Here’s what I said about this book on the back cover:
This book is the first in a series of Cites & Insights Readers, combining major essays on a single topic from Cites & Insights for easier reading and permanence.
Well, I said more than that, but that’s the key.
This was the first—and so far only—book branded as “A Cites & Insights Reader,” although Open Access and Libraries was really the first such compilation.
The genesis of this idea was severalfold:
- Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0,” the essay that made up the Midwinter 2006 issue of Cites & Insights (I was going to call it “the massive essay,” but it was only a 32-page issue; one recent single-essay issue was nearly twice that long), was by far the most downloaded and read essay in the history of Cites & Insights. Through 2012, the HTML version had been viewed more than 21,000 times and the PDF downloaded nearly 34,000 times. (The next-highest essay is about half that number; the next-highest issue, not the same thing, about 16,600 downloads.)
- According to Google Scholar, it’s my second most cited piece of writing—a long way behind Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness & Reality but considerably ahead of MARC for Library Use. (104 citations as of this writing.)
- I’d done five followup essays—one later in 2006, one each in 2008 and 2009, and a two-parter in 2011—that I thought made valuable additions to the story.
- I thought the Reader concept might be a nice way to add value to the publication—and a tiny amount of revenue as well (I said at the time that all Readers would be priced to return $4 to me).
I also replaced the Midwinter 2006 issue with a placeholder PDF that noted the book’s existence—but also gave the URL for the saved copy of the issue.
That proved to be interesting as a measure of how important “Library 2.0” was in 2011 and beyond.
To wit:
- In 2012, there were 667 attempts to view the HTML version of the article and 1,844 downloads of the PDF version (both stubs).
- But the saved PDF was only downloaded 36 times in 2012.
- In the last three months of 2013 (all that I have), the issue stub was downloaded 371 times; the saved PDF, 39 times.
This tells me that most of the time, people didn’t care enough to even key in (or copy-and-paste) a brief new URL. When I hear how many thousands and tens of thousands of times ejournal articles are downloaded, I do sometimes wonder what percentage of those are idle curiosity. For this issue, apparently, the answer is at least 98% of the time in 2012 and around 90% of the time in 2013.
How’s it done? So far, five paperback and 14 ebook versions.
Crawford, Walt. Library 2.0: A Cites & Insights Reader. 2011.
