Walt at Random

Cites & Insights 12:2 (March 2012) has just been published.

The 30-page two-column PDF (designed for printing) represents the new, refreshed Cites & Insights, following the two reader surveys. Contents, available as HTML separates using the links below, include:

The Front  (pp. 1-6)

The reinvention or refreshing of Cites & Insights, including results of the two polls, new section names, tweaks to layout and typography, and a discussion of the online PDF alternative, a single-column version (in this case 53 pages) designed for those who read C&I on various sorts of screens–iPads, netbooks, notebooks, Kindles, Nooks and others.

Social Networks (pp. 6-16)

The Social Network Scene, Part 1: Catching up with social network miscellany

The Middle (pp. 16-26)

A range of items that might formerly have appeared in Trends & Quick Takes: the non-death of desktop software; “smarter, dumber or both”; closing the digital frontier (or not); and lots more.

The Back (pp. 26-30)

 Notes from the 1%, stereo prices and other snark.

A note on versions

While the two-column print-oriented Cites & Insights is the version of record, with the most careful layout and typography, I’m adding a third option (in addition to the individual HTML essays): an “online PDF” version, single column, set on a 6″ x 9″ page (28 picas of text, compared to the 20 picas in each of the two standard columns), designed for those who want the PDF but are reading it online or on an e-device.

The online PDF version of Volume 12, Issue 2 is 53 pages. Please don’t download it to print out. It’s somewhat cruder typographically (there will be bad breaks, for example), but it should work very well on your e-device.

I’ve closed the second C&I survey, aimed at those who read Cites & Insights in PDF form but online (or on an e-device) rather than in print. (The first link here is to the post about the survey, not to the survey itself, since that’s closed.)

According to Urchin stats, 98 people viewed the post (or at least it was viewed 98 times). The first attempt at an online-oriented PDF was downloaded 17 times and viewed 23 times (which, as far as I can interpret Urchin’s handling of PDF stats, means it was used 17 times).

Five people responded to the survey.

The Results

The first question was “How do you feel about the Online PDF as compared to the regular C&I PDF?”

• Comparative readability online or on your preferred device: One response was “less readable,” one was “about the same,” two were “more readable” and one was “much more readable.” I take that as a mild endorsement for the single-column 6×9 version, and would suggest that one respondent stick with the canonical C&I (assuming I do an online-oriented variant).
• Likelihood that you’d read issues; Likelihood that you’d read all of an issue; Likelihood that you’d publicize the issue to others: I’m clustering all three together because the results were identical: Four said “about the same” and one said “more.” I’ll admit that I was hoping for slightly better responses, especially for the last one–as awareness of C&I outside of the core readership (somewhere between 8 and 800 people?) depends on people publicizing issues and essays.

The second question was “Would you pay for (or contribute toward) the Online PDF version?” Given that this was an anonymous survey and that nobody was actually making a commitment, the results are especially interesting in terms of the value people place on C&I:

• Four people said “Possibly: No more than $1/issue or $10-$12/year.”
• One person said “Possibly: Up to $2.50/issue or $25/year.”
• Nobody said “No.” Nobody said “Possibly: More than $25/year.”

I conclude that providing an online version might yield contributions totaling as much as $73/year, total, if I was really lucky. Last year, total contributions were just over $100; so far, there have been no contributions in 2012.

The third question was “Do you think it’s worthwhile to generate this version (in addition to the existing PDF, not in place of it)?”

• Not at all: One person
• Yes, if it takes less than 30 minutes per issue to create: Four people.
• Yes, if it takes up to an hour per issue to create and Yes, no matter how much time it takes: Nobody.

Finally, I asked an essay question: “What changes would make an Online PDF version more desirable?” I received three responses. Here they are, in full:

I like it fine. However, I’m used to the other PDF version which appears smaller on my computer screen. I also like the two column layout. However, I could get used to the new version very easily.

What you’ve done with this is great. The biggest issue I have with the current online PDF version is the columns and the constant scrolling.

I would really prefer to have the TOC back. That is pretty much the first thing I look at once I have downloaded an issue.

Conclusions and next steps

Last things first: If I do an online version, it will include “Inside this Issue”–changing the page numbers only takes about 2 minutes–but it will not include any attempts at copyfitting (cleaning up bad breaks, etc., which probably takes me 4-6 hours for a typical issue), so it will be typographically crude compared to the canonical version. It will be single-column, 28 picas wide, which is still within the range considered to be a readable line width. (Each column of the two-column version is 20 picas wide; many/most trade paperbacks have 26 pica body text width.) A 28-pica width should fit very nicely on iPads, netbooks and other e-devices with at least 9″ screens, and shouldn’t be too bad on 6″-7″ devices.

And I suppose I should change the wording on the C&I invitation to contribute to suggest as little as $10/year. Using Paypal, $1/issue contributions seem almost pointless.

Based on responses to the first survey, it might make sense to do the online PDF and scrap the HTML essays. In any case, the “real” C&I will continue to be the two-column, carefully copyfitted, print-oriented PDF. Beyond that–well, we’ll see, probably later this week.

Oh, and thanks to the five people who responded and, for that matter, to the dozen who apparently checked out the online-oriented version but felt no need to respond.

Since the most popular response to “how do you read Cites & Insights” in the previous survey (as discussed here) was “Online PDF form”–and since, with one exception, there were no suggestions on how an online-oriented PDF version might work better–I’ve put together a mockup of what the January-February 2012 issue might look like in an online/e-device-oriented PDF.

The mockup is here.

If you’re one of those who provided that response, or if you’re another C&I reader who typically reads the PDF version online or on an e-device, I’m asking you to do two things by Sunday, March 4:

1. Take a look at the online-oriented version, http://citesandinsights.info/civ12i1on.pdf
2. Respond to this survey.

Note: This version contains all the text and pictures from the “real” C&I January-February 2012, with a few changes in headline sizes to work better–but there may be irregularities in the formatting, since I didn’t actually create a new template (and won’t unless I decide it’s worth doing). The version is 36 pages long (rather than 20). It does not have page numbers, but it does have PDF bookmarks for essays and subheadings.

In disclosing and discussing the results of the brief (non-scientific, not a large enough response to be statistically interesting) survey of Cites & Insights readers, I noted the results on the first question: That is, 11 of 39 respondents usually read C&I as a print PDF (which the design is clearly optimized for), only 3 usually read it as HTML essays–and 16 usually read it as PDF but online (by which I intended, and I assumed people meant, “on screen, not printed out,” whether actually online or on an offline reading device).

To which I commented:

What I’m not sure is what, if anything, I can do to make the online PDF easier to read without making the print PDF more wasteful of paper. (A single-column 8.5″-wide issue is really not an option: That damages readability far too much.) If I come up with good ideas that don’t require much additional effort, I might do another survey. If you have great ideas, I’d welcome them. (If you’ve commented at this blog before and don’t use multiple links, direct comments might work. Otherwise…well, send them to waltcrawford at gmail dot com, since I’m still getting more than 100 spamments a day, so don’t really skim them for legitimate comments.)

I haven’t received any suggestions, and now I’m considering a slightly different issue:

If I offered C&I Online, an alternate PDF version that’s optimized for screen reading, what should that look like–noting that options need to be ones that take a relatively trivial amount of time to create from the print-optimized PDF version.

So, for example, a different-sized banner and a single column, in a width that works for reading, is plausible.

I’d love to have two or three plausible alternatives, in which case I’d run a quick poll aimed at those 16 readers and others like them. I anticipate doing the first New & “Improved” C&I fairly soon–probably within two weeks, maybe within a week–so I’d want to get this put together rapidly.

Here’s one possibility:

6″ x 9″ page size, single column, with 4 pica (two-thirds inch) side margins (no gutter margin), 4 pica top & bottom margin, no table of contents, but headings translated into bookmarks. (The hierarchy of headings doesn’t always work quite right, but it’s close.)

Turns out the lack of bookmarks in the existing PDFs is sloppiness on my part: The option’s there even in the save as PDF Word function, I just didn’t notice it. (Future issues will have bookmarks, unless I forget again…)

A quick test says that this version would roughly double the page count–38 pages for the January/February issue, although the test run didn’t really have a banner at all–but that’s presumably less of an issue.

Suggested alternatives, before I do another quick poll (which I’d probably start on March 1 and end after 4-5 days)? Drop the running page headers and footers? Turn off hyphenation and justification entirely? This all needs to be options that can be applied fairly quickly, preferably by copying the text into a new template (which works for the first suggested alternative), since the 8.5″ x 11″ 2-column version will still be the canonical version. (It’s the most efficient in terms of paper use, by quite a long shot.)

If you have a suggestion, send it to waltcrawford at gmail dot com.

Thanks again to the 39 people who responded to the first formal survey of Cites & Insights readers.

I have no real idea how many people actually read Cites & Insights on a semi-regular basis. Through yesterday, only 368 have so far downloaded the first 2012 issue, so 39 could be more than 10% of the regular readership–but at the end of last year, every issue had been downloaded at least 635 times (not including the hiatus 2-pager), and all but one had been downloaded at least 727 times, so I’m inclined to think that 39 is about 5% of the core readership. At least I hope I still have 720+ core readers!

Here’s a dump of the results, followed by some notes:

Results table

Comments

How you read it

The second row is the responses to the first question: how do you read C&I?

To me, the most significant figure is the “3″ for HTML. If that figure had been a lot higher, I might have worked a little more on the Word template I use for the HTML versions of essays. Given that it’s only one-thirteenth of responses, it would be tempting to say “ah, the heck with it, who needs HTML?”–but some essays have apparently been viewed (even in 2012 so far, several essays have been viewed more than 200 times, and from the time I started doing them through 12/31/11, 369 of the essays had been viewed at least 1,000 times, with 227 viewed at least 2,000 times and 40 viewed at least 5,000 times–all in addition to issue views).

So I’ll keep doing HTML, but don’t plan to spend more effort making it prettier than it is.

Then there’s the Online PDF vs. Print PDF–and it’s not a great surprise. What I’m not sure is what, if anything, I can do to make the online PDF easier to read without making the print PDF more wasteful of paper. (A single-column 8.5″-wide issue is really not an option: That damages readability far too much.) If I come up with good ideas that don’t require much additional effort, I might do another survey. If you have great ideas, I’d welcome them. (If you’ve commented at this blog before and don’t use multiple links, direct comments might work. Otherwise…well, send them to waltcrawford at gmail dot com, since I’m still getting more than 100 spamments a day, so don’t really skim them for legitimate comments.)

Category Readership and Enjoyment

I’ve abbreviated the questions, but I think it’s fairly obvious. The first row of each pair is for readership, the second for enjoyment, and as for those abbreviations that aren’t obvious:

• Offtopic = Offtopic Perspectives, my old-movie mini-reviews.
• MiW = Making it Work, essays on librarianship.
• TQT = Trends & Quick Takes.

Incidentally, if you’re snooping around in my Diigo lists, I use the latter two abbreviations there as well…for now, although MiW has lots of subtopics (e.g. miw-balance).

The rightmost column, “AU%,” is the percentage of all respondents that answered “Always” or “Usually” for this question. Note that “all respondents”: The divisor is always 39, even for Making it Work, where only 34 people responded to the “Enjoy?” question. (“Only” is, to be sure, quite high for a survey response!) I’m offering the most negative interpretation of the answers by using this larger divisor.

What I see, then, is that every one of these sections except My Back Pages is usually read by at least 2/3 of you (and MBP isn’t that far off), that–to my surprise–Making it Work is the least commonly-read of the serious sections (whatever Offtopic Perspectives may be, “serious” isn’t the right descriptor), and that most sections are read by most readers.

As for whether you enjoy the sections–well, I really did treat this as an anonymous poll (if I have access to the IP addresses, I’ve never looked and don’t plan to), so I’m gratified that no section scored lower than 72% “always” or “usually” enjoyed. It’s interesting that My Back Pages and Making it Work are tied for lowest percentage here.

I’m not terribly surprised that, for “always enjoyed,” you’re a serious bunch: Offtopic Perspectives and My Back Pages are tied for last, with only six enthusiastic responses each–and most serious sections are clustered fairly closely near the top.

What will I do with those results? Not a whole lot, because they don’t suggest clear futures. I could downplay Making it Work, and that may happen anyway as I’m generally not focusing on academic libraries–but I’m not likely to downplay language-related areas or policy any more than I already have.

I could put this another way, given plans I’d already started formulating. To wit:

All Those Sections Are Gone–Except The CD-ROM Project

That’s right. Bibs & Blather, My Back Pages, Trends & Quick Takes, Making it Work, Offtopic Perspective, The Zeitgeist (which I didn’t even bother to ask about), Interesting & Peculiar Products, Copyright Currents & Comments, Library Access to Scholarship, Old Media/New Media, even Perspective itself: All gone. Kaput. Finit.

What’s left? You’ll see–in the next Cites & Insights and beyond. Coming some time in March 2012.

As promised, I’ve shut down the C&I survey. Final count: 39 responses.

I’m not sure whether I’ll provide the results and my interpretation here, in Cites & Insights itself, or both. Probably both.

Very quickly, I found two things surprising in the survey responses, and one of them will affect how I proceed:

1. Assuming that survey responses represent C&I’s core readership, almost nobody in that core reads C&I as HTML essays. So, while I’ll probably continue to generate them, I won’t spend any real effort trying to make them prettier or more useful–and I definitely see no reason to make C&I “web-first,” with HTML as the primary format, until/unless a sponsoring agency comes into play. (On the other hand, the split between print PDF reading and online PDF reading may encourage me to think about providing an alternative, single-column, “online-optimized” PDF version.)
2. There was no significant dislike (or lack of like) for any of the sections of C&I that might be regarded as less than wholly apropos or serious. Since those were also the sections that I heard favorable comments about from the handful of folks upset that C&I almost went away completely, that encourages me to keep doing the lighter stuff.

Beyond that, I need to (and will) do a full writeup. Oh, and there will be dramatic changes in section names–although in that case the survey turns out not to be terribly relevant. Stay tuned.

And thanks again for your responses (and for Seth’s comment on the most recent survey-related post, which was not in fact the basis for the changes I’m making, but certainly could have been).

This will be the last post (and Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and FriendFeed annoyance) touting the brief survey related to Cites & Insights. I have 36 responses, and while I’d love to get more (40? 50?), maybe there are only 36 people who care enough to spend the two minutes. That’s OK.

The survey results will influence the future of Cites & Insights. That’s a given. otherwise, I wouldn’t bother with the reminders.

Survey closes (effectively, because that’s when I’ll start working on the results) at 8 a.m. PDT, Thursday, February 23, 2012.

Click here to take the survey.

A quick two-part post:

Survey

To date, 33 people have responded to the quick survey for Cites & Insights readers. Maybe that’s all I should expect, but I’d love to have a few more responses.

Sale

Lulu’s offering another of their frequent sales. This time, you can get 20% off any or all Cites & Insights Books, or The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing hardcover edition (at 20% off, the hardcover’s a bit cheaper than the paperback at full price) or whatever else you want to buy. The sale runs through February 23, 2012.

Just use SWEET as a coupon code. (Or, if you’re a really big spender–buying at least $400 worth of books in all–use SALTY and save 25%.)

One reason I expect to see more activity in this blog in the future is that I plan to prepost some portions of some Cites & Insights essays, just as I’ve always done for Offtopic Perspectives. The paragraphs that follow are the final portion of what will be the first section of the next Cites & Insights, and the only portion written so far. Not to give anything away, but it should be clear from the first sentence that I do plan to change and eliminate some sections of C&I—one reason I’m still polling. [Up to 30 responses as of 11 a.m., Friday, February 17, 2012. Can I hear 35? 40? 31?]

One section name that neither made the cut nor has a direct replacement: The Zeitgeist. It wasn’t used all that often—five times in all, as far as I can tell—and the last one landed with such a “tree in the forest” non-effect that I pretty much gave up the idea. Iris Jastram suggested the name (actually “preserving the zeitgeist”) as something Cites & Insights does or has done, for which I thank her: Even if I dropped the section name, I like the idea.

The very first essay tagged as The Zeitgeist appeared in the Spring 2010 issue (and was the entirety of that issue other than a Bibs & Blather on sponsorship and the surprise loss of my part-time job). The essay-specific subtitle was hypePad and buzzkill.

I reread the essay recently as part of an ongoing process of interleaving old Cites & Insights printed issues in with my flow of other magazines. At this writing, I’m about two months behind on other magazines and slightly less than two years behind on C&I, but the latter’s deliberate: I insert one issue of C&I in front of each Condé Nast Traveler when that magazine arrives. By the time I reread an issue, I’ve long since forgotten it, so I can read it freshly. That’s an attempt to replicate the experience of reading my magazine columns (all of which are now defunct, but it was a good two decades or so) a few months after writing them.

Anyway…

So I read this essay. At first I thought “it would be a prime candidate for a ‘wrong, wrong, wrong’ mea culpa about how badly off I was on my projections.”

Except that I didn’t make any projections regarding sales for the iPad: That part of the article wasn’t really about the iPad itself, it was about the sheer hype and hyperbole (not quite the same thing) before and immediately after its introduction. And I don’t see any need to apologize for anything I said in the article. In fact, while the iPad has sold much better than most non-Apple-centric observers expected, it has not destroyed ereaders, it has not wiped out netbooks or PCs or open computing (unless you’re one of those for whom a slowing of sales increases constitutes “wiped out”), and I don’t believe it’s changed everything. I’m still not part of the target market. My brother and sister-in-law are (they travel a lot more, for one thing), and they both have iPads (one of them is on a second-generation unit). They love them. They’re very intelligent people. We’ve tried them out. So far, we’ve found no particular desire to buy one—although there have been uses for which I’ve suggested that my wife might want one. So far, she doesn’t. If we wanted to spend more on computing and media consumption, switching to cable broadband from our increasingly-flaky DSL would probably come way ahead of buying iPads. (By the way, Apple’s down to 57% of the tablet market…but you can’t prove that by the pundits who still proclaim that there is no tablet market, only an iPad market. Using the same logic by which there is no personal computing market, only a Windows market—except that Windows still has more than 90% market share.)

As for the buzzkill section, for which the actual section heading was Buzzkill: Google Screws Up, I still think that’s a fair summary. Remember Google Buzz? How it was an instant success—because Google simply dumped everybody into it, populating your “social network” with email contacts? It was pretty much a disaster, and Google bailed out. Google+ may not be perfect (not by a long shot!), but it’s better.

I’m going to quote the final subsection of that essay, “Thinking about the Parallels.” I believe it’s held up pretty well:

Both Google and Apple are large companies in Silicon Valley, both of which rely heavily on user trust and faith. Both have groups of admirers who proclaim they can do no wrong and assail doubters.

As far as I can tell, Apple didn’t actively generate the level of hype, although the company certainly did its share of leaking and dissembling. Most of the hypePad story is about reactions and expectations, not about the device itself or Apple’s handling of it. I’ve never been much of an Apple person, and I’m not a great fan of Steve Jobs. That said, and discounting nonsense like “magical” and “revolutionary,” the iPad will succeed or fail largely on its own merits. While those merits may not meet my needs—and while I do believe you’re better off thinking of the iPad as an appliance, not another kind of computer, and that the closed model is dangerous—there’s no doubt its merits are real. It’s up to the public, early adopters and others, to decide whether the tablet form factor finally makes sense. It’s up to other companies to raise the bar that the iPad sets—which, depending on what people are looking for, may be easy or difficult.

Google was in charge of its own destiny. Google screwed up big time. I’ve generally been a cautious fan of Google. I like Gmail a lot. I think the Google Books project has many good aspects and could have been a blow for fair use (if Google hadn’t caved). I’ll be more cautious in the future about turning any part of my virtual life over to my former neighbors in Mountain View. Where I’ve usually been negatively disposed toward Apple, I’ve usually been positive (if cautious) about Google. In this case, Google screwed up. With any luck, Buzz will go the way of Orkut and Google users will get a lot more cautious.

Apple +1, Google -1. Is that a fair parallel?

My quick survey of Cites & Insights readers seems to have stalled at 25 responses.

Maybe that’s the total of readers who have opinions. (Maybe it’s the total of readers, which is a truly depressing thought, but I won’t go there.)

I thought I’d give this one more try. Once the survey goes, say, three days with no responses, I’ll shut it down and assume that’s all the feedback I’m going to get.

As in the original post: The survey shouldn’t take more than two minutes or so.

There are no essay questions, it’s wholly anonymous (there’s no way to add identifying info even if you wanted to). If I was redoing this, now that I understand better how SurveyMonkey organizes things, I could have done it as three questions rather than the nine that are in the current survey. (Two questions would have had eight response bars each, rather than eight questions with two response bars each.) That might have made it appear shorter and easier…or not.

Anyway: If you have a spare couple of minutes, if you haven’t already responded, if you read Cites & Insights and want a say in its future: Go take the survey.

Thanks.