wanted to have a C&I F2F in NOLA. (In English: If I wanted to have a get-together of people who care about Cites & Insights during the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans.)

So, trying to pull a silver lining out of what’s turning into a pretty cloudy day, I’d say this:

• A little get-together might be fun, if at least (say) five of you think it’s worth doing. No gifts, not even buying me drinks, no program, just a little get-together.
• If so, when? The limits are Friday late morning through Sunday evening.
• Maybe I should just piggyback on the LITA Happy Hour (location and time not yet announced, but it’s always late Friday afternoon/early Friday evening), in the manner that LSW sort of piggybacked on that event at a previous conference…

Comments or email will help in this regard. Piling on not encouraged.

If you’re fast on the draw and already attempted to open the new C&I, you may have noted that two of the three links are to volume 5 issue 11 rather than volume 11 issue 5…and, for that matter, that the current issue (v. 11 issue 5) said “May 2010″ in the banner rather than “May 2011.”

The links have now been fixed in the post and the date has been fixed in the banner of the issue. Thanks to DJF for the head’s-up.

Cites & Insights 11:5 (May 2011) is now available for downloading at http://citesandinsights.info/civ11i5.pdf

The 44-page issue is PDF as usual, and consists of 1.5 essays. Each essay (or portion) is also available as an HTML separate; click on the essay titles. If this seems like an all-ebook issue, that’s not intentional.

This issue includes:

Perspective: Writing about Reading (continued) pp. 1-16

This essay completes Perspective: Writing about Reading from the April 2011 C&I, with sections on how ebooks will (if you believe the authors) change reading and writing; “all singing! all dancing”–in which the only future for books is as multimedia extravaganzas; and writing about writing. It’s snarkier than the first portion, even though it’s been heavily desnarked.

The Zeitgeist: 26 is Not the Issue pp. 16-44

This abecedary goes from Absurd licenses to… Well, no, the topic is the only one truly suitable for the Zeitgeist label at the moment–HarperCollins, pay-per-view in some form, deals with the devil and what you lose when ownership turns to licenses.

If this one seems long, I’ll note two things:

1. It’s actually the shortest of this year’s major essays–but it’s all appearing at once, instead of being split over two issues.
2. I was drawing from some 100 source documents, and in a few cases those really needed to be quoted in full. Most cite-and-comment essays average around 500 words per cited source; this one averages fewer than 250 words per cited source. (Yes, I skipped some of the original 100…)

Enjoy! Or, you know, don’t.

The May 2011 Cites & Insights, Volume 11, Number 5, will appear soon.

How soon? I’m not sure. Possibly tomorrow, more likely Friday, less likely over the weekend. Or, given unforeseen circumstances, some other time on or before April 30.

I’m wondering how many more people I’ll alienate with this issue. If, of course, I haven’t already alienated them with stuff on FriendFeed or with my stubborn manifestation of refusal to accept the “obviously correct” answer to the Monty Hall Problem.

(Interesting: The show’s back on, most decidedly without Monty Hall, but it’s not called the Let’s Make A Deal Problem… Is this implicit racism, given the skin tone of the new host, Wayne Brady? Probably not; the problem’s just been around for a long, long time. And, given the 15 minutes of “geez, I’m bored” daytime in which I’ve watched each of the two “how can you replace the original host?” shows, I have to say Wayne Brady does a lot better with LMAD than Drew Carey does with The Price is Right. But that’s not only just me, it’s also a digression. I do that a lot.)

As I was saying…

Those who read C&I regularly already know what part of the May issue is–the last “half” of the essay that took up most of the April issue.

My original plans was that this last “half” would be about two-thirds of the April issue, with some regular departments filling in for a nice, modest, 24-pager.

It was a well-laid scheme. It gang aft a’glee. (Geez. Websites that tell us that the classic phrase was written by John Steinbeck…arggh…)

That last “half” is now just over a third of the May issue.

Which means it’s a long issue. A llloooonnnnggg issue. 44 pages after all the copy-fitting and desnarking I was willing to do. More words than in my new ALA Editions book.

Solutions considered and abandoned

I thought about making it a May/June issue…but the chances of my going through mid-June, nine weeks from now, without doing another issue are fairly slender.

I thought about doing two issues…but the bigger part of the issue is something I wanted to get out there now, and doing two simultaneous issues (say, a May 2011 and a Spring 2011 issue) just seemed silly.

I thought about delaying the second “half” of the April essay (sorry for the scare quotes, but it’s a little less than 40% of the essay, especially after desnarking), but that didn’t feel right.

So, well, it will just be a long issue.

Not the swan song

A few of you may sense that I’ve been a little discouraged now and then, sometimes thinking I should really and truly retire–from the intellectual battlefield as well as from formal employment.

This issue could make a fairly decent swan song.

I don’t believe it will, although if it lands with a complete but silent thud, like a rose bush falling in an abandoned garden, as though it had never existed, who knows?

There are two “natural” stopping points for C&I in the relatively near future, if some possibilities still don’t work out and I finally decide to go away:

• The gross point: Issue 144, which would be the September 2011 issue barring new irregularities. Unlikely, even though that’s also the date at which I’m eligible for full Social Security.
• The sesquicentennial: Issue 150, which would appear around March 2011. A little more possible.

Or, who knows, it could keep going on for a while.

ALA

As previously noted, to some at least, I have sponsorship for ALA Annual (from a potential sponsor for the ejournal and/or blog–more when I know more), so I’ll be in New Orleans, to my considerable delights. (Yes, it’s hot & muggy. It’s also NOLA. I attended the first big post-Katrina conference in NOLA, and if you didn’t, that’s a shame: It was a great conference and a great help to the city.)

I’ll be there Friday morning through Sunday night (arriving via red-eye; leaving early Monday morning). I have no idea what my schedule’s likely to include. Suggestions welcome.

Part of me says it would be fun to have a 10th anniversary C&I celebration. The one time we did have a C&I meetup, in San Antonio, was fun, even though the dank historic bar at the Menger made it difficult to talk to everybody there.

I don’t know that it’s practical to plan such a celebration (I have no funding to sponsor one, for sure!), and I don’t know the bars and other not too terribly rowdy places well enough to suggest something. And, of course, the people who count all probably have lots of high-end receptions to go to…but, well, it’s a thought.

Meanwhile:

Coming soon. Maybe tomorrow. A biggie.

What’s the rest of the 44-page issue? A Zeitgeist piece.

Ask yourself: What would be worthy of a Zeitgeist piece at this time?

Do the number “26″ ring a bell?

After seeing just how well my wife’s two family histories came out in Lulu’s casebound (hardback) version, and how well the incredibly limited-edition disContent: The Complete Collection came out, I got to wondering:

Are there libraries (presumably library school libraries, possibly others) or, for that matter, individuals who would find it worthwhile to own hardback annual volumes of Cites & Insights?

Paperback versions of Volumes 6 [2006], 7 [2007], 8 [2008], 9 [2009] and 10 [2010] have been available for some time–produced partly so I could have bound backsets that look better and hold up better than what I could do at Kinko’s.  Over the years, a handful of copies have sold to others–seven to date, I believe (that’s across all five volumes).

The paperbacks look great, but they’re certainly not ideal for library use.

If I believed that at least two copies of each volume would be likely to sell, I’d prepare hardback versions–and delete the paperback versions. This wouldn’t be a Big Moneymaking Scheme, since I’d keep the price at $50, which means my net receipts would be $10 less for each volume (hardback adds $10 to production costs).

Actually, it would probably be a money-loser, since I’d be inclined to replace my paperback volumes with casebound versions.

If I thought there was interest, I might even go back and do book versions of volumes 1-5.

Let me know if there is such interest. Otherwise, it’s really not worth the trouble…

Cites & Insights 11:4 (April 2011) is now available for downloading at http://citesandinsights.info/civ11i4.pdf

The 32-page issue, PDF but with most essays also available as HTML separates, includes:

Perspective: Writing about Reading pp. 1-24

Dipping one toe gingerly into the ebook/ereader waters, here’s the first of a two-part megaperspective on the nature of books, reading and writing. (Anticipate the snarkier second part in the May 2011 issue, barring surprises.)

Trends & Quick Takes pp. 24-27

More predictions, the gap between tools and talent, the cost of “free,” and seven quicker takes.

The CD-ROM Project pp. 27-30

Six title CD-ROMs about political and cultural leadership–and, unfortunately, the message is right in the title: “Sometimes They Just Don’t Work.”

My Back Pages  pp. 30-32

Only three of nine snarky little essays have anything to do with audiophilia–and in one case, that’s stretching things.

If you don’t read Cites & Insights, this post will be totally meaningless. If you do, only slightly meaningless.

Part of my editorial process is identifying source material that I’ll comment on later–”later” being when there’s enough of it to make a possibly-interesting overall discussion later on. (That’s for focused essays. Other items are tagged for Trends & Quick Takes and My Back Pages and Interesting & Peculiar Products, the “little pieces” sections of C&I.)

Sometimes–increasingly, actually–when I gather the material for an overall discussion and print leadsheets, I find that there’s really more material than will fit in an essay I’m ready to publish in one issue.

For years, I thought 7,000 words or so was a reasonable limit–but I’ve found that the exceptions, the much broader essays, seem to get more readers and more feedback. So now the limit is “whatever”–really about 20,000-24,000 words, since I’m trying to get issues down to that length or even shorter. My ideal goal might be 15,000 to 19,000 words (20 to 24 pages), but that seems unlikely, particularly while the condition of not getting any revenue for C&I persists: Cutting things down to size without losing meaning is hard work. And I’m fundamentally lazy.

There are two approaches to handling such a situation–in addition to splitting items before printing leadsheets into smaller categories (which I do a lot of already):

1. Split the leadsheets into smaller groups, work through as many of the groups as will fit in one issue, then leave the rest for later.
2. Write through the entire set in one pass (over several days, to be sure), then split the resulting overlength essay into two parts (or more, but that seems less like) that appear in consecutive issues.

I have consistently used the first approach in the past, most obviously in the numbered series (Writing about Reading, Thinking about Blogging) that appeared in 2008-2010. The problem with that approach is that later numbers in the series can be delayed long enough that things get confusing, especially as I find it necessary to revisit older subtopics. Some items simply never make it into the series.

This year, for the first time, I’ve tried the second approach–starting to write “Five Years Later: Library 2.0 and Balance,” realizing it was going to be too long for a single issue, but proceeding with the whole thing, which then appeared in two parts in the February and March 2011 issues.

I’m in the middle of writing the “first big essay” for the April issue–and it looks as though it’s also going to be too long for a single issue. I’ll try to cut it down, to be sure, and I’d really like to include one or two of the ongoing features (The CD-ROM Project, My Back Pages, Trends & Quick Takes) in each issue, but I also believe there are real advantages to throughwriting the entire essay. But that will mean cutting it into two parts.

Which works better?

For those who’ve read (or who go back to read) the Thinking about Blogging and Writing about Reading series and who’ve also read Five Years Later…

Which do you think works better, from your perspective as a reader?

Throughwritten essays will always (or almost always) appear in consecutive issues. “Pieced” groups of essays rarely occur in consecutive issues. That’s an advantage in that issues are more varies–but maybe that doesn’t matter at all.

As a writer, I find strength in throughwriting. It’s not quite as coherent a process as writing an essay in a single sitting (which ain’t gonna happen for any essay longer than 2,000 words or so!), but I think it yields more coherent results than pieced groups.

But I’d be interested in your opinion.

(“Nobody actually reads C&I any more except to do egosearches” may also be useful feedback, but I’d prefer that you send that via email; if, in fact, almost nobody cares about this stuff any more except as egoboo, there are other ways to use my time.)