How readers find books

How Consumers Discover Books Online, a Feb 2012 presentation at O’Reilly TOC 2012, by the CEO of GoodReads…

“Otis Chandler, CEO of Goodreads, would like to provide an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of consumer behavior in discovering books online. Who is searching for books online? What are their personas? How are they discovering books? How many are they discovering, and how many do they go on to read? Are there strong influencers? What factors can help a book get discovered online? How is the picture different for books in the head vs the long tail?”

JISC report on UK academic library use

Published 1st Feb 2012: “UK Scholarly Reading and the Value of Library Resources: Summary Results of the Study Conducted Spring 2011“, a JISC Collections report. 1000 academics were surveyed, at six British universities.

Sexy ugly

Why your new ejournal or website should not look too slick…

“When we watch people try to complete tasks on websites we notice that often the more visually appealing something is, the more they ignore it. If it looks like marketing or an ad, then people dismiss it as having low value or credibility. In the eyes of many customers, ugly equals authentic and credible. Ugly helps you get the task completed quickly without any fuss or distraction. Ugly is going to give you the details. Ugly is not hiding anything. Ugly does not waste your time on surface images and trivial jargon and hype.”

And yet, on the other hand, any Web design that shrieks “generic old-school blog template” will trigger the preconceptions arising from the over-use of such templates on spam blogs. The ideal is perhaps to be relatively plain/simple on the landing page, but also to tweak the template so as to display small carefully-crafted human touches in the design and layout.

Many open ejournals do pretty well on the ugly/authentic score. But some loose points with visitors by saying “here’s a naff 400px picture of this issue’s journal cover, click on it to see the table of contents”. That’s an annoying time-waster and means it can take as many as four clicks to get from the front page to an actual article. If you really must inflict a picture cover on readers, then stick it at the side of — or even behind — the table-of-contents.

Headliners

From Dan Cohen’s latest blog post…

“I’m convinced that something interesting and important is happening at the confluence of long-form journalism (say, 5,000 words or more) and short-form scholarship (ranging from long blog posts to Kindle Singles geared toward popular audiences). It doesn’t hurt that many journalists writing at this length could very well have been academics in a parallel universe, and vice versa. The prevalence of high-quality writing that is smart and accessible has never been greater.”

Perhaps we need a word for such things? Such chunky and well-researched articles are always likely to be “headliners”, surrounded by smaller articles in a public publication. But as Cohen suggests, they’re increasingly likely to be dis-aggregated from the original publication, after which such a name would not make as much sense. Nevertheless, “headliner article” / “headliners” has a certain naturalness. It also carries with it a faint whiff of the rock star, since a “headliner” at a rock concert is the lead band or artist, and yet it also retains something of the journalistic in it. The rather Alice-like idea of “lining the inside of one’s head” (head-liner) is also implicit in the word, linking naturally with the activity of sitting down for an hour to attentively read a serious 10,000 words or so.

Blocking ads in Google Chrome: the basics

AdBlock for Google Chrome

Disable Text Ads — disables text ads, from providers other than Google. A little old now, but still works.

YouTube Auto Buffer & Auto HD & Remove Ads — removes the overlay ads from YouTube videos. You now need to manually download and install this in Google Chrome.

(Update, Sept 2012: Adblock Plus replaced by the normal AdBlock. Adblock Plus has not been updated since April 2012, while Adblock continues with regular development).

Anvil Academic

Anvil Academic is a new “fully digital, non-profit publisher for the humanities”…

“Anvil will focus on publishing new forms of scholarship that cannot be adequately conveyed in the traditional monograph.”

All its content will be Creative Commons, and the first Anvil title is set for “late 2012″.

Incidentally, Open Reflections has a new long article from someone who’s actually gone through the risky process of using… “digital tools to explore open access, collaboration, remix” as part of creating a work titled The Future of the Scholarly Monograph and the Culture of Remix.

The digital “library stamp”

It used to be that rubber stamps were something that librarians were intimately associated with, often in terms of imprinting ownership in books and policing time-based access to them. The stamps came over time to be associated by the wider culture with over-zealousness. Much comedic fun was had with portrayals of spinster librarians in horn-rimmed glasses, driving a rubber-stamp down on a book with all the subtlety of a pile-driver. Similarly, notary stamps and other bureaucratic uses of the rubber stamp gave rise to the negative cultural meme of “the rubber stamp culture”, shorthand for an antiquated and hidebound bureaucracy.

But then over time the technology was taken up by artists and hobbyists. For instance, the boom in the use of self inking stamps for mail-art since the early 1980s, then their use by some book artists, and more recently as a key part of the scrapbooking boom. Also interested in these tools were the amateur collector/archivists, who even created little rubber stamp museums and other collections both on and offline.

I guess the digital equivalent of the rubber stamp is now the steganographic watermark, which invisibly “stamps” time and date data into digital images and other files. Digimarc is the main one, for instance, and ships as part of Adobe Photoshop. An interesting development there is Digimarc Discover for Magazines [white paper], which promises that…

“Readers need only point their smartphone at a digitally watermarked image, ad or article to be instantly connected to interactive content that is engaging and directly relevant to what they’re reading”

No ugly Q-codes or barcodes needed, it seems. The “stamps” used are invisible to all but the software in your smartphone. It’s a refined version of a technology first trialed in the wild by Wired magazine way back in 2000. Although one then wonders if this sort of tool could stamp a librarian-like “expiry date” onto Web images, flagging them for withdrawal from search-engines after a certain period? That might be quite attractive to celebrities. Or perhaps youths could have their phone stamp all their images (so all the embarrassing stuff can be removed from the Web before they go for their first job interview, with a single click). I also wonder if the technology might one day soon be used by publishers on book covers, to try to stymie things like Google Goggles (which lets you photograph a book cover in a retail store, and run an instant online price comparison).

Images added to Google Custom Search API

Google has added images to the Google JSON/Atom Custom Search API, enabling the construction of specialist image-only CSEs. Users of the API can have 100 free queries a day — and can purchase more at $5 per 1000 queries, for up to 10,000 queries per day.

A quick guide to desktop search software

The Google Desktop Search software became officially defunct toward the end of 2011. But one can still download the last 5.9.1 version, and it happily installs and indexes and searches the full-text of your content. For instance, a folder full of Gbs of PDF encyclopaedias and journal articles, ebooks, etc, presenting results in a familiar Google Search interface. Note the indexing has to be manually started by you, and this is done by right-clicking the taskbar icon and selecting “reindex”…

But if you need a personal desktop search product that’s being supported and developed, perhaps due to the need to index a new file-format, then the alternatives are…

* the free ad-supported Copernic Desktop Search (or the simplified and apparently ad-free version called Orange Desktop Search). Well-reviewed and mature software. Can be aggressive in its initial indexing, hogging system resources even when supposedly idling and in Restricted mode. There is also a Copernic Desktop Search Professional Edition.

* the free X1 Search beta. Once out of beta it seems this will become commercial software — joining their existing and mature X1 Desktop Search Professional (£37, PC Advisor review from 2011). The X1 website’s main landing page gives the unfortunate impression that X1 is only useful for searching Twitter and Facebook activity (blurgh), but it also functions as a powerful full-text desktop search tool and it seems well-reviewed.

* DocFetcher 1.1 is a Java-based desktop search software, that’s open source and free. It’s been around since 2009, but doesn’t seem to have any genuine reviews (that I could find). Supports indexing of Open Office file types.

* dtSearch Desktop (£119, PC World review from 2011). Another very mature and powerful software, although the price of $199 will likely make it unappealing to personal users. The dauntingly powerful interface will also likely make it unappealing to small business users.

* the free built-in Windows 7 search. Although now tamed, and no longer the terrible disk-grinding Windows Vista incarnation, in my view turning on Windows Search still makes a desktop PC too slow. Especially if you run a PC stuffed to the top with legacy files and emails.

In The Plex

I’m currently reading journalist/historian Steven Levy’s In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (Simon & Schuster, April 2011). At the half-way point through the book (Google is at the stage of throwing billion-dollar data centers around the planet), I can say it’s is wonderfully precise on the ancient history of the company. I’ve taught lessons on the history of Google to undergraduates numerous times, so a lot of the events and personalities are familiar — but it’s great to now have a book that’s so authoritative. I’d previously read and enjoyed Levy’s Crypto: How the [Cryptography] Code Rebels Beat the Government, Saving Privacy in the Digital Age (2002), and his new book is just as nearly structured, well researched, and elegantly written. Highly recommended.

How do Researchers in the Humanities Use Information Resources?

Ellen Collins and Michael Jubb. “How do Researchers in the Humanities Use Information Resources?“, Liber Quarterly, Volume 21 (2012), No.2.

“Crisis, what crisis?”

If your non-academic collegues are wondering what the fuss is about in academic publishing, one might do worse than give them this plain-English article from The Independent.

How to build a search engine – forthcoming online course at Stanford

Want to take an online course at Stanford on “how to build a search engine”? You’ll soon be able to…

Take the “Introduction to AI” course, for example. [...] 160,000 students signed up, from more than 190 countries, with a median age of around 30. But the really staggering thing is that about 23,000 of them stayed the course and finished it. A friend of mine, Seb Schmoller, took it and reports that it was worthwhile but pretty tough going. The project has been so successful that Professor Thrun has set up a spin-off company which plans to enrol 500,000 students on its first two courses: “Building a search engine” and “Programming a robotic car”.

Elegant typography for Web journal articles

Three really interesting developments in fine Web typography, which may interest ejournal editors concerned with presenting elegant HTML articles online…

* Typesetter.js is a javascript bundle able to parse a Web page on the fly, and embed numerous typographic qualities that are usually only associated with print.

* Lettering.js offers “complete down-to-the-letter control” for making appealing magazine-style layouts.

* Arctext.js puts curvy text on your webpage.

JURN turns three

JURN is now three years old.