Bibs & Blather
disContent: The Complete Collection
The first limited edition casebound Cites & Insights Book is now available—and will disappear either on March 1, 2011 or when 100 copies have been sold.
disContent: The Complete Collection brings together 73 “disContent” columns I wrote for EContent Magazine from 2001 through 2009. These columns offer an amateur’s views on econtent, context, media, borgs and more. Each includes a postscript offering my contemporary view of the column or bringing it up to date.
I regard these columns as some of my best short-form writing. Most are as relevant today as they were when I wrote them. On the other hand, a few are mildly embarrassing at this remove.
Most of you probably haven’t read these columns, since the EContent reader base is mostly in the econtent industries, not libraries. A few early columns appeared in Cites & Insights in its own early years. You’ll find the last “disContent” column at the end of this issue’s primary essay, and I may reprint a few of the columns in later issues—but certainly not the lesser gems and the ones where I got it wrong! For those, you need this limited edition.
The book is 314 pages long, very lightly indexed and hardbound, the first and possibly only hardbound (casebound) Cites & Insights book. Page size is 6x9”; the bound size is a little larger. If there’s enough interest, I may publish a set of the 37 “best” columns as a trade paperback, but that won’t happen before April 2011 (and may not happen at all). In any case, this limited edition (signed on the title page) is the only place the complete set, with updates, will appear. The price is $50.
What’s in the collection? Here are some column titles:
Keeping the Faith: Playing Fair with your Visitors
Survey Says…Or Does It? [Fun with Statistics]
Who Do You Trust?
Contemplation and Content
The Coming of the Borgs
This is Going On Your Permanent Record
Rich Media is Hard
Shortcut Literacy
The Renascence of the Writer
Ghosts in the Social Networking Machines
Security, Naïveté, and the Limits of Pseudonymity
Long Live the Audience!
Will You Be My Friend?
The 24×7 Ubiquitous Connectivity Blues
Welcome to the Neighborhood
Can You Read Me?
Not Me, Inc.
The Top 10 Reasons You See So Many Lists
Authenticity and Sincerity
Is Dead Isn’t Dead—but Maybe it Should Be
I think it’s well worth the $50—and purchases of this limited edition will help support ongoing research and writing. You’ll find it at lulu.com/product/13500200/. Do be aware that it takes longer to produce casebound books, typically five to seven business days.
This issue also includes a draft chapter from The Liblog Landscape 2007-2010, as universal a study of English-language liblogs as I could manage (and almost certainly the largest detailed study of blogs in any field).
That chapter is Chapter 2, explaining methods and metrics and including a few secondary metrics. If all goes as planned, Chapter 3 will appear in the next issue, Chapter 4 in the issue after that…and so on. I’m guessing the book itself will appear in December 2010 or January 2011. Draft chapters that appear in C&I have smaller graphs and may be lacking columns in some tables, in both cases because the column width in C&I is narrower than the text block width in the book.
Where’s Chapter 1? Only in the book—and it’s not written yet, as I’ll be putting it together from some of the highlights throughout other chapters (and possibly some new bits of information and conclusions).
As for graphs, I plan to do something to make them more viewable for book buyers: Provide a downloadable/printable PDF containing only the graphs (with no commentary), on 8.5x11” pages with narrower print margins so as to display as much detail as possible in the graphs. For some graphs, the difference is dramatic.
Rather than another expression of uncertainty about The Future (given that I still don’t have a sponsor), I’ll stick with a short-term reality.
To wit, this is not quite the end of Volume 10. It’s the last regular issue, but there will be a volume title page and index, probably in late November or early December—and, I suspect, a paperback printed volume shortly thereafter. It would be wonderful if some library school libraries were buying the bound volumes; it’s clear that they’re not. I have the naïve hope that a few might be binding their own copies, so the index will continue to have a volume title sheet (front and back) preceding the index itself. Or, rather, the indexes—as usual, there will be one for articles quoted, one for everything else.
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large, Volume 10, Number 12, Whole Issue 135, ISSN 1534-0937, a journal of libraries, policy, technology and media, is written and produced by Walt Crawford.
Comments should be sent to waltcrawford@gmail.com. Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large is copyright © 2010 by Walt Crawford: Some rights reserved.
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