As somnee of you may know, I published an odd little ejournal/zine/newsletter, Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large, from December 2001 through the end of 2019–19 volumes (and one preliminary issue), 227 issues, roughly 6,510 pages and just under 4.5 million words–most, but not all, mine. My set of printed & bound volumes takes up just about 18 inches on a bookshelf (Volumes 6-19 are available as Lulu PoD paperbacks; I have Velobound copies of the first five volumes.)
During its peak years, C&I had quite a substantial readership–as many as 55,000 downloads for one particular essay. There were more than 600,000 downloads from 2013 through 2015 and (maybe) 800,000 downloads from 2016 through 2019. But only about 38,000 in 2019. I had sponsorship for five years, and never charged for access.
I always hoped that a few people or institutions would find C&I worth preserving–and the annual print volumes even had indexes (of a sort). No print volume has ever sold more than four copies. Four have sold none at all.
When I stopped publishing C&I at the end of 2019, I promised it would remain available online through 2022 if that was feasible. It has remained available.
I just checked 2023-to-date usage. To my surprise, there are still thousands of downloads, apparently more than 10,000 total, including nearly 800 for one particular essay. So I plan to keep C&I available at least through 2024.
Use it or lose it?
But I would like to trim my Lulu catalog. (To see the list, just go to lulu.com and search for “walt crawford.” I see 51 results.) So here’s the deal: The Lulu (trade paperback) versions of any C&I volumes that have no sales between now and November 12, 2024 will be deleted.
The odd background…
For some reason, I reread the 2001 issues (and single 2000 issue) of C&I recently. It was…well, not terrible, and given the total lack of outside editorial oversight, better than I expected.
It was also very topical, as expected and intended. (I sure would love to see or remember whether PC Magazine published a ten-year followup to an astonishing set of 10-year predictions in 2001, but otherwise…)
With some exceptions, there isn’t much there that’s particularly relevant in 2023-2024. Maybe it’s reasonable to just shut it down. And if there had been total downloads in the hundreds or very low thousands for 2023, I might have done that. But the journal archives are safe, for now.
Oh: the most frequently-downloaded issues this year were from 2014 and considered OA and, in some cases, “predatory” journals.
