words / myth / ampers & virgule

Yes, dammit, there is such a thing as a dumb question

2012-01-12T07:38:00.000-05:00

I understand the rationale behind saying to an inquisitive child, “There is no such thing as a dumb question.” We want to encourage children to explore the world and ask questions about it, not shame them into passive silence. Fine. I’ll cooperate and never tell a child the question is a dumb one, even if it really is.

I have no such compunction with adults, however. I calls ’em as I sees ’em, and if someone asks a dumb question, I’m liable to say so. I am a curmudgeon. Love me, love my dog. That’s all I’m saying.

Presses, printers, and publishers

2012-01-09T12:43:00.000-05:00

I have encountered a lot of confusion of late, particularly in some discussions on LinkedIn, among people who have gotten their books “accepted” by a “publisher” as well as among people who had their books printed by a “press.” Let me try to untangle this mess a little bit.

When the word press is used in the context of producing books, it can mean a machine on which books are printed; it can mean the printing company that owns the machine; it can mean the company that publishes the book; or it can mean the newspaper and magazine industry taken as a whole. This can lead to some confusion.

Historically, many publishers owned their own printing and binding facilities. Another way to look at this is that many printers published books. Before 1500, it was pretty much a given that the printer who printed a book also published it.

Today, many publishers use the word press in their names. Think of all the university presses, for example. But virtually none of these publishers would consider owning a printing plant (I’ll posit that there are exceptions, even if I can’t think of any offhand). Instead, they pay book manufacturers to produce the books for them.

A number of book manufacturers, as well as other kinds of printers, have the word press in their business names, with no intention of deceiving anyone into thinking they are publishers.

Other companies, called subsidy publishers or vanity presses, also use the word press in their names. They are not publishers or printers; they’re companies that enrich themselves on the ignorance of authors, trying to give the impression that they both print and publish.

But what about the referent of this popular metonym? What’s the synecdoche about? When books were generally printed from raised metal types, those types were literally pressed into the paper. When offset photolithography became economically feasible, it was natural to call the machines that laid ink on paper offset presses, even though the image sat on the surface of the paper rather than being pressed in. And today, with the “photo” part replaced by direct-to-plate electronic imaging, the printing is still done on offset presses, where the paper does get squeezed pretty tight (pressed, as in pressing a sheet with an iron), so the word makes some sense if only as a metaphor. Digital printing, which is just a more sophisticated implementation of the basic technology your desktop laser printer uses, is even further afield from the letterpress of yore, but we still sometimes call the machines that do the printing presses.

Where am I going with this? Well, I’m asking you to be clear in your mind that printing is not the same as publishing, that the “press” that published your book is a publisher, the “press” that printed your book is a printer, and that a vanity press is neither. If I’ve helped you understand the difference, then I count this as a good day.

"Market yourself"

2012-01-05T11:33:00.002-05:00

For those of us who have freed ourselves from wage slavery (whether by choice or by layoff) and have chosen to go into business for ourselves (whether by choice or because the man must be paid), one of the hard questions is how to go about promoting one’s business and attracting paying customers.

For people of the editorial persuasion, this is a real challenge. For one thing, many editors are naturally introverts. Editing is a good fit for introverts for a number of reasons. The admonition to “market yourself” may come naturally to extraverts, but it’s often hard for introverts to take on board. Combine that with the fact that, for the most part, people associate editing with bad memories of high school English papers coming back with red marks all over them, and you can see the problem.

Today on the copyediting-l mailing list, a colleague posted her plaint that she has never figured out this marketing stuff. I posted a reply, and another colleage, Katharine O’Moore-Klopf asked me to post my little essay here, so she could link to it from the Business Tools section of her Copyeditors’ Knowledge Base. So, for what it’s worth…

Different people figure out how to market themselves at different points in their lives (some when they’re still children, some of us not until we’re laid off in our forties or later). But eventually, someone will provide the right prompt, and the idea will suddenly click for you. The penny will drop, as the saying goes.

Let me try this angle: Forget the phrase “market yourself.” It’s meaningless. Instead, focus on solving problems for people (which is what you do all day). The question a prospective client has is not “Who is Jane Smith and how talented and experienced is she?” The question is “What’s in it for me?” In other words, “What can you do for me?”

This is the reason so many marketing materials (in all fields) begin with a question or series of questions: “Feet hurt?” “Bills piling up?” “Need a vacation?”

For the most part, people do not wake up in the morning thinking, Gee, I need to find an editor. So you have to find the pain point that makes them realize they need an editor. Once someone recognizes a problem, you can pitch a solution and position yourself as that helpful person who can provide it.

I’m getting some long-postponed projects done in our house. I don’t care how much one contractor desperately needs the work versus another contractor. I don’t care whose kids are in college. I don’t care whose truck broke down or who’s in the hospital. I don’t care who has an engineering degree and is doing carpentry to make ends meet versus who dropped out of high school and learned the trade as an apprentice. I care who’s going to show up on time and do the work I need done. People who retain editors are just the same. They don’t care about a list of qualifications, education, and awards. They want to see what you can do and that you can do it on time and for the agreed price. So if you can communicate that—keeping your focus on the customer’s needs rather than your qualifications—perhaps this whole marketing thing will begin to work better for you.

с Новым годом

2011-12-31T15:57:00.000-05:00

On copyediting-l (mailing list for copyeditors) a little while ago, a member inquired about an arcane typesetting matter: what is the convention for representing the Russian soft sign in transliterated Russian text?

Now this is not a question that comes up in material for a general audience (such as newspaper readers); the presence or absence of soft signs and hard signs is ignored. But in scholarly work, there is a convention that, depending on the particular style guide in use, the soft sign (ь) is represented by a prime or an apostrophe and the hard sign (ъ) is represented by a double prime or a double quotation mark. I know you don’t care, but stay with me a second (or should that be stay with me a ″?)

It seems to me that this whole system of transliteration is an artifact of the machine age. Before the introduction of linecasting machines (Merganthaler Linotype, Harris Intertype), scholarly works typically included foreign words in their original alphabets, be they Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, or whatever else was under discussion. This was a particularly cumbersome thing to do with a linecasting machine (and not all that much fun with a Monotype machine).

Fast forward 100 years (the Linotype was actually manufactured for just shy of a century, giving way to filmsetters and then to electronic typesetting machines). Then add another few decades, and here we are in the world of Unicode and OpenType.

It’s fine for non-scholarly work to use transliteration, because we can’t assume that the general reader of a novel will necessarily know that с Новым годом means Happy New Year! But if we’re talking about an audience that already knows what a soft sign and a hard sign are and knows the convention of representing them with primes and double primes, then wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to skip the transliteration altogether and just use the Cyrillic?

It is a rhetorical question in the case the list member asked about, because the author already made that decision. Perhaps next year, in ירושלים.

Funnel follies

2011-12-05T08:16:00.001-05:00

Dear United Airlines:Your funnel is fermischt. The first decision your site visitor has to make is whether to book a flight using cash or miles. Well, if my wife and I want to travel on the same flights, with one paying cash and the other paying with miles, we have to make two separate reservations, hoping the same flights are available for the second ticket and hoping you get it that we want to travel together on an eight-hour flight, not at opposite ends of the plane when you decide to upgrade one of us but not the other. Don’t you think it would make sense to let us reserve two tickets together and THEN tell you we’re paying for one with miles? Show the price for every itinerary in both dollars and miles, and put the payment choice, for each ticket separately, at the end of the sales funnel, not at the beginning, please.Thank you,Frustrated Mileage Plus member

A Doctor in Spite of Himself at Yale Rep

2011-11-28T22:02:00.000-05:00

Worried about global climate change? Depressed about the stock market? Angry about political corruption. Heartsick about hatred and violence?

Well, pack up your troubles, c’mon get happy, and head to Yale Rep. There’s nothing like good slapstick to put you in a good mood for the holidays. The current production of Molière’s A Doctor in Spite of Himself is fabulous. The audience was dancing in the aisles even before the curtain, but the show was a laugh a minute. The cast was as brilliant as the writing and direction.

Supposedly it’s harder to do comedy well than to do drama well. But it hardly looked like anyone was working tonight (although I’m sure they were), because they just looked like they were having a grand old time.

Keeping books on the books you don't keep (and the ones you do keep)

2011-11-17T22:15:00.000-05:00

You’re a publisher, right? Sure, you’re a self-publisher, and you only have one title under your imprint. Nonetheless, you’re a publisher. And you’re trying to sell books at a profit.

But you’re also an author, right? And as an author, you want to be paid for your effort.

This is a hard concept for some people—many people—to wrap their heads around.

Wholesale or retail?
In a previous life, my first wife and I exhibited and sold our wares at large arts and crafts fairs, mostly in upstate New York. Because the region is somewhat isolated, many of the same exhibitors did all the shows we did; so I got to know quite a few of them. Quite a few of them, consummate craftspeople though they were, did not quite get that they were in business. Some were happy to collect enough from their sales to pay for their materials (never mind the booth fee, the transportation, or their time). It was just a hobby, after all. Others decided what their time was worth and then proceeded to sell at the same price to everyone, retail or wholesale. They could not understand how that might hurt them financially. Others applied a formula to calculate their wholesale and retail prices but never looked at whether they were actually making money as retailers.

I looked at the situation differently. I figured that for every piece of every product we made, I had the opportunity to sell it wholesale to a shop at a price determined by what the competitive traffic would bear, and I had the opportunity to sell that same item retail if I took it to a craft show. So my wholesale left hand told my retail right hand what the wholesale value of the item was. And my retail right hand had to make enough of a margin to pay for the booth, pay for the truck rental, pay my helper’s wage for the day, pay for meals and occasionally lodging, and cover the opportunity cost of my being there. Otherwise, I was losing money by going to the show. After a couple of years of testing all the craft shows in the region on this basis, we winnowed our schedule to fewer than a dozen weekends a year while other people kept beating themselves up week after week after week and never knowing whether they made money or lost money.

Self-publishing works much the same way.
As the author, you want the publisher to pay you royalties. As the publisher, you want to show a profit after paying those royalties. And you don’t want to count the same money twice, only to find out when it’s time to pay your bills that you have half what you thought you had.

Marion Gropen consults with publishers of all sizes on accounting and finance matters. The other day on a mailing list for mostly small publishers and self-publishers, she had this to say in response to a question from a new publisher:

Publishers have a few unusual issues. First, we are not ever allowed to include the fixed costs of producing an edition (such as editorial, cover design, etc.) in the inventory value. They are, of course, part of your cost of goods sold (COGS), but they are not part of the unit cost of your books. Instead, you are required, for tax purposes and by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for publishing, to put them in an asset account when you incur them, and then to amortize them over the expected lifetime of the book. This is generally a trivially easy task, and you can certainly do it in any basic accounting software, but you do have to know that you’re going to do it when you set them up.

Second, even if we’re self-publishing, it’s wise to pay ourselves a royalty, and treat our publishing operation and our authoring operation as separate functions, and entities.

When I asked Marion to elaborate a bit on that last point (does she really mean that the one-title self-publisher should formally pay royalties in that way?), her was her answer:

The typical one-book self-publisher may need to be dragged into recognizing that they are running a business, and this will help in that effort.

But the best reason, from my perspective, to do this is that it makes crystal clear how much of your income is coming from which part of your operation. If you pay yourself as an author, and also as a publisher, you will often see that you’re doing much better from the author side of the table. If you also don’t enjoy the publishing work, then it becomes clear that you need to sell the rights to a traditional publisher.

Words to the wise (quoted with Marion’s permission,of course).

Makeover time!

2011-11-12T10:00:00.001-05:00

I took Jane Mackay’s advice in updating my website (see her comment on previous post). I integrated some other people’s thoughts, too. Better, I think. We’ll see what Google thinks.

Interesting post on the history of business cards

2011-10-28T07:57:00.001-04:00

Thanks to Will Sherwood on LinkedIn for this link.

Makeover time?

2011-10-25T13:06:00.000-04:00

I need your help.
Saturday, at the Self-Publishing Book Expo, I unveiled new graphics. My thinking was that my old graphics, representing classic, elegant typography, were not going to go over big in New York. I wanted something splashier.

The old look
My website (go ahead, click the link) matches my old business card:

The new look
Here are the graphics I had at the show in New York (and my new business card, front and back, matches the two striped posters):

Which do you like better?
Should I redesign my website in the newer style or leave well enough alone? Drop me a note or comment below. Tell me where you are geographically and what your relationship is to book publishing, so I know whether the new graphics have any appeal outside New York.

Thanks for your time!

You missed a good event

2011-10-23T11:35:00.000-04:00

The Self-Publishing Book Expo, October 22 in NYC, was well attended. Sessions were excellent, I’m told. But the crowd in the exhibit hall kept me pinned to my table all day, so I can’t offer any direct reports. I do know that the list of speakers included some of the major lights of independent publishing, and people came away with a lot more knowledge than they arrived with. The exhibitors included a number of companies that provide important services to self-publishing authors, and I had productive conversations with both attendees and other exhibitors.

This is a fast-evolving business, and attending conferences is an important way to stay up to date.

Sorry you couldn’t make it. Maybe I’ll see you there next year.

Self-Publishing Book Expo, October 22, NYC

2011-10-16T09:53:00.000-04:00

I’ll have an exhibit table at the Self-Publishing Book Expo this coming Saturday. Stop by to say hello.

Location:

The Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers
811 7th Avenue (between 52nd & 53rd)
New York NY 10019
Main number for hotel: 212-581-1000

The exhibit hall will be the New York Ballroom West, on the third floor.

Hours: 9 am to 5 pm

Are you a soon-to-be-famous novelist?

2011-10-13T05:27:00.000-04:00

Read this interview. Thanks to Jane Friedman for the tip on Google+.

Making Mini-Mes

2011-10-02T16:54:00.001-04:00

I was in Baltimore Friday and Saturday, at this year’s Communication Central conference, organized every year by the freelance publishing world’s very own hostess with the mostest, Ruth “I can write about anything!”™ Thaler-Carter.

I spoke yesterday afternoon to a roomful of editors on how to attract self-publishing authors and how best to help them. The audience was receptive, and I hope some of the people there will take up the challenge.

The more the merrier, I say. Independent publishing is growing at a tremendous rate, far outpacing traditional publishing. In 2010, 2.8 million titles were released in the United States. If independent self-publishing is going to gain traction and credibility—as well it should—in the publishing world, producing quality books is going to be a key, whether they’re printed books or e-books. And that invariably means that most self-publishing authors are going to need at least some input from professional editors and designers. There should be plenty of work to keep us all busy.

There were several excellent presentations at the conference, running in two tracks. I picked up some valuable ideas, and I know others did too.

Suggestion box

2011-09-23T10:53:00.002-04:00

Your credit card statement comes. There’s a charge ascribed to some company with an obscure name you don’t immediately recognize, but there’s an 800 number associated with it. So you call the number, speak with someone who eventually answers, and find out that, indeed, this was a purchase you made and agreed to pay for. You hang up.

What has this cost the company (which is obviously set up for just this transaction and probably goes through the process many times an hour)? The call cost something. The representative’s time cost something. Let’s call it $5 (wild guess), which is a cost they then have to build into their prices, probably lowering total units sold.

But there’s a solution. I just received the following email:

Dear Dick Margulis,

This notification is just a friendly reminder (not a bill or a second charge) that on Sep 9, 2011, you placed an order from [obscure company]. The charge will appear on your bill as “[even more obscure rubric]”. This is just a reminder to help you recognize the charge. You will not be charged again.

Bingo! One email, sent by automated script two weeks after the purchase, alerting me to what I’ll see on the bill. Total cost: less than a penny.

Some employee of the company suggested that strategy and hopefully got a reward or a promotion for doing so.

I don’t know if you’re old enough to recall when every box of Kodak film came with a folded sheet of instructions printed on lightweight paper. You may not even be old enough to remember film, but just go with me on this. Kodak had an employee suggestion program. Any employee could write up a suggestion, and if the suggestion was implemented, the employee would get a hefty reward. The number that sticks in my mind is ten thousand dollars, which was nothing to sneeze at fifty years ago.

Well, one inspired employee came up with the idea of printing the instructions on the white inside surface of the yellow box itself, rather than on a separate piece of paper. The cost of the reward was recouped within weeks of making the change, perhaps within days.

A decade or so before that, another Kodak employee noticed that the Brownie camera kits sold as Open Me First Christmas presents were being returned in large numbers because of dead batteries. The batteries were dead because they were inserted into the cameras when the packages were put together, in July, so they could be shipped to stores in time for Christmas sales. The employee suggested packing the batteries in a separate slot in the box, rather than in the camera. Problem solved. Returns cut to a negligible level. Millions of dollars saved.

When was the last time, in this age of MBA-led corporations with their attitude that all innovation comes from the top, that you saw an employee suggestion box?

Just asking.

What color should I paint the hall?

2011-09-22T08:34:00.003-04:00

Caller: Is this the architect to whom I am speaking?

Architect: Yes. How may I help you?

Caller: Well, I’m thinking about building a house. I don’t have a piece of property yet, and I don’t know how big the lot will be or whether it will be in town or in the country or near the ocean or near the mountains or what direction it will face or whether it will be in a neighborhood where it’s safe to have picture windows or what style I want the house to be, but there’s a paint sale on at Sears, and I want to know what color I should paint the hall.

The other day in a LinkedIn group called Creative Designers and Writers, someone began a discussion thread under the heading “How do you choose the best font?” [If you can access the group link and then find the discussion, go ahead and do so. I think access is restricted group members, though, so you may not be able to until you are accepted into the group.]

The question, though, is like asking what color to paint the hall. It’s approximately the last question to ask when designing a block of text for a book or a website or anything else. This is old ground for me, but it’s worth repeating. A few of us old type hands tried to put the question in context. Alas, others kept extolling their favorite typefaces (and continuing the confusion about the difference between a font and a typeface, which are not the same). As I said in my comment, “Context. Context. Context. What’s the medium? Who’s the audience? What is the content about? Does the type have to be read, or is it just there to make a statement or draw the eye? If it is to be read, what are the page dimensions, margins, line length, character count, leading, …?”

Details matter.

Two cultures

2011-09-02T07:09:00.002-04:00

A visitor last Sunday by the name of Irene blew a tree onto a neighbor’s house. Onto two neighbors’ houses, actually. It was a mature white oak that yielded two good-size saw logs.

The complicating factor, aside from the precariousness of the tree’s crown over the second house (its lower trunk having already crushed the front porch of the first house) was that the neighbor lives on a state road. So the state owned the tree, but the tree fell on private property. Well, rules are rules. It was the homeowner’s responsibility to get the tree taken off the houses. The homeowner, after due consultation with an insurance adjuster, called in a tree service who had worked on the property before.

It was quite a show.
Wednesday, three people showed up in two vehicles. One was a large stake-body truck that would be used to haul away branches and brush. The other was a log truck, the kind with a large hydraulic boom and claw mounted on the back.

One man did all of the technical work. He did both the chainsaw work and the claw work, making a complicated, difficult, dangerous job look like child’s play. It’s a joy to watch someone with that level of skill ply his trade.

His two helpers flagged traffic while he went about his business. Now I don’t know how traffic is flagged on construction sites in your state, but the standard practice around here is that the contractor gets a permit for doing pretty much any work on or near a road, then pays for a police officer to come park a cruiser with flashing lights and stand around in a Day-Glo vest chatting with the workers and occasionally glancing at traffic. In this situation, though, perhaps because of the extraordinary nature of the storm, that requirement seems to have been waived. There was no police officer anywhere to be seen. And despite the two large trucks jutting into the road, there were no traffic cones and no vests of any kind. Just two guys, one before and one after the worksite, in nondescript clothing, with nothing but hand signals, stopping traffic when it had to be stopped and letting it pass when it was safe to do so.

Some people took umbrage at being told to stop by a person not wearing a uniform and decided to thread their way through at inopportune times, but there were only a few near misses and no actual collisions.

Total of three people. At the end of the day, a full truckload of branches and brush headed out and the log truck stayed parked.

Thursday morning, the crew returned, this time with a fifteen-yard Dumpster instead of the large stake-body, and finished the cleanup, then left. No muss. No fuss. Just working guys doing their job as efficiently as possible.

All that was left was the upturned stump, where the tree had tipped out of the soggy ground. State tree. State right-of-way. The state’s job to remove the last piece. This is not a dangerous situation anymore, as the stump is nowhere near power lines or structures of any kind.

This morning, seven state vehicles arrived.
Supervisor’s pickup, large front-end loader. Backhoe. Cherry picker. Three dump trucks.

That was an hour ago. They’re still here. The road, during commute time, is blocked at both ends, forcing traffic to detour. At some point I’m sure they’ll get done with what they’re doing, but what they’re doing consists principally in picking up one large, heavy object and placing it in a truck for removal.

Just working guys doing their job, in full compliance with all state work rules.

To all those who complain about regulations hampering private business,
I offer this counterexample.

How a Book is Made: AD 400 vs. 1947 vs. 1961 vs. 2011

2011-08-27T18:41:00.000-04:00

Here is a great link from Joanna Penn. Enjoy.

Teach them to write an English sentence

2011-08-22T08:58:00.002-04:00

At a recent industry conference (I’m intentionally obfuscating the location and the industry, but my source is reliable), a speaker, the head of the mechanical engineering department at a large university, invited the audience to tell him what specific coursework would make graduates with master’s degrees more attractive as new hires.

The first person to rise to the challenge indicated that his company was less interested in hiring people with master’s degrees than in hiring people with bachelor’s degrees in engineering; but, that said, there were two basic skills he found lacking, not just in graduates of the speaker’s program but in graduates of all three of the local engineering schools.

First, he said, they all know about CAD and 3D modeling software, but none of them know basic drafting. So they design products that can’t actually be manufactured. Make them take a basic drafting course, so they can make a sketch.

Second, he said, teach them to write an English sentence. I want engineers who know enough about technical writing to produce a report that I can understand when I read it. You’re not doing that.

The audience approved. The professor responded pusillanimously, saying those courses had to be removed from the curriculum to make way for more engineering courses. The questioner was not impressed.

Amen.

A crowdsourcing tale

2011-08-06T07:31:00.002-04:00

Everyone should read this blog post on crowdsourcing. It speaks volumes and is applicable in many fields—mine and maybe yours, too. Thanks to Carolyn Haley for the link.

Fix the USPS

2011-08-04T11:34:00.004-04:00

If you’re even tangentially involved in publishing, a functioning USPS is important to you. If you live in the United States, you know the postal service is in trouble (and not for the first time). If you’re older than twelve, you’ve probably gotten crosswise with the USPS more than once in your life. I know I’ve lodged my share of complaints over the years, and I’ve watched the service deteriorate, improve, and deteriorate again. It’s time to fix what’s wrong.

In the short term…
Mail volume is down in all categories. A lot of mail has gone online. A lot of the reduction is a symptom of a weak economy. Volume is not going to recover. As a result, the USPS is losing money hand over fist and they’re looking for ways to save money. They always trot out their old standby—eliminating Saturday deliveries—because they know that will be rejected and they’ll get a rate hike instead.

Well here’s an idea: For business deliveries, go ahead and drop Saturday. It’s okay. Really. For residential deliveries, keep Saturday and drop Tuesday. People who work regular Monday-to-Friday jobs, what few of them remain, need to be able to get to a post office when it’s open, to pick up parcels that were not delivered, to mail bulky items, to purchase money orders, to apply for a passport. They need Saturday hours. Once mail that came in over the weekend is delivered on Monday, most people would probably accept skipping Tuesday. And for federal holidays that fall on Monday, the postal workers would get an extended break (something they rarely get now). That wouldn’t happen if the skipped day were Wednesday. Similar arguments can be made against Thursday and Friday, particularly as regards checks that come in that you want to deposit during the current week. But Tuesday? I can live without it. How about you.

Why does my letter carrier drive a truck?
In all the countries I’ve visited in the last several years, letter carries use pushcarts, bicycles, tricycles, or scooters. They do not drive a fleet of custom-made gasoline-powered trucks for a total distance of two miles a day each in order to move mail from a local branch post office to houses that are within easy walking distance.

My local post office is on the current closure list, and the neighborhood is up in arms. Why? Because the post office is within walking distance, and it would be a shame for seniors to have to get in a car to go to the next post office down the road (less than a mile away). Doesn’t that suggest that the letter carriers could manage without their own individual trucks? Do it the way every other civilized country does it. Save capital costs. Save energy costs.

Why is my post office lobby frigid in summer and broiling in winter?
Because it was built when James Farley was Postmaster General and postal workers were not entitled to a pleasant working environment. So the only heating and cooling equipment is in the lobby, and by cranking it to the max, enough makes it through the service windows to the back to make life bearable. In other words, the building is an energy hog. It should be retrofitted or closed. How many other post offices are of the same vintage and wasting huge amounts of expensive energy for equally ridiculous reasons?

In the long term…
All of the long-term dysfunctions of the USPS—and for all they do right, they are certainly a dysfunctional organization—can be traced to a single root cause: the USPS is the archetype of the Theory X organization. It’s time to figure out how to migrate to Theory Y, to empower employees to make decisions that solve problems instead of hobbling them with thousands of pages of regulations, procedures, and rules.

First, teach managers to manage, not the way they’re trained to manage now but in accordance with modern practices. Then empower them to do so.

An example. A couple of weeks ago, our mail deliveries suddenly became very irregular. We got little or no mail when it was eventually delivered, which was not every day and certainly not during daylight hours. When I inquired, the reason eventually given was that our route only takes three and a half hours to deliver and so does not justify a full-time carrier. Therefore we’ve been designated an auxiliary route (don’t ask). After a bit of conversation, I asked why the manager doesn’t just divvy up the routes differently so they are all roughly equal in length, rather than always having to designate an auxiliary route and leave customers angry and upset. No can do; laying out routes is not the manager’s responsibility. Well, why the hell isn’t it the manager’s responsibility?

Classic Theory X. The manager is powerless to manage, because all decisions and rules are imposed top-down from layers that are totally inaccessible from below.

Change it. Make every employee from the carrier to the CEO accountable for meeting performance goals and then empower every employee to make decisions to that end. If that means replacing trucks with bicycles to save enough money to keep the office open, then the carriers and manager should be empowered to make that choice.

This will take a long time. The USPS is composed of people selected for their ability to digest, abide by, and enforce rules—on each other and on us, the customers. It is not peopled with employees dedicated to serving customers or meeting performance goals creatively. If they change their hiring practices today, it will be thirty years before the workforce turns over. But they should start today anyway. And they should start intensively training the managers they have (who come from the same ranks of rule-bound employees) and favor the ones who understand how to adapt.

The USPS says it has a crisis. There’s no better time to act. Fix the system.

Typography books at ABE

2011-07-20T19:29:00.002-04:00

A nice collection of typography books. I own too few of these. But then I also own many not listed here. The subject is both broad and deep.

Moses behind a laptop

2011-07-14T09:07:00.002-04:00

I am sitting in the living room at a retreat center—one of those 1930s-era lefty summer camps for adults that fill their calendars with workshops and lectures and canoeing and hiking and bad vegetarian food. This is not my thing. “Fun group activities” is an oxymoron in my idiolect. I readily acknowledge being a curmudgeon. I am here only to humor my wife, who is here because of a particular workshop she wanted to attend.

Earlier this morning, another guest, a woman about my age with a German accent, came down the stairs, saw me sitting here, and asked if I would mind if she took my picture. “If that would amuse you, feel free,” I said, and kept reading my email.

She took her picture and then volunteered that she is accustomed to seeing young people tapping away at their laptops but that she was startled to see me. She said, “You have a patriarchal beard.” I replied that the last time I shaved I was a young man and my beard was not patriarchal. “You look like Moses behind a laptop,” she said.

Maybe I’ll go on that hike this afternoon, after all. It’s up a mountain.

DO NOT MAKE THIS MISTAKE

2011-07-05T09:49:00.002-04:00

On the umpteenth round of revisions on a book I’m working on (don’t ask), the client reworded the dedication. The original wording began by thanking his wife and then his children. The revision began with his children and omitted any mention of his wife.

Well, people’s situations change, and this is a client, not a personal friend. So I don’t like to pry. But just to be sure the omission was intentional, I queried the change.

Good thing I did. The author did not intend to omit his wife. We’re both glad I asked.

As you were

2011-06-30T08:39:00.002-04:00

Yesterday’s story of the demise of the Oxford comma was greatly exaggerated. The rumor began with a style guide used by the University of Oxford public relations office and had nothing to do with Oxford University Press, where the Oxford comma remains safely ensconced. I regret spreading the false rumor. As you were.

Oxford shmoxford

2011-06-29T13:53:00.003-04:00

Oxford has dropped the Oxford comma.

I have not. It serves a useful purpose in nonfiction, and it is a non-issue in nonfiction.

From now on I will refer to it by its other name, the Harvard comma. If Harvard drops it, I will just call it a serial comma.

Maybe Oxford will come to its senses in time for their next edition.

Stick a fork in it

2011-06-11T18:55:00.001-04:00

The final week of our trip was a sojourn in Cyprus, another country where politics is a touchy subject. The southern part of the island (the Greek Cypriot part) has a population of about 700,000, with the annual tourist influx a multiple of that. Tourists (and investment) come from many countries—notably Russia and England—but not particularly from the U.S. English is widespread in this former British colony, but at least in the Limassol area, where we stayed, commercial signs are as likely to be in Russian as in English or Greek.

Cyprus is old. When Aphrodite emerged from the sea, near Paphos according to Greek legend, the island had already been continuously occupied for thousands of years. There are archeological digs—some of the most spectacular I’ve seen—everywhere, ranging from Late Stone Age through the Hellenic and Roman periods. I got the feeling that if you stick a shovel in the ground at random and dig down a few feet, you’re likely to hit the foundation of some ancient building. One person we spoke with suggested that most of the beachfront resorts might have been developed illegally by people who, upon digging for a foundation and finding ruins, failed to report what was there, because doing so would have scuttled their projects.

Cyprus itself emerged from the sea, of course. The Trados mountains are igneous rock that formed as an ocean ridge where two tectonic plates collided. The lowlands are limestone pushed up from the surrounding ocean bottom. Construction materials are a mixture of the two kinds of stone in the middle of the island and almost entirely limestone toward the southern beaches. The beaches themselves, at least where we were, are nearly black in color, from the weathering of the mountains. But the overall landscape in the lowlands is overpoweringly light in color, just barely tan. This looks like a desert at this time of year—fertile desert with good crops, but desert nonetheless. The appearance is probably deceptive, but just a little bit uphill, the slopes are stripped bare of soil, with just the scattered tree here and there. Once this island was forested, but the Bronze Age inhabitants four millennia or so ago mined and smelted copper here. And smelting copper requires fire. And fire requires wood. And so the hillsides were stripped and what remains is dry land and a dry, hot climate. Culturally, Cyprus is part of Europe. But in terms of climate and soil, it is part of the Levant.

Our hosts, as has been true in other countries we visited, overfed us. But they did so in a way that is apparently customary on Cyprus. Many of the restaurants are taverns, and whether they specialize in meat or fish or some foreign cuisine, they all offer meze. Meze (rhymes with “yeah, yeah”) was described to us as “like tapas.” Um, not really. With tapas, you order specific small plates for specific prices and you run out of money before you run out of appetite. With meze, you pay a prix fixe per person (twenty euros, give or take a couple of euros), and you are served heaping platter after heaping platter after heaping platter. It is immediately obvious that if you empty a dish, it’s a signal that the next dish should have even more food on it. It is also immediately obvious that if you consume more than a forkful of each dish, you will not make it to the end of the meal. It takes discipline to have just a taste, because the food is delicious, whether it is souvla on freshly baked pita or any of a raft of dips and condiments or sausage or fish or anything else. The cuisine overall is heavily influenced by Greek food, but some Turkish and Middle Eastern and North African influences are there too. With meze, there are invariably leftovers to go home with someone. Of course, if that’s not your scene, there’s always Pizza Hut.

From Cyprus, we flew to Frankfurt, spent the night, and caught a morning plane to home sweet home.

It has been a fabulous trip, but the junket is done. Stick a fork in it.

Tiptoeing through a minefield

2011-06-02T06:40:00.002-04:00

We have been in Israel for nearly a week. Between hosts and tour guides and exploring a bit on our own, we have seen old cities and ruins and religious shrines of all sorts. There were places we were not permitted to go, though. When a gesture asking a guard if we might pass is answered with the barest shake of a head, the meaning is clear. It would be rude to argue, particularly when the guard is visibly armed, as nearly all are. There are guards, both uniformed and plainclothes, and gates and locks and security checkpoints everywhere, as is understandable.

We have had interesting conversations about souks and taxi drivers and food and ancient history and farming and geology. As polite guests, we have not brought up any topics of modern history or politics or living in the middle of what some might think of as a perpetual war zone. But neither has anyone we’ve spoken with. We learned, for example, that most farmworkers are from Thailand, but we knew not to ask why.

On a bus tour a couple of days ago to visit some archaeological sites, the guide, a smart, knowledgeable, and articulate person, provided a running commentary about communities and land features and crops as we drove past. (Guides are licensed and must pass a rigorous exam.) But whenever we approached a cemetery—and some that we passed appeared to be quite old—she diverted our attention to something on the other side of the road, often something banal. In the course of the day, she made no mention of any deaths more recent than the eleventh century or of any extant graves anywhere.

I am reminded of three wise monkeys.

Unordered set

2011-05-30T02:40:00.000-04:00

Herewith some more random notes and photos from the trip we’re still on. Maybe some day I’ll gather up these travel posts and sort the notes chronologically (not on a blog and not particularly for publication, as I don’t fancy myself a travel writer by any means), but for now I make no such promise. If you are a newcomer to this blog, you should know that it is usually devoted to topics of at least tangential professional interest, but for the duration of the round-the-world trip my wife and I are taking, I am using this space as a travel journal for my own benefit. Feel free to ignore this space until after June 10 or so.

Public art
Taking a shortcut across a park in Fremantle (near Perth) to get to a brewpub on the beach, we walked past the sort of statue of a local historical figure that you might see in any park in the world. But we noticed that it bore two bronze plaques, one above the other, and stopped long enough to snap these two photos.

The upper plaque reads in part as follows:

This monument was erected by C. J. Brockman as a fellow bush wanderer’s tribute to the memories of Panter, Harding and Goldwyer, earliest explorers after Grey and Gregory, of this terra incognita, attacked at night by treacherous natives, were murdered at Boola Boola near Le Grange Bay on the 13th November 1864, also as an appreciative token of remembrance of Maitland Brown, one of the pioneer pastoralists and premier politicians of this State, intrepid leader of the government search as punitive party.

The lower plaque, apparently added later, reads in part as follows:

This plaque was erected by people who found the monument before you offensive. The monument describes the events at La Grange from one perspective only: the viewpoint of the white ‘settlers.’ No mention is made of the right of aboriginal people to defend their land or of the history of provocation which led to the explorers’ deaths. The ‘punitive party’ mentioned here ended in the deaths of somewhere around twenty aboriginal people. The whites were well armed and equipped and none of their party was killed or wounded. This plaque is in memory of the aboriginal people killed at La Grange. It also commemorates all other aboriginal people who died during the invasion of their country.

In googling for more information on the incident, I came across this recent essay by a local student.

When in Bangkok…
I have not ventured far into Thai cooking at home. We have so many Thai restaurants in New Haven, some of them quite good, that I’ve limited my home versions to the few things I can fake with help from Trader Joe’s. But Bangkok has a number of cooking schools for foreign tourists, and I had a morning to myself, so I took a class from the Bangkok Thai Cooking Academy. This being the off-season, I was the only student last Thursday. I met my instructor, as directed, at the…

…and we walked through the nearby wet market, where he told me what many of the unfamiliar ingredients were, so that I could recognize them in the Asian markets at home. A good start. (In the wet market, as in the one we visited in Beijing, meats were sold from unrefrigerated displays, although fish were at least on ice. The Thai health ministry doesn’t have a problem with this, so I don’t either.)

We walked from the market, where we bought the items on the day’s shopping list, some for my class, some for the afternoon class, to the home where the classes are held. The prep area was a mat on the living room floor. For the first hour I knelt (I’ve never been able to sit cross-legged, even when I was little). After that, I retired to a couch and a small prep table was provided so I could work sitting.

Closely following instructions, I made the dishes in the picture. Clockwise from the left: stir-fry of snow peas, straw mushrooms, and chicken (not a challenge, but I picked up some pointers); stir-fried water morning-glories (pad pak bung fai daeng); pumpkin custard (dessert); papaya salad (som tum); and (in the center) pork and tomato chili dip (nam prik ong).

Coffee in Thailand
Throughout this trip I have been whining about the difficulty of finding coffee I like. There has been plenty of expensive coffee that other people like, so I know I’m in a distinct minority. Nonetheless, I’ve resented spending more than I think it’s worth for coffee I don’t particularly enjoy. I had promised to drink green tea instead, but so far I’ve only done that occasionally. I did find that one great coffee place in Perth, as previously noted. Coffee in Singapore and Malaysia was uneven, but I found some that was drinkable.

And then we got to Bangkok. The first opportunity to drink coffee as we were whisked around on our VIP tour was in a gift shop that sells only goods made or grown in Thailand. That included the coffee, and the coffee was delicious. It had a rich, deep, strong, chocolaty flavor, without a hint of bitterness. It went down smoothly, with no acid reflux. For the rest of the week, I had coffee that was perhaps not made so skillfully but that was nonetheless immediately recognizable by its flavor as being from the same region. Thai coffee is worth looking for, although I don’t know how much of it is exported.

In both Singapore and Thailand, I encountered “3-in-1” when trying to get myself a glass of iced coffee. This vile substance is a premix of coffee, sugar, and some sort of milk product (probably condensed milk) sold from a dispenser. It is to iced coffee what a McDonald’s hamburger is to Chateaubriand, although perhaps that’s unfair to McDonald’s. And “iced coffee” in this part of the world (including Israel, where I am as I write this) is a rich, ice-cream-based dessert drink.

(So far, “coffee” in Israel appears to be Turkish coffee, made by boiling ground coffee in water briefly and pouring the slurry into a cup. If you want an espresso drink, you have to ask for it explicitly. This is an improvement.)

An addendum on Thai technology
I snapped this telephone lineman from a pedestrian overpass. Click for the larger image.

Room with a view
The view from our hotel room in Tel Aviv.

Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?

2011-05-25T10:25:00.003-04:00

Somewhere in southern Thailand to visit the princess.

Tuesday morning—yesterday, although it seems much longer ago—we left the hotel in Bangkok at 4:30 to catch a 6:00 flight. From a military base, not from an airport. We jumped a ride on a C-300 (cargo plane with a big rear door, not much in the way of passenger comfort, earplugs required) with a bunch of armed military police, to Nakhon Si Thammarat (spelling varies), in southern Thailand. Then we trailed around the territory in a military-escorted motorcade to meet HRH Princess Srirasmi, the Princess Consort to the Crown Prince of Siam.

With the birth of her child six years ago, she was recruited to lend her name and sponsorship to a program to increase breastfeeding among the Thai population. She was reviewing the troops, as it were, in one of the program’s demonstration areas.

The princess is cool. Forty, looks twenty-five, dressed in slacks and a nice top, sneakers, and a tasteful amount of jewelry; and she carried her own large purse. If it weren’t for the guy carrying the huge parasol to cover her every time she stepped out of the van, you wouldn’t have been able to pick her out as royalty. She warmly greeted her fellow graduate students (she’s working on a PhD) and engaged with many individual villagers and families. She was led down the VIP line, and my handshake was just a minor courtesy on introduction as Tina’s husband.

Most of yesterday consisted of variations on a theme as the princess first sat politely for a welcoming ceremony and a presentation about the program, then visited a family enrolled in the program, then visited a community health center. At that point our contingent peeled off, and our local hosts took us to see the sights. We visited a Buddhist temple (not our first, not necessarily the most impressive, but the biggest the local area had to offer). Then we did a drive-by of a palace built by the local province to entice the king to visit (well, that didn’t work), next to a decade-old tidal gate that does work to keep the sea from making the river too brackish, thus enabling the surrounding land to be farmed again.

From there we went off to a small town in which all the largest buildings are for the birds. The town, on the coast, is a mecca for swiftlets, which build their nests of saliva. These are the nests of Chinese bird nest soup. Swiftlets naturally congregate and nest in caves, but in this town, the caves all look like modern apartment buildings. We ate overlooking the water, watching the swiftlets returning at dusk.

The province we were touring in produces, aside from a lot of bird nests for export to China (at about $5,000 a pound), a great deal of rubber, the price of which has risen fivefold in the last few years, and palm oil, the price of which has risen because it is used for biodiesel. As a result, the province is doing pretty well financially.

Today, we toured the main hospital in Nakhon Si Thammarat and a number of related facilities before catching a commercial 737 back to Bangkok.

Elephant jokes

2011-05-22T23:18:00.006-04:00

What’s yellow and hangs from the ceiling?
If you remember elephant jokes you probably also know that what’s yellow and hangs from the ceiling is a yellow ceiling-hanger.

What’s red and hangs from the ceiling?

That’s right. It’s a red ceiling-hanger?

And what’s blue and hangs from the ceiling?

No. Ceiling-hangers only come in red and yellow.

And taxicabs only come in yellow in most cities.

But not in Bangkok. I was glancing out the hotel room window and saw this line of taxis waiting for a light to change. This is not the full range of taxi colors here. There are others, including chartreuse.

And in other news on the street,
I stepped out of the hotel’s front door and looked up. I assume these are telephone wires, but I am at a loss to explain why they are managed, if that’s the right word, in this fashion.

One degree north

2011-05-20T18:46:00.004-04:00

In Perth it is autumn, and there is what passes for a chill in the air in Australia. Singapore is in the same time zone but a different climate zone. Singapore is one degree north of the Equator.

Singapore is all business all the time, though, and men are required to wear suits to the office (cf. Collapse, by Jared Diamond). So indoor spaces are cooled more than we anticipated. Outdoors, the heat is tolerable, as there is lush tropical greenery everywhere, providing natural cooling to what would otherwise be a concrete oven. Apparently energy costs are relatively low, as Singapore is a major oil-refining center. Nonetheless, there is a move afoot to think green.

Friends took us to a rotating top-floor restaurant (physically similar to other such restaurants in big cities worldwide) for a view of the city, particularly of the port, which was adjacent. The meal was a spectacular Chinese banquet of too many courses to count.

From there they took us to the Singapore Flyer, a Ferris wheel similar to the London Eye, but larger, for a broader view of the city. We then went for a drive to explore more of the city. Our host likes to show off his town.

In the morning we flew to Bangkok, where we will spend the next several days. After clearing Customs, we were greeted by one of Tina’s colleagues and an assistant from the hospital motor pool, who then hailed the driver from the cell phone lot (I assume). Eventually we all piled into a comfortable passenger van and, still in our tropical travel clothes, were whisked to an embarrassingly formal, rock-star-worthy reception at a model child- and elder-care health center on a military base. We were led from room to room and department to department by two senior military officers in full uniform, with chests full of medals, accompanied by other senior staff and two photographers. The photographers initially focused on me, as I was the larger target, but I think we eventually conveyed to them that Tina was the rock star in question. The military officers, as well as other senior staff, sported pins on their shirts bearing the photos of babies. The program that was the main focus of the tour was the initiative, now about five years old, of one of the royal princesses in support of increasing breastfeeding in Thailand.

The base where the demonstration project is taking place houses a thousand-and-some military families, over five thousand people. The center provides child care for infants through preschoolers, health care for the community, and a rich elder-care program, all in one center, so that there are many opportunities for intergenerational interaction. It is also the coordination center for the propagation of these programs across Thailand. What was most impressive was that the entire complex represented a quite modest capital investment. What is mainly required is cooperation and intent.

I admit to being somewhat uncomfortable with all of the bowing and scraping we have encountered so far (on the plane, at the center, at the hotel, in the hotel restaurant, but not at the airport). I don’t know what goes through the mind of someone who is executing exaggeratedly obsequious gestures in a country that has an active, occasionally violent, political opposition. I know what would be going through my mind if I were behaving that way. Yet this is apparently a standard feature of Thai culture, and I’m being a boorish and ugly American if I try to carry my own bag. I will try to behave better henceforth.

And in no particular order

2011-05-18T23:22:00.002-04:00

So how did we end up in Johor Bahru?

Singapore Air from Perth to Singapore. While we had never flown Singapore Air before, both of us had often commented on the gorgeous, floor-length dresses worn their female flight attendants. Perhaps they would not be so striking if they were not also all size 2 and if they did not spend so much time on hair and makeup. In any case, this is an airline that does economy class right. Plenty of knee room. Excellent curried chicken for dinner. Free drinks (as on virtually all non-U.S. carriers). The drink menu promoted the Singapore Sling, so we tried one. Took a sip each and handed it back. Ewww. Too sweet. Never mind.

Got to the hotel quite late. Worked a bit after breakfast. Then we were picked up at noon by a driver from the Malaysian university where Tina is speaking as I type this. UTM has about 25,000 students on a huge, modern campus in Johor Bahru, which is why we are here. The conference organizer had a schedule conflict and was not able to be our tour guide for the afternoon, so she sent in her stead the head nurse from her department, to accompany the driver.

Our first stop after the very efficient border control operation (the U.S. border control folks could learn a thing or two about how to design a border crossing for efficient processing) was a handicraft center. It turned out that the center only bakes a cake if they know you’re a-comin’; so we caught them off guard. But a gentleman who spoke excellent English graciously showed us around and introduced us to the craftspeople who were working that day. We saw an artist producing batik and got a full explanation and demonstration of technique. Then we moved on to a musical instrument maker who was making drums called kompang of goatskin stretched over lauan heads. He started with hides and logs and turned out highly finished goods that included several types of drums as well as bamboo flutes. The next stop was a knife-making operation. These were various styles of hunting knives and reproduction historic weaponry, all in intricate, highly finished wooden scabbards that matched the handles. They began with a block of wood and a block of steel (mostly 440C stainless) and turned out gorgeous work. The head of the operation is a customs agent in his day job. He acknowledged that it would not be possible to take a knife back to the U.S. on a plane.

After the craft center, we stopped for a latish lunch at a neighborhood eatery. It was an open air place under an insubstantial shelter that nonetheless kept the sudden, drenching rain off us as we ate. This was street food. Much of it was deep-fried and banana-based. Yummy, filling, cheap. What else can you ask for from street food. The locals keep asking us if the food is too spicy for us, but we really haven’t encountered anything that sets off fire alarms yet.

And it was nice to be someplace where bananas are a staple. In Australia, where imported bananas are forbidden and the main growing area was wiped out by floods, organic bananas (grown in a different region and therefore the only kind available in the market) were selling for AUD 12.98 (about USD 13.25) per kilogram. That’s around six bucks a pound, up from the three bucks a pound they cost before the floods. Needless to say, we had no bananas in Australia.

Dinner in Johor Bahru

2011-05-18T23:15:00.003-04:00

We were taken out for Thai food in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. But this was definitely a Malaysian take on Thai.

We began with satay (both beef and chicken). Not the flat slices we’re accustomed to. Wasn’t sure if it was just tender chunks of meat or meat that had been ground and formed into tiny meatballs. The sauce was a sweet chili sauce (not much bite) with some peanut nibs, rather than a smooth peanut sauce as you’d get in the U.S. Other dishes:
Steamed whole fish (white-fleshed, mild, can’t say much more about it) with a thick garlic sauce
Same fish, fried whole, with a sweet chili sauce
Greens (maybe bok choy leaves or something on that order) in a nice sauce
Mussels in a different sweet chili sauce, this one with a bit of a bite to it (really, no two sauces were the same)
Tom yum, with prawns (whole, head on, peel your own), mussels, baby octopus, etc.)—highlight of an excellent meal
Rice
Fresh squeezed orange juice by the pitcherful
And the pièce de résistance: on the drive into Malaysia from Singapore in the afternoon, our hostess on the ride initiated a conversation about durian, which I knew from seeing it in NYC Chinatown fruit stands but had never tasted. Tina had not heard of it. I knew it only as something with such a powerful stench that it is not permitted on NYC subways. We passed a roadside stall piled high with the stuff. Well, she brought one to dinner and had the kitchen split it open for us. The inside consists of chambers (six?) running the length of the fruit, filled with large seeds (an inch in diameter, roughly spherical), each of which is coated in a thick layer of sweet yellow paste. Grab a seed, suck off the paste, savor, swallow. Rinse and repeat. There’s really not a lot of food in that huge fruit, when all is said and done. But it’s tasty.

The venue was a very casual, family-friendly café with an open kitchen, no tablecloths, a box of Kleenex for napkins, plastic plates, tacky flatware. We didn’t see the bill, but after I sprang for lunch for four at a neighborhood eatery for three bucks, my guess is that dinner for eight adults and three kids, with leftovers to take home, probably came to less than forty dollars American.

Best coffee in Australia

2011-05-17T00:02:00.002-04:00

I like my caffeine. What I do not like is bitter, reflux-inducing coffee. I like a medium roast coffee made in a drip coffeemaker. Under duress, in need of a fix, I’ll drink espresso if I can dilute it sufficiently with water or ice. But even that is unsatisfying.

Unfortunately, the Italians seem to have brought their form of coffee to Australia before we Americans did. Or perhaps they just overtook us. But having now spent three weeks in Australia’s largest cities, I can report with confidence that drip coffee is hard to find. Hotels serve some sort of percolated or drip coffee at conference breaks, but as the chefs don’t know what it’s supposed to taste like, they make it badly. Otherwise, everything comes out of an espresso machine. I’ve learned to order a long black, which has some water added, and then to add icewater to that to make it drinkable.

In Perth, though, walking through an arcade, I discovered the real thing. The place is Low Down Espresso, and they don’t even advertise their drip coffee. But there’s the machine, big as life, on the back counter; and these guys know how to use it. They even make proper iced coffee. Best I’ve had in a long time. If any coffee in Australia deserves a plug from an American traveler, this is the place.

Let's see, where was I?

2011-05-15T04:28:00.002-04:00

After Brisbane, we headed to Sydney for a few days (itinerary determined by speaking schedule, not by geographic logic).

In Sydney we stayed in the World Square area of the CBD. Our block, including the large indoor mall adjacent to the hotel, seemed to be the center of Japanese and Korean cuisine. Chinatown was a block up from us. The block to the left was mostly Spanish restaurants. So much good food, so little time. Sushi was everywhere, it seemed. Several restaurants offered freshly made plates of sushi on a conveyor belt that surrounded the chefs. Plates were priced according to what color the china was, totted up when it was time to leave. We had dinner one night, though, in a restaurant called Tokyo Ria. The menu was closer to the wide variety of food we had in Japan two years ago than any of the sushi lunch places had or than we typically see in the U.S. Their ordering system consisted of a jukebox-like touch screen display in each booth. The photo menu went on for many pages of thumbnails. Touch to open a full-screen photo and description. Order immediately or cancel. Click another button to call a server to the table for help. Each dish was prepared immediately upon ordering and delivered when it was ready. So there’s a bit of an art to ordering things in the order you want to eat them. The food was excellent.

The next day we took a bus down to Circular Quay and walked to the Sydney Opera House. We took the one-hour tour (not the two-hour backstage tour) and enjoyed that very much. We had lunch at one of the Opera House cafés. Then we walked along the water, under the Sydney Harbor Bridge, over to Darlington Harbor (a bit of a hike). We both watched the people traversing the top of the bridge while we were eating lunch and decided that was a little too high and too scary for us. (It was odd to see, a couple of days later, that a fellow had caused a stir by climbing the bridge and hanging a protest banner, considering that hundreds of people a day climb almost to where he stood.) We had a light dinner at Darlington Harbor (shared some appetizers and some grilled kangaroo loin), then walked the last few blocks back to the hotel.

Early the next morning we flew to Perth. There’s a bit of the Wild West about Western Australia that expresses itself in terms of the jocular disdain the residents have for what they lump together as the “Eastern States,” to the dismay of the residents of those states. Perth’s CBD is a lot less glitzy and glossy than those in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. There are plenty of unpretentious small shops of all sorts that are not chain stores catering to the rich and famous.

After a day in Perth capped by dinner at a home in the hills on the north side of the city, we drove south yesterday in a rented car, to a rented house in Prevelly, a surfers’ beach community near Margaret River. This is a major wine region, and the main tourist activity is winery tours. But that doesn’t interest us particularly. For one thing, we’re getting on a plane to Singapore Monday and can’t exactly take a case of wine with us. So we skipped the tours in favor of hanging out at the beach. It’s fall here, cool and overcast, but I couldn’t be this close to the Indian Ocean and not take at least a brief swim.

Driving in Australia is always a challenge, as it’s on the wrong side of the road (well, it’s the right side of the road here, but it’s the wrong side for an American driver). Our solution to the safe driving problem is that I drive, and Tina sits in the passenger seat constantly reminding me what lane I’m supposed to be in. It works out better than it sounds. We also try to avoid driving at night if we can.

Barristers to the left of me, barristers to the right of me

2011-05-06T01:35:00.005-04:00

Just travel notes, mostly for my own benefit…

We’re in a hotel on the edge of the central business district (written and pronounced CBD in Australian English, never spelled out, even on first use) in Brisbane. The CBD borders the Brisbane River and it includes various state buildings as well as commercial offices, stores, and hotels. Some years ago, the downtown waterfront, as in many cities, was entirely industrial and inaccessible to pedestrians.

I haven’t researched the political process that led to the current situation. I imagine there was conflict in Brisbane as there is conflict everywhere when planners and developers want to displace businesses in favor of tourism. However, as a tourist, I can say that the effort paid off in spectacular results.

The CBD is chock full of the sorts of building architects mostly dream up for competitions in the U.S., with no thought of ever being allowed to actually build them. Public spaces, including those in front of commercial buildings, are showcases for large, modern public sculptures, the result of a requirement that 0.25% of construction budgets be spent on public art. In the U.S., the one percent for art movement has not done nearly so much.

Pedestrian bridges seem to be a special art form in Australia. Here’s one that connects South Wharf and North Wharf in Melbourne (an area that includes a discount mall, a convention center, some casinos, and some pleasant walking paths along the shores but not much else to hold one’s interest).

Here’s one of a much larger pedestrian bridge across the Brisbane River, a block from the hotel, although the photo does not really convey the dramatic design, I’m unhappy to report.

Because the museums here are state-owned, admission is free. The one I spent the most time in, the Gallery of Modern Art, mounts a heck of a show. It is what the other end of the bridge connects to.

Walking around the Brisbane CBD, I came across a large weekly farmers’ market and spent a pleasant hour or so talking with growers. This is fall, so the stalls were full, mostly with familiar produce at unfamiliarly high prices, typically double what I’d pay at a farmers’ market in the States and three or four times what I’d pay at a supermarket. However, there was a grower of mushrooms, with spectacular-looking goods, whose prices were less than half of U.S. supermarket mushroom prices. I asked the woman whose company runs the market why she thought that might be the case. She answered, “because he doesn’t know how to price his goods.” (I immediately thought of a number of conversations on editing lists about pricing services.)

Prices in general, at least in the CBD, are higher than I’m used to. Espresso shops are everywhere, and they are everywhere more expensive that Starbucks at home, by quite a bit. Coffee of the non-espresso type is virtually unobtainable. I’ve learned to order “black iced coffee,” which consists of a great deal of espresso, ice, and additional water to make the stuff drinkable. “Iced coffee,” in Australia, is a dessert drink consisting of two scoops of vanilla ice cream, milk or cream, and a little coffee. Not the same thing at all.

Yesterday I toured the botanic gardens (42 acres, ten full-time gardening staff). The point of botanic gardens, as opposed to other sorts of gardens, was historically to have a place to test the suitability and economic viability of various plant species, both native, such as the still extant tree that produced the world’s first commercial crop of macadamia nuts, and alien, such as date palm and tamarind tree. The botanic gardens here date to the mid-nineteenth century. Many of the native plants on exhibit have common names similar to Northern Hemisphere plants but they are botanically unrelated or only distantly related. It is always interesting to see how biological niches get filled, though, one way or the other.

On the way back from the garden to the hotel, I passed three or four barristers at the end of their day in court. They had on the starched white collar-type thingies that cross on the chest, the white dress shirt, and the lightweight black robes; they were dragging their large, wheeled briefcases behind them. They were a rumpled, bedraggled lot. Hard day in court, I guess. This morning, I chanced upon a couple of barristers on their way to court. They were freshly pressed and starched, their hair was kempt, there was a spring in their step, and they were carrying their wigs in hand. I got the impression they have several changes of their court attire and afford the nearby dry cleaners a nice livelihood.

The wombat zone

2011-04-30T15:51:00.002-04:00

Saturday (yesterday here, probably today where you are) was the birthday of a colleague of Tina’s who lives in Melbourne. Lisa and her husband, Maury, picked us up at the hotel in the morning, and we went to the Healesville Sanctuary, part of the Victoria Zoos system, about an hour’s drive northeast of Melbourne, in the Yarra River area.

A zoo is a zoo, you may think, and why spend precious tourist hours visiting one, especially sans grandchildren. But many of Australia’s native species are not easily seen in American zoos, and so it was an interesting excursion. I had never seen a platypus other than on tv and no idea how small they are in real life, for example. Nor did I have a clear mental image of what a wombat looks like. And although I’ve been to Tasmania, this was the first time I’d seen a Tasmanian devil in the flesh.

After a few hours there, we drove back through wine country and stopped at an elegant winery bistro for tea (the time of day, not the beverage). It is fall here, harvest time (think Halloween), which explains why pumpkin is featured on so many menus and in so many interesting dishes, none of which bear any remote resemblance to pumpkin pie. And no, there are no outdoor decorations of pumpkins, gourds, and cornstalks to be seen anywhere. The American fruit has been adopted but not the kitsch that goes with it.

I was struck, on our drive, by the difference between public works in Australia and those in the U.S. This is a place where architects and artists are allowed—perhaps encouraged—to play. Everything from highway sound barriers to tunnel entrances to bridges of all types to train stations to customs houses is a work of public art, not just a utilitarian structure devoid of personality or attitude, as seems to be the only permissible style in the U.S. At home it’s considered wondrous that a government entity can ram a cable stay bridge through the approval process. Here, there is a sense of exuberance. Cable stay bridges are merely a starting point for beautiful and varied ways to move people from one side of a river to another. In fact, the tunnel we went through yesterday was built to get beneath a mountain stream that was thought important enough not to disturb with a bridge over it.

Around the world in 52 days

2011-04-28T17:48:00.005-04:00

If you are old enough to remember Cinerama, you may recall Around the World in Eighty Days, with David Niven as Phileas Fogg and Cantinflas as Passepartout in the 1956 film adaptation of the Jules Verne novel. The movie poster featured the two of them in a balloon.

This morning, eating breakfast in the executive lounge at the Hilton South Wharf in Melbourne, my wife and I looked out the window and saw five balloons rising over the harbor. The hostess explained that this is a daily occurrence, organized by commercial balloon excursion companies for people who want to pay ridiculous sums to then have to rise at three or four in the morning in order to get to the launch site in time for their adventure. I guess we’ll be passing on that experience, although we were up well before then today, having just arrive in Melbourne yesterday morning local time and not having adjusted completely to the time shift yet.

In any case, the blog will be given over to a travel journal for the next few weeks. If this bores you to tears, feel free to stop back mid-June, when it will return to the regular mishmash of more professional observations.

The occasion for this junket is a series of speaking engagements Tina arranged for herself in such a way that we end up circumnavigating the globe. This is something airlines like to encourage people to do, and so they offer deals. In particular, Star Alliance (owned by Lufthansa but participated in by many airlines) offers two plans, one about half the price of the other. If you can limit your itinerary to five stops (stops quite loosely defined, so that you can land in one city and take off from another, arranging your own transportation between them) and you can make the trip in less than 26,000 air miles, then you can take advantage of the lower-priced deal. Tina, in addition to being the sort of person who gets invited to speak all over the world, is also a savvy travel planner; she gets the credit for making this trip possible.

We also have a pretty good deal with Hilton that makes it possible for us to hole up for free in luxury hotels from time to time and eat free in the executive lounge. That cuts way down on daily expenditures as we go along, even as it embarrassingly intensifies the sense that we’ve become the kind of tourists we mocked in our youth.

Eat your heart out, United
The domestic airline whose mileage program we participate in is United, a Star Alliance member. Tina accumulates enough miles to qualify for a variety of privileges that I, as her spouse, get to enjoy as well. The occasional upgrade out of cattle class is one.

The first two legs of our trip were a short flight from Hartford to Washington followed by a cross-country flight to San Francisco, where Tina grew up and still has friends. We flew first class on both planes. This is not particularly special. While there are only two seats on either side of the aisle, rather than three, it is the space between seats that is wider, not the space between the armrests. In fact, in economy class, in most rows, you can raise the armrests between seats, providing a little extra hip room. In first class, the armrests are wide and filled with gadgetry, but they cannot be raised, so the seat is effectively narrower than an economy seat. There is slightly more legroom, but the tray tables extend only so far, making it a tight squeeze for someone my size, and the distance to the seat in front is not quite enough to comfortably open up a laptop. So much for plan A. Meanwhile, the entertainment, such as it is, is on an overhead monitor, not a seatback monitor, so you have no choice in what to watch. The only personal option is to not bother putting on your headphones; that’s the one I exercised, as the programs on offer were not suitable for anyone over the age of 13. There was a meal, but it was nothing memorable.

After a few days in the bay area, during which I was treated to lunch by a client and had drinks and light meal with some editing colleagues, it was off to Melbourne by way of Auckland, on Air New Zealand. We had to check out of our San Francisco hotel at 3:00 in the afternoon, but we couldn’t check in for our flight until 6:15. A good part of the interval between was spent in slapstick comedy as we chased between terminal buildings trying to track down a lost passport that wasn’t lost at all, just in the wrong person’s possession. Let’s just say that one of us was (accidentally) holding both of our passports and neither of us realized that. By the time we found it, it was time to get in line to check our bags. Then we were finally able to navigate unencumbered. We headed through security and on to the lounge.

Traveling as Star Alliance gold members, we have access to airport lounges. We had the choice of United’s Red Carpet Club or the Eva Airways Evergreen Club lounge shared by several of the international carriers. Hmmm. Decisions, decisions. Well, we know what Red Carpet Club offers—cookies and crackers, mini-slices of plastic-encased processed cheese, underripe fruit, and soft drinks. Anything else that might be on offer, such as beer or mediocre wine, comes at a steep price. Let’s try the other one. Lovely trays of charcuterie, interesting New Zealand cheeses, sliced fresh fruit, New Zealand wines (quite nice), and more. All free. Not a hard choice.

We had paid for an upgrade to Economy Premium for the fifteen-hour flight to Auckland. Now on United, there is something called Economy Plus, which is the first several rows in the economy cabin. It gets you five inches additional knee room, thus preventing permanent injury, but is otherwise identical to regular cattle class. On Air New Zealand, though, it entails a substantial array of perks. On board, we learned that Economy Premium is its own seating area. Leg room is comparable to United’s first class seating. The tray tables push away several inches further than in United’s first class, making it possible for me to sit up and eat like a normal human. A large storage locker on the window side holds a large, heavy duvet to supplement the standard-issue airplane blanket. Service includes complimentary beer or red, white, or sparkling New Zealand wine and the sorts of amenities, such as hot washcloths before meals, that United provides in Business Class. The supper menu started with cured and seared tuna with salad ratatouille and lobster dressing over mesclun greens. For the entree we had a choice of New Zealand lamb lin with yellow bell pepper salsa, lyonnaise potatoes, and broccolini with lemon; pan-seared cod with lemon caper sauce, baby potatoes, spinach, and caramelized shallots; or wood-roasted chicken breast with soft herb mash, zucchini, mushrooms, and red onion. We both had the lamb. A basket of various interesting warm breads was passed with dinner. Dessert was a berry almond sponge cake with a dollop of cinnamon cream on the side. There was an after-dinner plate of New Zealand cheeses with grapes and apricots, but neither of us had room to consider even looking at it.

Breakfast began with a fruit plate, yogurt, croissants (warm) with New Zealand butter and fruit conserves. Cereal was available but we passed. There was a further choice of cheddar and chive scrambled egg served with chicken sausage, mushroom ragout, and cherry tomatoes; or Belgian waffles, strawberries, manuka honey apple syrup, and freshly whipped banana cream. Tina had the eggs. I had neither, as I was still full from dinner.

The menu for those traveling the other direction, Auckland to California, is entirely different for both meals, featuring more fresh New Zealand ingredients, but of the same quality. While I don’t know what the choices were in regular economy, I note that this is the Premium Economy menu I’m talking about, not the same menu as is offered in business class or in first class, and yet it is quite elegant, and the food lives up to the description.

The onboard entertainment system on many international carriers consists of individually controlled seatback monitors. The Air New Zealand system, in addition to whatever musical offerings, informational pages about destinations, and television episodes it had, offered a choice of seventy movies—many more than I’ve seen offered on any other airline. I generally don’t bother unwrapping the headphones. There were the expected kids’ movies, romantic comedies, and recent action flicks. There were extensive selections in Japanese and Chinese. And there were classics. On the transpacific flight I saw Elmer Gantry and almost all of The Misfits, neither of which I’d ever seen. So that was pretty cool. On the Auckland to Melbourne flight, I saw Buena Vista Social Club, another I had missed.

About an hour before breakfast, we were awakened by a PA announcement requesting the assistance of a doctor or registered nurse. Tina turned out to be the only doctor who volunteered, and her major contribution was to be present so that the aircraft’s medical kit could legally be opened. The medical problem was one that the nurses who volunteered were much more qualified to treat than Tina was. Nonetheless, the crew were quite grateful for her stepping forward. As a consequence, on our Auckland to Melbourne flight, we were upgraded from the regular economy seats we had booked (I can tolerate tight knee room for three hours) to business class.

In Auckland we did a little airport shopping and proceeded to the Air New Zealand lounge for our second breakfast of the morning. (Really, we ate little, but there was a nice buffet spread that included scrambled eggs, pancakes, a selection of breads and pastries, fresh fruit, and more.)

Business class was interesting. Maybe you’ve seen ads for business class seats that recline into full-length individual beds. That was the arrangement. Each pod included a comfortable seat (wider, finally, than any of the other seats so far), an ottoman that doubled as a guest seat (it had a seatbelt) and a large table (normally stowed) that is adequate for two people to eat facing each other, which is how we had our third breakfast yesterday. Service began with a choice of water, juice, sparkling wine, or a banana-honey smoothie. This was followed by a sliced fruit plate, assorted cereals, bircher muesli, and yogurt. The passed bread basket included croissants, muffins, Vogel’s (a New Zealand brand of dense, whole grain bread), or fruit toast, served with New Zealand butter and fruit conserves. This was followed by a choice of smoked chicken pesto and parmesan omelette with slow-roasted tomato and chicken sausage; or corned beef and root vegetable cakes with grilled field mushroom (actually, it was half a portobello), leaf spinach, blistered vine tomato, and tarragon mustard mayonnaise. The breakfast entrees were credited to, respectively, chef Geoff Scott of Vinnies Restaurant, Auckland, and Rex Morgan, Boulcott Street Bistro, Wellington.( A third chef pictured in the menu did not have a dish listed on this version.) The corned beef was a minor and subtle ingredient in an almost latke-like cake of shredded vegetables—not what either of was expecting, but much lighter and more subtle.

As a further gesture, when we were about to land, the plane’s concierge stopped by to speak with Tina and handed her a bottle of one of New Zealand’s better Cabernet Sauvignons.

United Airlines is the U.S. flag carrier. We’ve flown their D.C. to Paris route, once, by mistake. In comparison with any other Star Alliance carrier we’ve been on, they are an embarrassment to their flag. The food is barely edible, even by American standards. Service is generally polite but never warm, regardless of class. On the Paris flight, there were perhaps two members of the cabin crew who spoke French. Every other flag carrier we’ve traveled on has been superior on all counts and in all travel classes.

Noted in passing: become becomes obsolete

2011-04-18T08:31:00.002-04:00

Language changes. The rate at which a given language changes is something linguists can measure and write papers about and draw conclusions about, and I’m not a linguist. So I’ll leave all that to the experts.

But we all recognize that certain phrases and words and usages rise or fall in popularity within our lifetimes. So linguistic change is not always glacial.

For some reason, the word become popped into my head Saturday night. Not the intransitive verb become, as in “a caterpillar becomes a butterfly,” but the transitive verb become, as in “that outfit becomes you” or the gerund (I think I have that right) “that outfit is very becoming.”

This was a common locution in my childhood. My mother would say it to my sister, as she would say to me “that behavior is unbecoming a young gentleman.”

Sunday morning, my wife and I had brunch with her daughter and son-in-law. My wife remarked to my stepdaughter, “Is that jacket new? It looks cute on you.” Driving home, I asked her if her mother, like mine, would instead have said “that jacket is very becoming.” We agreed that neither of us had heard anyone use the word in recent memory—certainly no one of our generation or those after.

So I did a cursory corpus search, using Google’s new Ngram viewer. It seems the use of the word unbecoming, at least in printed works, peaked around 1710 at 20 times its current frequency, and related phrases that I tried have similarly declined. The decline has been about fifty percent since the 1950s. There has been a slight uptick in the last few years of “unbecoming a young lady,” apparently in Christian behavior manuals. Otherwise, this sense of the word become seems to be quite moribund, although dictionaries treat it as current and unremarkable.

So let me ask you: if you are under forty, is this a word you hear or use in speech? Other than in nineteenth-century and earlier literature or in the title Morning Becomes Electra, are you familiar with it in writing? Did you even know the word before reading this post?

Intended to be a true statement

2011-04-15T22:03:00.003-04:00

About this sendup of a book signing, by the Onion (do read it; it’s a hoot), guest blogger Dave Marx of PassPorter Travel Press had this to say on a publishers’ discussion list:

…there’s a lot of truth to it.

Too many authors and small pubs don’t understand that an author event’s greatest value is in the pre-event publicity. Far more will see that and be exposed to author and title than will ever haul their butts down to the store. Author events are an excuse for the book store and author to send press releases, appear on local radio/tv, etc. Showing up at the store, pen in hand, is the payback, not the payoff.

Dave will be be speaking on Marketing 101 in the Digital Age at the 2011 IBPA Publishing University, May 22–23 in New York

the eyes have it

2011-04-12T14:07:00.002-04:00

Disambiguation page

The following three words all sound alike:

I
First person singular pronoun

eye
Organ of vision

aye
Yes, as in “Aye, Cap’n” or “the ayes have it”

The following two words sound alike:

yea
Yes, as in, “Are you with me, yea or nay?” or “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.”

yay
A cheer, similar to hooray, with which it rhymes.

And the following word does not sound like any of the above:

yeah
An informal or slang way to say yes, as in “yeah, right” or “yeah, I’ll pick it up on the way home.”

This message brought to you by someone increasingly annoyed that anyone who writes or edits for a living can possibly be confused about this.

If you don't subscribe to Nathan Bransford's blog, you missed this

2011-04-02T08:00:00.002-04:00

Nathan Bransford’s blog is a must-read. Yesterday’s post offers this nugget:

Comment! of! the! Week! I’m going to Twitter for this one, as EvilWylie responded to my question about how authors of the future will make money:

The blind leading the blind

2011-03-31T15:11:00.002-04:00

A screen reader is a piece of software that converts written words to a computer-generated voice. The technology has improved over the years, and I guess some of these programs are at least satisfactory, even if listening to a book read by a screen reader will never be as fulfilling an experience as listening to an audio book recorded by a skilled voice artist.

For a publisher who is trying to accommodate people with visual impairments, producing a version of a book that works with screen readers is much less expensive than producing an audio book or a Braille book. And now that a large number of books are being packaged as electronic books (e-books), it should be no trouble to do this. At least that’s the theory.

There are some snags, though.
First, the popular e-book readers have visual controls for navigating the text. This makes them unsuitable, and therefore the main e-book file formats (.mobi for Kindle and .epub for everyone else) don’t solve the problem.

Instead, the preferred format is something called accessible PDF. This is a PDF file in which Alt tags have been embedded so that there is a verbal description associated with every picture. The PDF also has a document structure set up so that the order in which the screen reader reads the elements on a page can be controlled.

That’s the theory.

In practice, books undergo frequent revision in the last stages before they are released. So it would be very inefficient to have to start with a regular PDF after every revision and reenter all of the Alt tags, then reimplement the structural arrangement for the screen reader. Therefore, ideally, one should be able to create the Alt tags and the reading order in the original document before creating the PDF.

Now all of this—creating the book layout and generating the PDF and making it an accessible PDF—is done entirely within the integrated Adobe Creative Suite. So the programs should communicate with each other correctly.

Further, because this is Adobe’s technology, Adobe ought to have good documentation and support for the process.

Not so much. On both counts. The documentation for the process omits a great deal of critical information, and the actual output process does not work as advertised. At best the solution is partial.

This is all pretty new, though.
It’s so new, in fact, that Bowker, the company responsible for assigning ISBNs in the U.S. and for publishing the Books in Print database, have never heard of the accessible PDF format before. They learned about it today from a client of mine who is the person on whose behalf I had to disentangle the production process in the first place.

Bottom line.
I’ve now figured out what is needed to produce a proper accessible PDF that works for people with visual impairments using screen readers. Bookmark this post. If you need to produce such a book in the future, get in touch with me. What I’ll charge you for a consulting fee to walk you through it is much less than what it will cost you to figure it out on your own.

How does that work, Daddy?

2011-03-19T20:24:00.004-04:00

When I was a little kid (before about three quarters of people now living were born, in other words), technology was macroscopic. I could ask my father how something worked, and most of the time he could answer with what, in retrospect, was reasonable accuracy. (I could ask my mother, but her answer was consistently “Ask your father.”)

The reason he was able to do this is that an observant person could see how something worked. If you stood and watched a machine for a while, you could figure out its theory of operation. You could, if you pondered a bit, see why a particular piece was shaped the way it was. A tour guide in a factory could point to some part of the operation and explain, so a six-year-old could understand, what was happening.

This is no longer the case.
Yesterday, UPS delivered a new camera my wife had ordered. Because she plans to use it to take short movies for her next DVD, she also ordered a spare memory card. Now the camera—a high-definition model—is about the size of a pack of playing cards. The spare memory card is small enough that a spy might swallow it to avoid its discovery. And while this particular card holds 8 gigabytes of data, for a little more money the same size card could hold 32 gigabytes (256 gigabits).

There is nothing in either of these devices that the average dad can explain to the average six-year-old. Yes, I’m sure Wikipedia has articles that explain the technologies and even provide schematic diagrams. But I defy you to visualize—in a way that reflects the reality of how it’s done—how 256 billion bits of information are stored on that memory card or how a factory can produce such a device as reliably and cheaply as it does.

The same can be said for much modern technology. I know how a rotary telephone dial works. I’m okay with a Touch-Tone keypad. But my Droid does things I would not want to have to explain. (Do you really know how GPS navigation works or do you just sort of wave your hands and say plausible-sounding things about satellites whizzing around and the general theory of relativity?)

Now I say this as someone who started programming in numeric machine language in 1962 and who minored in physics and who is familiar with modern programming languages as well. It’s not that I don’t know how to make a computer do what I want it to. But that’s different from satisfying the need to see parts moving in visible space, making things.

In the natural world, we’ve gone from distinguishing organisms by their appearance and criminals by their fingerprints to distinguishing both groups by their DNA—a molecule whose structure was unknown when I was born.

Every generation faces the struggle to keep up with a changing world.
And every generation looks back at the changes it has seen. My grandparents were born before automobiles or electric lights were invented and they lived to see men walk on the moon.

I’ve heard pundits pontificate about the changes my Boomer generation has witnessed. We grew up with television and were shaped by it. Computers have moved from the periphery to the center of our lives. The Internet has truly changed the way society functions. Social media are enabling whole populations to liberate themselves. Yada yada. All of that may be true. But I think the biggest change in the way we human organisms interact with the world—what has perhaps pushed us further from our cousins in the animal kingdom rather than closer to them—is this shift from seeing the world as filled with things we can see and touch to seeing the world as filled with technology so advanced it is indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C. Clarke put it.

The HarperCollins gambit

2011-03-04T09:28:00.003-05:00

HarperCollins, one of the huge publishing conglomerates that dominate the commercial book world, announced that libraries “purchasing” their e-books will be able to lend such a book only twenty-six times before the book expires. The Twitterverse exploded with accusations of corporate greed and the absolute entitlement of libraries and their patrons to not only cheap but probably free books from publishers, on the theory that libraries don’t have enough money to pay for books in the first place. This view was supported by some authors who want their words read, and hang the royalties.

I suspect part of brouhaha was sparked by the injudicious use of the word purchase. E-books are software. As such, they are licensed, not purchased. When you “buy” an e-book, you are licensing the right to read it. There is nothing physical that you own. When you buy a p-book, you own the physical object. One person can read it at a time. In the U.S., when a library purchases a p-book, the author collects the royalty on one sale, and that’s the end of the transaction. In many countries (the United Kingdom and Australia among them), authors receive payments based on how many times a library lends a book. Not so here.

Another confusion arises over copying. You cannot take an in-copyright p-book to a copy shop and ask that copies be made of it. Copy shops know that’s illegal copyright infringement. But copying a digital file is trivially simple, so some people think they should be allowed to make unlimited copies of e-books and they castigate publishers for trying to protect e-books with digital rights management (DRM) technology. Yet copying is still copying is still copyright infringement. The rationale of the infinitely entitled—that unlike a p-book, which costs the publisher money for ink and paper, an e-book has no production cost—exhibits a profound misunderstanding of what publishers do and how they spend their money.

The worldview of authors (principally academics) who are secure, salaried professionals and publish books for the purpose of sharing information is very different from the worldview of authors who seek income from writing. (Yes, I know there are some academics, authors of popular undergraduate textbooks, who make a nice supplemental income from royalties; but they’re the exceptions.) One group would like libraries to get all their books free and devote their limited budgets to promoting those books to readers. The other group would like to receive royalties every time a book is checked out. Neither group seems to see any role for publishers or to think that publishers have any costs to recoup.

My point in this discussion of the HarperCollins e-book gambit is not that twenty-six is the right number or that charging more for an e-book than for a p-book can be justified. My point is that there needs to be some calm discussion between groups with differing worldviews so that a rational pricing model can emerge. This is early days in the evolution of e-books, and I have no idea where we will end up.

What has irked me about the tenor of most of the comments I’ve seen is a sense of absolute entitlement on the part of librarians to pick the pockets of publishers and authors—the people who put dinner on the tables of editors and book designers, I should add, just so you know where my interests lie. Libraries cost money to run. They are a public benefit. We, the public, should pay their costs and be happy to do so. Publishers should be free to price their goods in whatever way maximizes their profits in a competitive marketplace, and libraries should be free to buy or not buy a given publisher’s books as a result. But libraries are not entitled to a free ride at publishers’ expense just because the public feels entitled to pay too little in taxes.

Is your passion for telling the story or for selling the story?

2011-02-15T08:44:00.002-05:00

Do you have a story you must tell the world? Are there people out there whose lives you could save if only they knew what you went through and how you overcame it? Is it your burning desire help everyone who has ever faced what you faced?

Cool. Now what?

I applaud you for having the courage to write what’s in your heart. If the act of writing it all down—itself a deeply therapeutic endeavor—is sufficient to calm your soul and extinguish your fire, stop there. You’ve written it down. You’ve accomplished what you set out to do. You’re a success! Now go on to do other successful things in your life, and put your manuscript in a safe deposit box for your heirs to discover.

But if just writing it all down wasn’t enough and now you want to tell the world, that means you want to publish your story (literally, make it public).

You can accomplish that by putting it all on a blog or a dedicated website. Total cost: approximately $0. (You might have to pay a small hosting fee, or you might decide to use a free service.) You can do this without paying an editor, although the services of an editor may be helpful, depending on how clearly you write. You can do this without paying a designer. You don’t need a printer or distributor or retailer. No money goes out, and presumably no money comes in. But you can reach a worldwide audience with your story. And if you publicize it through social media and by optimizing your site for search engines (something you can learn how to do by reading about it), you will have accomplished your initial goal of reaching out to others with your story.

For most personal stories—personal memoirs of struggle and redemption, of surmounting oppression, of exposing the corruption of the medical or legal system—telling the world about it free on the Internet may be the best possible approach.

Only if you want to sell your story and have the commitment and energy to market it to a defined audience should you take the next step and publish it as a book. Because a book is a product. As the publisher you are taking on the responsibility to develop and market that product profitably. If you’re not going to follow through with the hard work of marketing, why do you want to invest in developing the product?

Of course, it’s less expensive to develop an e-book than a printed book. You still need an editor. You still need a cover designer. But in many cases you can get by without a designer for the interior of the book. And you can test market an e-book through Smashwords at no cost. A printed book costs more to develop, and then you have to pay the cost of printing it. So maybe you want that to be something you take on after you see how well the e-book sells.

I edit and design books. Why am I suggesting that a printed book should be your last choice? Isn’t that driving away potential business? I suppose it is. But I don’t take people’s money under false pretenses; I don’t suggest that all they need is a printed book and their next stop is a private island in the Caribbean, paid for with the profits. Publishing is a business, not a get-rich-quick scheme. I like to work with clients who understand that.

Figure out where your passion lies and then decide how far you want to go with your story.

And also...

2011-01-24T09:46:00.002-05:00

Writing—any writing—is hard for some people. Here’s a blank screen, and the assignment is to write an essay or a chapter or a book on a subject the author knows well. What to do, what to do?

Well, apparently what some authors do is cogitate for a few minutes and then think of a sentence to begin with. That sentence may, if we are lucky, convey a fact. Then the author thinks of something else to say that seems to belong to the same paragraph. This is, however, a new thought. Or perhaps the authors categorizes it as an afterthought. So he begins the second sentence with also. This process repeats, and most succeeding sentences begin with also or the semantic equivalent (for variety), too.

This is the written equivalent of the spoken run-on in which the person on the other end of the phone line (or the interview guest running over his time slot on NPR) strings forty or fifty independent clauses together with and so that the interlocutor cannot get a word in edgewise. (You’ve heard people do this. You never do it yourself, of course.)

In another variant of this authorial tic, we see remember that used to start every second or third sentence.

Okay, listen up, dammit. The reader expects succeeding sentences to convey information that is in addition to the first sentence. Also is implied automatically. And is implied automatically. We can assume that if you are writing something down to be printed in a book it is something you want the reader to remember; so you don’t have keep reminding us of that, either.

Please stop doing that. You know who you are.

The Ten Commandments of Type

2011-01-17T16:24:00.001-05:00

The Ten Commandments of Type, by Ilene Strizver, on CreativePro.com

Snomigod

2011-01-13T07:49:00.002-05:00

I suppose I should post pictures, but I’ve been too busy clearing snow for the last twenty-four hours (had a handle on it by yesterday afternoon, but then the plow came through and undid a lot of it) and I’m bushed. Almost feels like I’m back in the Adirondack foothills. Except the plows were bigger there.

A small victory

2010-12-08T14:12:00.001-05:00

Update
The infringing document (see previous post) has been removed from the server, as of today. The link returns a 404 error. Chalk one up for persistent whining.

I'm sorry you feel that way

2010-12-03T10:42:00.005-05:00

Editor’s note
A few years ago, when I was trying to be diligent about posting regularly to this blog, I tossed off a Seinfeld-style observation about something of no particular import. No, I’m not going to link to it in this post, for reasons that may become clear as you read on.

Unbeknown to me, it turns out that the title I chose for the post is actually a phrase people search on with some frequency. As luck would have it, my post floated to the top of the search listings for that phrase, was then scraped for a while by some miscreant in the Philippines (outside the reach of U.S. law), thus further raising the visibility in search listings of the original post. The way major search engines work, the higher something is in the listing, the more likely it is to be clicked, and the more often it is clicked, the higher it goes in the listing. So here we are, more than three years later, and a little squib I tossed off is still high on search listings.

A couple of weeks ago, in a moment of idle procrastination, I searched for the first sentence of that post. And there it was: my blog post, yes; but also a link to a newsletter published by a small rural public school in an English-speaking country. I clicked the link, and a Microsoft Word document file opened. There was my blog post, presented as the school principal’s letter at the top of the newsletter, over the principal’s signature, with no acknowledgment that the words were not his own.

And thus begins the tale…

Dear [redacted],

The Principal’s Message in your school’s newsletter, [redacted], over your signature, is directly taken from a blog post I wrote on [redacted]. My blog is copyright, with notice of copyright given in the footer of every page. Your newsletter column gave no indication that the words were not your own and in particular gave no credit to me.

I do understand that my article has been posted without my permission on other sites from time to time and that you may have copied the text from someplace other than my blog. Nonetheless, you, or whoever “wrote” the column in your newsletter, knew or should have known that taking someone else’s words and passing them off as yours is both illegal and a violation of one of the fundamental tenets of scholarship.

Whether or not the copyright infringement and plagiarism were the result of your own actions or those of a subordinate to whom you delegated the writing of the column, I think this was a poor example to set for your school’s students. I believe you owe them—and me—a public apology, in language that shows you accept responsibility for this serious infraction.

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely,

The principal replied:

I am very sorry that your article was used in our Newsletter without your permission or acknowledging your work.

I will ensure that this never happens again and an apology will apear in our next edition.

Regards

That didn’t sit well with me.

Thank you for writing back to me.

Let me try this again.

[Your country], like the United States, is party to the Berne Convention. Copyright infringement is a serious violation of [your country’s] law just as it is a serious violation of U.S. law, and enforcement is international.

More important—in this case much more important—you are the principal of a school. Plagiarism, which has become rampant in higher education to the point that it threatens the integrity of the whole system (see http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/) starts with a presumption on students’ parts that it doesn’t matter. If you, in your role as an adult model for young children, engage in plagiarism, then you are essentially condoning their cheating in their own studies; and that’s a despicable thing to do to them.

Moreover, the public actually takes this issue seriously in many cases: politicians’ careers have been damaged or have ended entirely because of disclosures of plagiarized speeches. Senior scientists have been professionally disgraced and have lost their jobs over this issue.

Now I can see from your photos on the Web that you are a young [person]. And you are further handicapped by being an educator. So I am not particularly surprised at the inadequacy of your apology. Therefore, I’ll offer you another chance, with some friendly editorial coaching.

Let’s look at your first sentence: “I am very sorry that your article was used in our Newsletter….” I don’t doubt that you are sorry (or will be, eventually). However, your use of the passive voice (“your article was used”) serves only to deflect responsibility to some unknown agent. That’s one of the main uses of the passive voice—deflecting agency to an unknown actor. So this is the form people use when they want to issue a non-apology. I’m sure you’ve heard many people say things like “I’m sorry you feel that way [but by implication it’s not my fault]” or “I’m sorry your dog was killed [but the fact I ran her over isn’t my responsibility].” That’s a non-apology, as was yours. An actual apology begins with the words “I’m sorry I,” as in “I’m sorry I killed your dog.”

My work did not appear in your newsletter by magic. Someone put it there. It appears over your signature. So I expect an apology that begins with the words “I’m sorry I” followed by an action verb that tells me what you did.

Now let’s look at your second sentence: “I will ensure that this never happens again and an apology will appear in our next edition.” The first clause promises something quite outside your control to make it happen. The most you can ensure is that you will never engage in this activity again, and I would like to hear that from you. The second clause promises that an apology will magically appear, but it does not say that you will be the one apologizing. I would like to hear that from you as well.

So let’s look at what an appropriate remedy would be at this point.

1. It is absolutely necessary that you remove the contraband newsletter from the server where it resides. There should be no way for a search engine to locate that document on the Internet. It is up to you whether a link returns a 404-not found error or redirects to a substitute document. My preference would be that it redirects to a substitute document that explains why the original newsletter was removed (referencing this incident).

2. I expect a rewritten apology that takes into account the editorial advice above.

3. I want to see and approve in advance the apology you will issue to your community. And I want you to send me directly (by email) a copy of the newsletter in which it appears.

4. I would like to be invited to address a school assembly on the subject of cheating (in an age-appropriate way), specifically with regard to plagiarism and copyright infringement, at your personal expense (rather than out of the school’s budget). I will be in [your area] in May 2011 and could speak at your school the afternoon of 10 May. My fee for this engagement will be US$___ plus round trip travel between [large city] and [your town].

My hope is that this will become a learning experience for you and that you will rise to my challenge to take this incident as seriously as I do.

Sincerely,

When nothing further came my way, I wrote to the head of the regional education department. After a bit of bureaucratic buck-passing, I received a letter last night from the principal’s boss and responded as below (italics are what I wrote).

Dear Mr Margulis

I refer to your previous emails to [redacted] (“School”) regarding the use of some material posted on your website in the School Newsletter, the [redacted].

Thank you for responding.

As it appears that you have not fully accepted [the principal’s] apology, [she/he] has asked me to respond as School Education Director for the [redacted] area.

Here we differ. I do not accept that [the principal’s] response was an apology. As [she/he] never offered an apology, there was nothing for me to accept. This is a point of some importance in public life, and it’s worth dwelling on for a moment. As I tried to convey to [the principal], the essence of apology is the acknowledgment of responsibility. The basic form of an apology is “I’m sorry I did that.” That implies remorse for having done something injurious to another. The form [the principal] used, “I am very sorry that your article was used,” lacks any acknowledgment of responsibility. I am very sorry that tyrants kidnap children and turn them into soldiers in Africa; I am very sorry the world’s economy is in recession and that a great many people are unemployed; I am very sorry that tuberculosis still kills millions of people. None of those statements implies remorse for my responsibility in causing any of those terrible conditions to exist. “I’m sorry I stepped on your toe” is an apology. “I’m sorry your toe hurts” is a non-apology. [the principal] offered a non-apology.

See, for example, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000327.html for analysis of this point by a world-renown linguist.

[The principal] has advised me that [she/he] does not remember the website where [she/he] accessed the material, however [she/he] has provided an apology to you on the 22 November 2010 for any inadvertent use of your material without receiving your permission. In addition, I understand that the Newsletter was removed from the School’s website on 1 December 2010.

Your understanding is incorrect. The following link still retrieves the document(I just checked). Hence it is still available on the World Wide Web and is available on a Web search, which is how I found it in the first place.

[link redacted]

You have a legal obligation to remove the document from the server where it resides. I’m reasonably certain that there are enforceable statutory penalties for leaving it up there and that such penalties accrue daily. I’m not the sort of nasty person who goes around launching international lawsuits over such matters, but someday you may run into someone who is. As I said in my email of 22 November, “It is up to you whether a link returns a 404-not found error or redirects to a substitute document. My preference would be that it redirects to a substitute document that explains why the original newsletter was removed (referencing this incident).”

In any case, “provided an apology…for any inadvertent use” doesn’t come close to acceptance of responsibility.

[The principal] has learned a valuable lesson from this matter and the importance of respecting an author’s copyright. [She/he] has assured me that [she/he] will make every effort to comply with copyright requirements in the future and has again expressed [his/her] sincere apology to you for [his/her] actions. As previously advised a formal public apology will be made in the next School Newsletter which will be sent to you.

It’s nice to hear from you that [the principal] has learned a lesson. It is completely opaque to me why [she/he] wasn’t able to write back to me asserting as much for [him/her]self, thus saving you a great deal of time and trouble. But I will take you at your word on that point, as I imagine the cost in administrative and legal time [she/he] has caused the department has been impressed upon [him/her] to [her/his] everlasting regret (if not, please don’t disabuse me of my fantasy).

The [redacted] (“Department”) does not consider that it would be appropriate for you to address the school on plagiarism and copyright infringement. The Department has a Copyright Unit which provides a broad range of information and advice to staff on these issues. In addition there are learning programs for students in the Kindergarten to Year 6 range which includes an awareness that deliberately copying the work of others and claiming ownership is plagiarism.

Well, that’s a bit of a disappointment for me, because I think it would have been a fun presentation for me and for the students, as well as an opportunity for [the principal] to appear contrite in a constructive way. However, I’m glad that you do teach young children that cheating is wrong, as it’s a fundamental lesson.

I have asked that all staff at the school include a component on copyright and plagiarism in their next Staff Development Day.

These are two separate concepts, and I hope the teaching component clarifies the distinction. Copyright infringement injures me. Plagiarism corrupts the institution. The first consists of taking property that is not yours. It is a commercial tort, and yet we make fair use exceptions so that teachers can often get away with wholesale copying—of almost anything but a textbook—for educational purposes, without threat of penalty (so long as they acknowledge their sources). The second consists of claiming credit for someone else’s work. This is a critical concept in all academic settings, and those charged with the education of children should understand it in their bones. We, as a society, entrust educational institutions to award diplomas and degrees to people based on the work those people do. We expect those institutions to police their students with regard to plagiarism; to the extent that they fail to do so, their integrity—and our trust in them—is undermined.

On behalf of the [Department], I offer a further apology for the use of your copyright material without first obtaining permission.

Permission would have freely been offered had it been sought. And, frankly, if [the principal] had merely cited [her/his] source, I’d have been happy to be quoted even if permission had not been sought. I will gladly accept the department’s institutional apology once the document is removed from the web server. I don’t see how it substitutes for a simple and direct apology from [the principal], though.

Yours sincerely

Please let me know when the department’s IT administrator has successfully quarantined the contraband document against public access over the Internet. And I would still appreciate a simple and direct apology from [the principal], as evidence of lesson learned. I know some people are constitutionally incapable of remorse, but I should hope that’s not the sort of person you would place in charge of schoolchildren.

Sincerely,

If you feel I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, well, I’m sorry you feel that way.

Too much information

2010-12-02T13:25:00.002-05:00

Damn this new technology anyway!

Thanks to Brian Dana Akers for the link to an excellent article in the Globe.

Payback: a little self-publishing math

2010-11-18T11:13:00.002-05:00

A client reports that in the first two months after delivery, about 700 books have sold. While most of these were sold “at the back of the room” (the client is a speaker), let’s value those sales at the wholesale (discounted) price. The reason for this is that any margin between the wholesale price and the retail price really belongs to the retailer, even if that retailer is the speaker. (There are costs associated with shlepping books around, setting up a table, staffing the table, etc.; and those costs are paid by the author-as-retailer, not by the author-as-publisher.)

At a wholesale value of $15 a book, that means that the publisher has recouped $10,500 in two months. The total cost of producing the book (except for the author’s time writing it) and printing 1,600 copies was about $11,000. So at this point, my client has 900 books in inventory and has recovered all but about $500 of the original investment. If those 900 books sell in the next six months (as is likely), my client will be $13,000 ahead. That’s still not much compensation for writing the book, but it represents a doubling of the original investment in less than a year. And the client expects to order more printings and continue selling the book for several more years, with no further outlay except manufacturing costs of less than $3.00 a book. In addition, the client reports that the presence of the book on the sales table (where it is the high-price item at $25) has significantly boosted the sales of older items that were already in inventory and that can also be reprinted cheaply.

Is it a living? No. It is rare for a single book to be anyone’s sole source of income. But if a single book can add ten or fifteen or twenty thousand dollars a year to a speaker’s income, don’t you think it’s worth the effort?

Nice piece on letterpress nouveau

2010-11-13T10:30:00.002-05:00

Thanks to Mike Starr for the link to this encouraging article on Boing Boing.

The cookies next time

2010-11-01T05:35:00.003-04:00

The block I live on gets light trick-or-treat traffic of mostly neighborhood children. This is a neighborhood that still supports a traditional mix of store-bought and homemade costumes. In these respects, it is not very different from the neighborhood where I grew up several decades ago.

What has changed is the nature of the treats handed out. Beginning in the mid-1960s, according to Snopes, rumors about razor blades in apples began to circulate (some suspect with help from the candy manufacturing industry), leading to police warnings, hospitals offering to x-ray kids’ hauls, and a complete shift toward individually wrapped commercial candy. No more homemade cookies. No more apples. No more anything that didn’t come out of a candy factory.

Well, that’s two generations of children experiencing a debased, corrupt, commercialized Halloween. And two generations of baseless paranoia is enough, sez I.

So I tried an experiment. In one bowl I offered candy. In a second bowl I offered beautiful, polished apples that we bought yesterday from the grower at our local farmers’ market. Of the dozen or so kids who came by last night, I’m happy to report that three chose apples. (One little girl, grabbing a handful of candy as her younger brother chose an apple, said, “He’s the smart one.”) Clearly the sample was too small to have any statistical significance, but I count as a small victory the fact that their hovering parents allowed these children to accept unwrapped apples.

Maybe next year you’ll try something similar. And the year after that your neighbors might. In Arlo Guthrie’s immortal words, “And, friends, they may thinks it’s a movement.”

Great news for self-published authors

2010-09-28T16:05:00.001-04:00

Literary agents open the door to self-published writers

How to sell $15,000 worth of books in three hours

2010-09-23T08:23:00.002-04:00

Last Thursday the psychiatry department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, medical school held its sixtieth anniversary banquet. This is the sort of “development” (read: fund-raising) event that large institutions host several times a year. Ho-hum. Knock yourselves out. The university development people did not expect the psychiatry department to attract more than about 200 people. Instead, they had to start turning people away after reaching the fire marshall’s limit of 480 guests, as additional people tried to get in without having made reservations.

What happened?
What happened was that the department chair had the foresight a few years ago to commission a book about the department’s history. One thing led to another, and Pat McNees was selected to write the book. What was originally going to be a fairly modest project grew and grew as Pat delved into not only the department’s sixty-year history but also the hundred-year history of psychiatry in Maryland. She conducted multiple interviews each with some of the more connected informants and dozens of additional interviews and email exchanges with many more people who have at one time or another been connected with the department.

Unfortunately, the scope creep also pushed the completion date for the book. Pat had approached me in February about editing and designing it, and I had suggested mid-April as the deadline for the last of the manuscript pages, with an allowance for photos to straggle in for a month or so after. That schedule would have comfortably allowed for time to lay out the book, have it proofread, have it printed on a normal schedule and shipped in time for the banquet.

In the event, the book was put to bed on July 28.
It was 584 pages (seven by ten inches), with 175 photos.* The cover price for the softcover book was set at $49.95 and for the hardcover at $59.95. By that time, I could find no U.S. plant that would guarantee delivery in time for the September 16 banquet and was also willing to set up for binding just one hundred hardcovers out of a print run of 1,700. We ended up with a printer in Korea. Great quality. Great price. No problem with the hardcovers. The only catch? To get 350 books to Baltimore in time for the banquet, they had to be sent overnight by air, at a cost of $3,400. (The total was still cheaper than printing in the United States.)

All of Pat’s interviews and requests for photos over the last couple of years generated a lot of buzz about the forthcoming book, and that’s what boosted the attendance at the banquet to what appears to be a school record. Tickets were $250 for a couple, with one copy of the book included, or $150 for an individual, with one copy of the book included. If you do the math, that’s $100 for the banquet itself and $50 (the cover price) for the book. Of the 350 shipped in advance, a few were used as complimentary copies for various people, most were sold as part of the banquet ticket price, and the rest were sold to people who could not get into the banquet or who wanted an additional copy for someone else. The total comes to something over $15,000 worth of books during the event. And so far the responses have been enthusiastically positive.

Did this cover the full cost of writing, producing, printing, and shipping the book? No. It was a bigger project than that. But it covered a good chunk. And when the rest of the books arrive by slow boat, a good many of them will have been sold already. The initial plan was to have books in inventory for a few years to use as recruiting enticements for faculty and students. So it was not expected that the book would turn a cash profit. Now it seems that it might.

* Production note: this large and heavy a softcover book should not be perfectbound, as there are potential issues with pages pulling out. Instead, the book was Smyth-sewn (as a good hardcover book is), and the cover was drawn on. Some book manufacturers are smart enough to recognize the problem and suggest this solution. Others are not. So designers should be aware of the technique.

Visual thinkers. And others.

2010-09-05T08:56:00.002-04:00

Client 1
My client sent me a book she likes the look of and said she wanted her book to be approximately the same format. She sent me a photograph she already owned the rights to and asked me to use it for the cover. From beginning to end, she was with me at every turn, considering the alternatives I offered, choosing decisively, suggesting improvements, reacting to my suggestions. The book came out both beautiful and completely appropriate to its subject and audience. If I were the sort of person who entered design contests, I’d consider entering this book.

Client 2
Given the subject of my client’s book, I wasn’t sure which of two general approaches was going to be more to his liking. I sent two very different trial designs, one that I described to him as quite stiff and formal, the other that I described to him as very casual and friendly. I made it clear that I was just looking for a quick reaction, that we could then refine either design to get it just the way he wanted it. Basing his choice entirely on my description in the cover email and not on looking at the samples, he chose one of the two designs. He allowed as how really didn’t have the vocabulary to discuss design further and would leave the rest up to me. That book will come out looking pretty good, too.

I try to involve clients in design choices, because I’m creating their books, not my own. I’ve begun sending every new design client a copy of Michael Brady’s Thinking Like a Designer: How to save money by being a smart client. My hope is that they’ll read it and be able to interact more productively with me. Some clients are visual thinkers. Some have a little bit of visual sense but know their limitations. Some are completely oblivious and realize it. I’m happy to work with any of them, and I try to do good work for all of them, whether I think they’ll understand the subtleties or not.

The people I feel sorry for are those who delude themselves into thinking design doesn’t matter to anyone and just send their unformatted Word document to a vanity press, hoping for the best. Design matters to readers, even if it doesn’t matter to you. If you understand that much, it makes no difference whether you think visually or don’t.

A bizarre disconnect

2010-08-28T05:48:00.003-04:00

I use a virtual company to manufacture some books. My direct contact is with a U.S. firm that consists of a sales office, a customer service office, and a warehouse where they receive books from printing plants and ship them on to publishers. A second U.S.-based company consists of a prepress studio, where technicians review customer files for flaws before releasing them to the company in Asia that does the actual printing. At the printing company, another prepress office processes the files to prepare them for the machines that produce the printing plates.

This is akin to the game of telephone you may have played as a child. As a result, sometimes the publisher’s and designer’s intent is not translated perfectly into finished product. Frankly, it’s amazing the system works as well as it does most of the time.

End sheets
The odd thing that happened yesterday was a message from the U.S. prepress company telling me that I needed to make some technical corrections in the files I had submitted. These were all minor and consisted of changing some parameters related to ink color and, in one case, the location of some printer’s marks. Ten minutes work altogether. Not a problem.

But the final request puzzled me.

I should say, as an aside, that I don’t often work on books with printed end sheets.

The end sheet is the stiff paper that is glued to the inside of the case on a hardcover book, where it conceals the edges of the cover material, and to the first page or last page of the book block (the sewn signatures of printed pages), thus helping hold the cover onto the book.

Most of the hardcover books I work on call for plain end sheets or perhaps end sheets printed in a solid color or made from solid-colored paper. However, the book I uploaded yesterday called for illustrated end sheets, the first time I had done them with this particular printer. Because the end sheet is a single piece of paper the size of two book pages, that’s how I laid it out—one landscape page twice the size of a book page, with the illustration placed on it.

The message instructed me that the end sheet should be laid out as two pages rather than as a single wide page. This struck me as so strange that I called the prepress guy who sent the email. He told me, yep, the plant printed the end sheet as two separate pages. I suggested he actually open up a hardcover book and look at it—that the end sheet had to be printed as a single sheet; otherwise it would not serve the purpose of holding the cover onto the book. Nope, he said, two pages. He was sure this plant printed end sheets that way, and that’s how I was to submit the file.

In the end, I submitted the file that way, and no harm done. It will print fine—as a single sheet of paper.

But the disconnect that stunned me is that I was talking to someone who went to school to master the arcane details of prepress work (a highly skilled trade requiring intelligence, talent, and training) but who had perhaps never been inside a book bindery or even thought about how a book is assembled from its parts. He knew only that the printing plant we were dealing with wanted the files formatted a particular way and made no connection between that and the actual printing of the end sheet or gluing up of the book.

The digitization of the printing industry has created a situation where the person preparing matter to be printed on a press and bound into a book need have no firsthand knowledge of any of the physical processes involved. I’m flabbergasted that the process works at all.

Page sizes. In case you wondered.

2010-08-28T05:44:00.002-04:00

Folio, quarto, octavo, 16mo, 32mo, and 64mo explained. Nicely. Thanks to Brian Dana Akers for the link.

Zoom

2010-07-31T10:37:00.002-04:00

Wednesday afternoon I sent a book to a printer. The book in question is 584 pages and includes 192 images, many of which are bleeds; and numerous tint blocks, some with special visual effects. The book will be printed in softcover and lithowrap hardcover with dust jacket, so there were three separate covers in the package. The cover design incorporates white text dropped out of a background, colored text on a tinted background, and other effects.

Friday at 6:15 am, FedEx picked up the proofs for the book from the printer. The entire job, in other words, went from submitted files to completed proofs in about a day and a half.

When I heard from the printer that the proofs had shipped, I thought back to my days working for a book printer in the early 1980s.

To begin with, manuscripts came to us as typewritten pages with handwritten editorial redaction. These typewritten pages may have been produced on a word processor rather than on a conventional typewriter, but we were not yet at the stage where publishers could reliably send manuscripts electronically. Initially, we relied on accurate markup by editors and the knowledge and training of our keyboard operators to correctly translate the author’s raw, unmarked typescript into all the right fonts and line lengths and indents and spacing. Later we introduced a modern, computer-mediated system for which a couple of us received training in the special markup codes the system required. The keyboard operators just typed those codes, and the computer took care of the fonts and spacing. But every character still required a keystroke.

The output of the typesetting system was a light-tight cartridge of exposed, photosensitive paper that had then to be carried to the darkroom and run through a film processor. The processed galleys were proofread, and new galleys were processed again and delivered to me. I cut them apart, ran them through a waxer (a machine that spread a thin coating of melted wax on the back), and pasted up pages.

Meanwhile, photographs came as glossy photo prints. Each one had to be measured with a densitometer to determine the correct exposure needed on the copy camera (a Brobdingnagian version of the type of camera you might envision Matthew Brady using). I then had to determine what percentage to enlarge or reduce the image, make a number of camera settings, place the image on the copy board, go into the darkroom (the back of the camera), cut a piece of film the right size, load the film, load the halftone screen in front of the film, expose it, expose it again to make the dots the right size, and run the film through the film processor. It was hard to make more than ten or a a dozen good halftones an hour. Each had to then be printed on photo paper to create a low-quality print to be waxed and positioned on the page.

The complex sort of pages involved in the book I just sent off to the printer would have taken about fifteen minutes each to paste up, once I had the corrected galleys and the photo prints in hand. So if you’re keeping a running tally, that’s roughly nine weeks of typesetting, two days of making halftones, and three weeks, with overtime, of paste-up. But let’s not count the typesetting or the paste-up, because, after all, I did send made-up pages to the printer. We have to count the two days in the darkroom, though.

Next, once all the pasted up pages were proofread in house, copies of them were sent to the customer for checking, and corrections were made (figure two or three days altogether), I took the pasted up pages and went back to the copy camera, this time making large negatives of four pages each. Two more days.

With the page negatives and the halftones in hand, I then had to carefully position them on large sheets of mylar (one sheet for the page negatives, another for the halftones) over a ruled master that I had spent an hour or so creating. For each sheet of mylar (holding 16 pages), I had to cut a vinyl mask so that only the correct content would be exposed (text from the page negatives, and just the correctly cropped area from each halftone). Pages with screen tints required additional steps, including complicated multiple exposures in the darkroom. Altogether another week and a half of work. Two more days just to expose the proofing material and cut and fold the proofs.

And after all of that, all I would have to show for my efforts would be a proof of the black-and-white pages. I would not have begun to work on the covers yet.

The small company I worked for did not do its own color separations. I would have spent at least a day, perhaps two, doing the multilayer comprehensives for the covers, but then they would have gone out to a color shop, at a cost of several hundred dollars, to prepare the color separation negatives that would come back to me for stripping. I would have then gone into the darkroom with the color separations and made duplicates so we could print the covers two-up. That, plus stripping three different cover forms and proofing them, would have occupied another couple of days.

Are you keeping track? That’s close to three weeks of work, in the early 1980s, to get from camera-ready pages to proofs ready to send the customer. Instead of the day and a half it takes now.

But the work I did back then as an offset lithographer was comparably fast and efficient in relation to what would have been done thirty years earlier, in a letterpress plant.

Zoom.

Traveling to Italy?

2010-07-07T13:26:00.002-04:00

Check this out:

T Magazine (New York Times style section) “A Fount of Fonts,” By Steven Heller, July 7, 2010: “A designer’s mecca lies in a font museum located 40 miles north of Venice.”. Thanks to Brian Akers for the link.

796 acres of data

2010-06-20T12:43:00.005-04:00

I just bought a new computer (haven’t had a chance to open the box yet, actually). As an accessory, I got a backup disk drive, a device about the size of your average hardcover novel. This drive cost less than $200 and hold 2TB of data. That two terabytes. Two trillion bytes.

So I thought about the first disk drive, the IBM 350, which held five million 7-bit characters and was able to access any record in an average of 800 ms (that’s eight tenths of a second, which is longer than it takes some people to tie their shoes).

The 350, as you can see from the Wikipedia picture, was the size of a side-by-side refrigerator and needed five feet of clear floor space around it. If you were to arrange units in a rectangular grid, I figure each unit would occupy about 65 square feet. It would take 533 IBM 350s to hold 2TB of data, and that means you would need close to thirty-five million square feet of space, about 796 acres of air-conditioned floor space. I suppose you could house them in, say, forty-story buildings, reducing the footprint from 796 acres to about forty acres (buildings need space around them). Then there’s the power requirement. And then there’s the question of how much longer than 800 ms it would take to retrieve the data.

Okay, that’s unfair
Let’s skip ahead to the first IBM disk unit I actually saw, in 1962. That was an IBM 1301. The model 2 stored fifty-six million characters and had slightly faster access times (100 to 800ms). But it had the same footprint as the 350, so now we’re down to seventy-two acres.

And what did that seventy-two acres of data cost?
You could have leased it all (exclusive of the real estate and without accounting for the cost of electricity to run and cool the units) a mere $168,000 a month. Or you could have bought the ball of wax for $8.9 million.

Now let’s talk about how the cost of doing business has risen.

Print pricing 101

2010-06-05T07:01:00.004-04:00

It never ceases to amaze me how many people make it through life with apparent financial success and yet cannot do basic arithmetic. I wonder, sometimes, how they have managed to stay out of jail and out of bankruptcy. And yet there they are. And a lot of the people who so amaze me are salespeople. In particular, they are printing salespeople, because I buy printing services on behalf of my publishing clients.

The basics
For the sake of simplicity, I am discussing only book manufacturing in this post. Book manufacturing consist of printing either digitally or by offset and binding the book with a soft or hard cover. There are further divisions within those categories, but we don’t need to concern ourselves with them for this exercise.

In digital printing, a company may have some administrative costs for setting up a new customer and for uploading and checking files, but these costs are modest and may or may not be itemized on a customer bill. Once the files for a book are loaded onto a server, every copy costs the same amount to produce, from the first to the millionth. The printer may offer some volume discounts as incentives, but the price per copy does not drop rapidly. If you’re going to save money, it will be in ordering quantities that are efficient to ship. The printing and binding costs don’t change much, if at all.

In offset printing, on the other hand, the cost to set up the job is significant, whereas the cost to produce each additional copy of the book is quite low. As more and more of the prepress tasks are automated, the setup costs keep coming down, but they are still important in pricing.

That’s where your trusty calculator comes in
When you get printing quotes, typically you will ask for pricing on two or three different quantities. A given printer may suggest that the lowest quantity might work out better printed digitally and the higher quantities should be printed offset, but you can get all quantities quoted both ways if you want to and if the job could go either way. Some books can only be printed offset, for a variety of reasons.

But now you’re looking at the quotes. You can see that the digital prices don’t change much, if at all, with quantity. That’s as it should be. But then you look at the offset prices and you see this:

  500    $9.20/copy
1,000    $5.05/copy
1,500    $4.27/copy

What can you learn from that?

The first step is to multiply out the totals:

  500 @ $9.20/copy = $4,600
1,000 @ $5.05/copy = $5,050
1,500 @ $4.27/copy = $6,405

The next step is to subtract to find the differences between totals:

  500 @ $9.20/copy = $4,600
1,000 @ $5.05/copy = $5,050 = $4,600 + $450
1,500 @ $4.27/copy = $6,405 = $5,050 + $1,355

What do those numbers tell us?

The difference in cost between 500 copies and 1,000 copies is $450. If we divide $450 by 500, we see that the second 500 copies cost $0.90 each.

The difference in cost between 1,000 copies and 1,500 copies is $1,355. If we divide $1,355 by 500, we see that the third 500 copies cost us $2.71 each.

Now this makes no sense, because once the job is running, every new copy should cost the same. Certainly we don’t expect the cost per copy to jump up! What’s going on here?

What’s going on is that the person who did the pricing is either working from bad source documents (charts, tables, or incorrect software) or else just made a mistake.

But suppose it really does cost $1,355 to produce 500 books. Then the cost for the first 500 should be no more than $3,695 ($5,050 - $1,355), not $4,600.

Or suppose that it really costs $450 to produce 500 books. Then the cost for 1,500 should be no higher than $5,500 ($5,050 + $450), not $6,405.

The numbers I started with are from a real quote from a real printer. I didn’t make them up as a fake example that would never really happen. In this case, the printer will fix the numbers or I’ll use someone else.

The point is that you always have to check the numbers a salesperson gives you. Not checking them can be expensive.

The do-it-yourself picture book. Or not.

2010-05-28T09:27:00.002-04:00

Got a call yesterday. Printing rep I’ve done business with. (He’s an American who represents a printer in Asia, and he’s a straight shooter.) Wanted my advice on a job.

He had been sent a book to quote on, a do-it-yourself job on which the “yourself” who did it was a clueless amateur. The printer in Asia had raised an alarm that the files would not result in a high-quality book. The printer was loath to take on a job that the customer might complain about after the fact. What did I think?

I asked him to send me a few pages so I could see what was what.

The book consisted of separate one-page PDF files, all of which had been prepared using Photoshop. Each page was a montage of photographs (of a deceased pop icon) with cutlines. Now it’s true that Photoshop files can include a text layer consisting of font outlines, and in a few instances the author took advantage of this. But most of the type was rendered as part of the composite image. Type rendered that way (as a raster image) does not print with sharp, clean outlines. The edges of the letters are either fuzzy or jagged (a choice available to the designer). This guy chose jagged (probably unintentionally), but neither of those choices is really the right one. The right choice is to use Photoshop for optimizing photographs and to build pages in a page layout application, such as InDesign.

There were other problems too. The photographs were a long way from being optimized for printing. Colors were not corrected, black and white photos did not have their tones adjusted. Scanned newspaper halftones were not descreened. And in any case, it was not at all clear that the author had the rights to reproduce all of these images (perhaps he did, but if not, this could have exposed the printer to a lawsuit).

I said I thought the book could be redone by a professional, using the existing files as a design dummy, for something in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars, maybe more.

My advice was to recommend redoing the book to the author. The second choice would be to collect prepayment in full for the printing and get an ironclad, lawsuit-proof contract stating that any quality problems resulting from printing the files as furnished were the author’s fault, not the printer’s fault. But because we all know there is no such thing as a lawsuit-proof contract and because the author already had a bid from a U.S. printer who saw no problems with the files, my buddy decided he didn’t need the money enough to risk bidding the job. He passed.

In the end, the author will get his books. But he’ll pay through the nose for them and the quality will still be terrible. All because he figured he could save money by doing the work himself. My guess? He would have been both time and money ahead had he hired a professional book designer in the first place.

Self-publishing is not the same as do-it-yourself publishing.

Lazy blogger links to someone else's compilation of 50 tools for word nerds

2010-05-25T06:35:00.002-04:00

"Fifty Coolest Online Tools for Word Nerds"

It's about time

2010-05-16T16:05:00.002-04:00

I’ve been so busy of late that I have of necessity neglected the blog. As a quick update, I finally got around to adding a few books to the sidebar that I should have added months ago. RSS subscribers will have to click through to see them.

Battle of Black and Dogs at Yale Rep

2010-04-20T22:50:00.002-04:00

Pointless. Dated. Gratuitous in more ways than I care to describe. Go out to dinner instead.

Should I mention that the actors did a great job with awful material or that the lighting and set were fully up to Yale Rep standards? All that’s true, but there is still no reason to subject yourself to this black dog of a play.

What is this font good for?

2010-04-20T14:29:00.004-04:00

People who notice for the first time that they have at their disposal a great many fonts they’ve never used remind me of a three-year-old who can just reach the dessert tray at a buffet and decides to lick them all to see which one she likes.

Ooh! Isn’t this one pretty? I wonder what I can use it for.

It seems to me that the right question to ask is this: How can I solve my design problem? In answering that question, I’m sure I’ll find an appropriate font, but font selection is the output of the design analysis, not the input.

Fonts are like buttons in your grandmother’s button box. The reason she kept a box full of buttons was that it increased her chances of finding the button she needed when she needed a button. She didn’t stare at the box wondering what she could use them for. Ooh! Isn’t this one pretty? I wonder what I can use it for. No. If a garment turned up in the laundry missing a button, she could then go to the button box and look for a suitable replacement. She began with the design problem and went to the button box to solve it, not the other way around.

The age of bloviation

2010-04-15T10:36:00.002-04:00

I’m editing an organizational history of an educational institution (for an upcoming major anniversary/fund-raising opportunity). It’s organized chronologically and contains a great many quotations from people active in the respective decades, gleaned either from their published writings or from author interviews.

The chapters have been coming to me in order, and I’ve noticed something.

The early chapters are fascinating. The people being quoted are long retired and have polished their anecdotes through frequent retelling. (In fact, some are deceased and the anecdotes are secondhand, retold by their adult children.) The stories are tight, pointed, and interesting.

But the most recent chapter I’ve received concerns the early careers of people nearing retirement age who are still working, still attending conferences, still schmoozing their colleagues, still getting grants, still asking favors. Their interview quotes are boring as hell. They pepper their answers with lists of names of people they want to be sure to flatter; they summarize their career accomplishments (or at least the stuff they’ve done that they’re proudest of, even if it’s not interesting to anyone else or relevant to the subject of the book); they pull their punches on any anecdote that might be amusing if you knew who it was about. The whole chapter is leaden.

This is not an editing problem. The author and I will tighten it up as much as organizational politics permit, and life will go on. I just think it’s fascinating how people in a given stage of their careers exhibit such a consistent response, in the way they write, to the external pressures that come to bear at that stage.

This is similar to the phenomenon that middle managers in hierarchical organizations have enough similarities in their behavior that Dilbert—along with countless sitcoms—resonates with nearly everyone who has ever worked in a cubicle farm. They’re not evil people, even if the way they behave, driven by the organizational structure, makes them seem that way.

We think we’re in control of our own actions, but quite often we’re deluding ourselves.

A step in my spring

2010-04-09T11:28:00.002-04:00

Garden diary department

[Spring blooming in my yard for the last three years summarized here]

Step 1. Here it is April 9. Andromeda, weeping cherry, Bradford pear, early azalea (that one cerise or magenta variety that used to be the only one you could get in the Northeast, not the more modern ones), and the forsythia are all more or less in peak bloom. The magnolia, which only fully opened yesterday has begun to drop petals already. This is the earliest any of these have bloomed since I have kept these notes.

Step 2. The remainder of the azaleas, the rhododendrons, and the wisteria are not even hinting any awareness of spring. Perhaps the winter was not kind to them this year. But last year it was the third week of May before they were fully involved; so there is time yet.

I post these notes for myself. If other gardeners are interested, so be it. For the rest of you, move along. Nothing happening here.

Sharp marketing takes a dull edge

2010-03-27T07:48:00.003-04:00

Over the decades, I’ve generally been impressed with the product designs introduced by Sharp Electronics. If I wanted some gadget or other to fill a particular function, it was often the Sharp offering that I ended up buying. It had the features I was looking for or was more stylish than a competing brand at the same price. I can’t say a lot about the durability of their products. All of them bit the dust at some point, except our microwave oven, which groans as if it is dying every time we turn it on.

So I guess I have to conclude that what has always attracted me to Sharp is their product design, rather than their engineering quality.

But I just saw a banner ad for what Sharp has branded “Quattron quad pixel Technology” (complete with random capitalization), and I have to say this is one of the dumbest, least sharp ideas I’ve ever seen.

The new technology adds a yellow (Y) channel to the existing red (R), green (G), and blue (B) transmissive primaries.

First of all, the claimed product benefit is richer, more vibrant colors on an LCD television screen. I don’t see a lot of benefit there. Aren’t the colors on television garish enough already?

Second, the RGB gamut encompasses Y. In terms of the physics, no new colors are being added to the gamut.

The signal sent to the television is an RGB signal. Processing it to subtract out the Y algebraically and send it to the new Y channel may or may not decrease the overall power consumption of the set at a given brightness. If it does decrease power consumption, maybe this was the reason for developing the technology. In that case, it’s a real consumer benefit and should be the one Sharp is promoting instead of the “more colors” voodoo science they’re touting.

The blurb copy on the page I linked to above is another matter altogether:

Sharp once again demonstrates its leadership in LED LCD TVs [LEDs provide the backlighting; LCDs define the colors. I had to figure this out myself after first wondering if the copywriter had any idea that these are two distinct technologies used in quite different kinds of displays. A link to an explanation would have helped.] with its groundbreaking [mind-boggling?] Quattron quad pixel Technology. For the very first time [Delete “very,” a weak modifier that adds nothing to “first,” which is an absolute.], yellow has been added to the conventional red, green and blue color filter, enabling more colors to be displayed [Not really, as explained above.]. Introducing never-before-seen colors [Never-before-seen colors? Really? Do tell.] to LCD TVs, like sparkling golds, Caribbean blues and sunflower yellows without overdriving the panel [Oh, you had a problem with the panel, whatever that is, being overdriven, whatever that means. If this knowledge is of benefit to the consumer, because, for example, it reduces power consumption (if that’s the case), then explain the benefit to the consumer. Otherwise, you’re just parroting back what some engineer told you and you don’t understand it any more than I do. In any case, it casts doubt on your selling proposition. So just delete the phrase.]. Sharp is redefining the way we see LED LCD TV.

Maybe you’ve seen the cubicle placard that reads “If you can’t dazzle ’em with your brilliance, baffle ’em with your bullshit.”

Honesty matters. Honest. It does.

All that jazz

2010-03-25T11:11:00.002-04:00

For what it’s worth department
There are world travelers and there are world travelers. I did not travel much outside the U.S. when I was young, but in the last few years I’ve had occasion to visit a number of countries in various parts of the world. My wife and I typically stay in brand-name hotels that cater to American business tourists, either in major cities or in tourism-focused towns; and aside from eating street food while walking around, we are likely to be found eating in establishments where an English menu is available. In other words, you would do well to question the authenticity of our experience.

Nonetheless, it has struck us that no matter where we are in the world, the background music in restaurants and stores, the tunes playing on a taxi radio, the songs sung on street corners, are all likely to be American jazz, usually sung in English. I don’t think this is entirely because it is assumed the American tourist clientele will enjoy it; rather, it seems to be ubiquitous and to be ubiquitously enjoyed. We hear rock and hip-hop and other kinds of music, too. But the predominance of jazz and the genuine affection people hold for it is far more obvious outside the U.S. than inside.

Last week we were at a pre-conference banquet in a historic Polish town. The conference attendees were mostly from Europe, with just a few Americans present. The hosts had arranged for a feast of traditional Polish food and had hired a Polish band—a polka band, as a matter of fact.The band played American standards for the most part, arranged as polkas. There were no obviously Polish pieces at all (nor did we have to suffer through the “Beer Barrel Polka,” thankfully).

“American food,” in many parts of the world, is represented by McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC, and Subway. But “American culture” is represented by jazz.

The Servant of Two Masters at Yale Rep

2010-03-16T23:22:00.002-04:00

How do you get away with staging an eighteenth-century commedia dell’arte farce in twenty-first century America?

Apparently, if you’re Yale Rep, you get away with it quite well.

Great adaptation. Great cast. Excellent music (and musicians). And, as usual (with one recent exception), a wonderful set. Speaking of the contrast with that exception, as plodding and pedestrian as the marionette work was in Compulsion, The Servant of Two Masters included charming, magical puppetry of another sort, first with fireflies, later with butterflies, that were just bits of stage business handled deftly by the ensemble, with no special program credits and no awkward self-consciousness.

What a delightful evening! Life got you down? Go. Enjoy. Forget your troubles.

Trust but verify: the problem of knowledge entropy

2010-03-09T12:00:00.004-05:00

NPR has a photo essay, “The Jobs Of Yesteryear: Obsolete Occupations.” The story was researched and produced by Carolyn Beeler and edited by Tanya Ballard Brown of NPR, and it’s a lovely reminiscence for those of us old enough to have seen people doing these jobs.

However, the story exemplifies a problem with the transmittal of knowledge across decades and centuries. Knowledge degrades. There’s noise in the signal.

The NPR essay includes an entry for typesetters (click the arrow to the right of the photo until you get to it). Now that’s something I know about with a degree of intimacy that I would not expect from a photo archivist or a journalist. So it’s obvious to me that the descriptive paragraphs are full of misunderstandings and misstatements (never mind what they are, as the details are irrelevant to the point I’m making). Perhaps there are similar kinds of errors in the other descriptions, regarding occupations I know less about.

This is not a new phenomenon. I’ve been involved in events that were reported on the next day in a newspaper or the next week in a newsmagazine, and I’ve frequently had the experience, as you may have, of finding many factual errors and gross misinterpretations of events in the news story. I have no reason to think this discrepancy between fact and the reporting of the fact is larger or smaller today than it was a hundred or five hundred or a thousand or thirty thousand years ago. Surely you’ve read about psychological experiments involving the accuracy (or lack thereof) in eyewitness accounts of staged events. We’re not wired for reporting facts; we’re wired for remembering emotional states and rationalizing them by attributing them to things we think we saw.

I think this idea has begun to seep into the public consciousness, at least to the extent that literary critics now talk about the unreliable narrator as a feature not only of fiction, where it is an intentional device, but also of biography, autobiography, and memoir, where it is often not intentional at all.

However, I’m not sure the idea has fully penetrated to the extent that everything becomes suspect.

Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman writes often about bad science journalism, in which journalists jump to conclusions completely unsupported by the research they are reporting on. This is just one more area where we should question what we hear and see in the news (irrespective of how reputable a media outlet is or what political slant we believe it has).

But what about books? Books are edited, researched, fact-checked…some of the time. But there are also an overwhelming number of bad books, as there have always been (even before Gutenberg). And even in the most carefully done books, less-than-omniscient authors (all of them, in other words) write things they do not know from personal experience but read about or heard about somewhere else.

Well then, what about primary sources, the documents historians put so much trust in? Those, too, reflect a human interpretation and are subject to error.

What all this comes down to is the idea that maybe we shouldn’t be too sure we know what we think we know; we should be tolerant of others’ differing understandings (unless they’re total lunatics, of course). And just because we heard it on NPR doesn’t always mean it’s true.

If you don't like it, change it

2010-02-22T13:12:00.002-05:00

The New York Times reports that the formerly respected publisher Macmillan is introducing a system that allows college instructors to change the content of the books they assign to their classes (delivered to the students as e-books), down to the sentence level, without notifying the publisher or author.

Technically, there is no review mechanism to detect whether an instructor introduces errors or adds material that the author whose name is on the cover would find unacceptable. The system is completely under the control of the individual instructor.

Were there a wiki-based approach that allowed a community of similarly situated instructors to revise and improve the text, with the author being able to accept or reject such changes, this would be a way to keep scientific texts, for example, up to date with the latest research. But under the system as Macmillan has designed it, students will soon be subjected to freshman biology texts that replace the Theory of Evolution with Intelligent Design or some such.

This is more than a bad idea (and thanks to Brian Akers for bringing it to my attention). This represents a total abdication of any duty on Macmillan’s part to control the quality of the books they publish. But this is not an entirely new phenomenon. Ever since publishers started to be acquired by conglomerates in, what, the 1980s?, MBAization of their management has turned them away from any sense of social or cultural responsibility. This is just one more (and one very disturbing) step in that process.

One size fits . . . some

2010-02-10T10:30:00.000-05:00

Have you been trying to follow any of the many recent discussions about e-books and e-readers, about access to knowledge and protecting authors’ rights, about book scanning and copyright? Are you confused? Me too.

What confuses me is that putatively smart people are making such simplistic prognostications and arguments. End of the book as we know it indeed! Please. I don’t think so.

The rhetorical problem, it seems to me, is that we have a word, book, that represents not one category but many categories of objects, both concrete and abstract, both physical and virtual. Most people who work with books of one sort see their grove of trees as the whole forest. This is an easy trap to fall into: if you spend your life in the world of genre fiction, then books means genre fiction. If you spend your life in research libraries studying the history of fruit fly research, then books means obscure, long-forgotten monographs in danger of being deaccessioned and lost to history.

So here is an incomplete list of kinds of books and what the current swirl of debates might say about them.

Genre fiction
This is the category that is most in flux and where the current debates are actually meaningful. The mass market paperback sold in grocery stores, discount stores, and airport newsstands is vulnerable. If enough consumers are eventually attracted to an e-reader (one that is better designed, more readable, and less expensive than the generation now on the market), a lot of trees will be saved. For the most part, these books are not designed, in the sense of there being a book designer making decisions about individual books. They are text poured into an innocuous template and printed very very cheaply. The only design money involved goes into often lurid covers, and there will continue to be covers designed, for online marketing purposes, even if these books go all-e.

Literary fiction
Technically, there is no reason serious fiction can’t go the same way genre fiction does. However, there continues to be a social meme that associates reading literature with sophistication and status. People like to have the physical books—well-designed, well-manufactured hardcovers—on display in their homes to impress their friends. I suppose this meme could become extinct in another few decades, and in any case we’re talking about a small portion of the reading public. But for as long as it’s around, there will be printed books in the category. Many will prefer to read these as e-books, of course.

Biography, autobiography, memoir, history, government, politics
This is a mixed bag, but all of these categories share with fiction that they are predominantly straight text. Oh, there might be a few photographs here and there, but even today’s generation of e-readers can handle this sort of material well enough.

There are books in these categories that are the result of decades of research and are meant to stand the test of time. There are others that are more ephemeral, dealing, say, with the current or just-ended political season. The latter will migrate quickly to mostly-e. The former will parallel the fate of literary fiction, with at least some copies printed for the foreseeable future.

Many of vanity press books in this group (memoir, for the most part) will, as people come to understand what a bad idea vanity publishing is, start to be produced as e-books from the get-go—or as blogs, which is what most of them should be now.

Self-help, travel, gardening, cooking, health
Books with charts, graphs, color photos, diagrams, and other graphical information that doesn’t work well with the current e-readers will undoubtedly be accommodated by future devices. Why wouldn’t you rather carry a bunch of travel guides in one lightweight device than lug around a stack of books? For now, though, the devices are either not up to the job or are too expensive for most people or both. So we’re going to be seeing these books printed for the most part for a while yet.

The self-published books in these categories, particularly those sold at the back of the room, may continue to be printed. What is it that you would hand someone in exchange for their twenty bucks at a show booth or a card table if not for the physical book—a gift card? A password? I suppose someone will solve the technical challenge, but from a sales psychology standpoint, I think people will still feel they want a physical object to carry home, for a good while, at least.

Coffee table books, gift books, journals
The same drive for technological innovation that is leading to the virtualization of some kinds of books is also dramatically reducing the costs associated with luxury printing and binding. The book as an art object to savor in one’s lap is going to be with us a long time, I think. At the same time, a lot of the creative energy that goes into these books is beginning to flow toward multimedia extravaganzas that are as likely to be delivered online as through printed, bound books. So the coffee table category may shrink. Gift books will stick around, as will blank journals. There will always be romantics.

Children’s books
Speaking of multimedia extravaganzas, from Beatrix Potter to Pat the Bunny to pop-up books to talking books to interactive books on the iPod Touch, parents have been happy to give kids the latest, busiest books to try to hold their attention. Grandparents will continue to buy printed books, but I suspect they’ll be read less and less by the youngest readers.

For older children, e-books will capture a lot of the market, particularly in school.

Textbooks
A huge amount of inertia—from teachers’ unions, from school administrators, from elected school boards, from schools of education, from state politicians—has kept the process of educating our children mired in nineteenth-century technology despite all the well-meaning efforts to modernize it. Yes, some textbook publishers are embracing e-books as a way to lower costs for schools. But until the whole concept of a standard textbook is seen as hopelessly obsolete, we’ll continue to have printed textbooks, both in K-12 and in college. There will be erosion (e-rosion?), but the hundred-dollar chemistry text will be with us for a while.

Scholarly works
A lot of scholarly work has already moved online. The information gets out there faster and cheaper, and scholarly publishing has never been about profiting from sales.

As I said, this is a partial list. What does it mean overall? Just that you have to look at each category by itself and judge what it means in terms of the businesses of printing, distributing, and selling printed books. Publishing will be with us forever: a publisher is in the business of disseminating information for profit, regardless of the medium. The physical book may become less prominent over time, but it’s not going to disappear soon.

Compulsion at Yale Rep

2010-02-03T15:10:00.000-05:00

NOTE: This is a review of a play that officially opens tomorrow. The play, a co-production of the Yale Repertory Theatre, the Public Theater (in New York), and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, is scheduled to tour nationally. Because the performance I attended was technically a preview of the show’s world premiere run, it is possible—likely—that changes will be made (gawd, I hope so) before tomorrow’s opening or at least before it reaches a stage near you, wherever you are.

Oy! Where to begin
Okay, I may as well tell you what the play is about, first. Meyer Levin’s book, Compulsion, the title of which was borrowed for this unrelated play, was the first nonfiction true crime novel (about the Leopold and Loeb murder case), the precursor to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, according to the Wikipedia article on Levin.

Levin was a journalist and a prolific writer. One of the defining moments of his life was his witnessing, as a war correspondent, the liberation of concentration camps in Europe at the end of the Second World War. Today we would say that the behavior portrayed in the play was the manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder, but that diagnosis wasn’t around in the 1950s.

The doppelgänger Levin created for himself in his writing was Sid Silver. The playwright, Rinne Groff, collated a set of events in Levin’s life, as recounted in books by Levin; by Levin’s wife, Tereska Torres; by Lawrence Graver; and by Ralph Melnick (see the Wikipedia link), and gave them to the character Sid Silver. So the play is ostensibly a dramatization of the nonfiction novel (form invented by Levin) of Levin’s life, told through the alter ego Levin invented, using a title Levin applied to a book about something else altogether. Nicely recursive, don’t you think? Derivative, too.

The outline
The play is about Levin’s obsession (not really a compulsion, I think) to bring The Diary of Anne Frank to the United States, first as a book and then as a drama. Anne Frank became the medium through which he understood his purpose in the world. Because of ideological and artistic differences with others (Otto Frank among them), he entered into a series of legal battles the narration of which constitutes the heart of the play. Well, what’s wrong with that? I’m not saying there wasn’t conflict or dramatic tension, but I am saying the play consisted almost entirely of exposition. Levin’s story—Groff’s synthesis of Levin’s story—would have made an interesting magazine article. In a good piece of journalism in the New Yorker or Harper’s, I expect exposition. In a play I want more.

The production
Three actors cover seven main and a few incidental roles. In addition, a crew of three puppeteers handle the ghosts of Anne Frank, Otto Frank, and Miep Gies, as well as the play-within-a-play roles consisting of an assortment of actors playing Anne Frank, Otto Frank, and Miep Gies. There’s that recursion thing again, a trick Groff seems fond of.

The play dragged. A third to a half of the scenes could be cut. In particular, the last three scenes were merely maudlin and added nothing to the play—not even a graceful denouement. If the playwright and director have any mercy, these scenes will be gone before the New Haven run is over. But the script has other problems aside from length. At the start of the second act, we’re treated to one of the characters entering the set, walking to the front of the stage to face the audience, and addressing the audience directly with superfluous narration of biographical details we don’t need to know. The whole show is so ponderously expository that it’s a wonder the actors could spit out the lines most of the time.

Moving on…
Hannah Cabell, as the publisher Miss Mermin and as Sid Silver’s wife (based on Levin’s wife, Tereska Torres) was superb.

Stephen Barker Turner, playing a variety of publishing executives and lawyers, who somehow all looked and acted alike, as well as Silver’s friend Mr. Matzliach, did the best he could. Mr. Thomas, Mr. Harris, and Mr. Ferris were all stereotyped WASPs, and Turner played them all pretty much the same way—as flat as they were written. I wasn’t the only one who was confused. At one point Silver called Ferris Harris and was corrected, garnering a chuckle from the audience. I honestly couldn’t tell if the error and correction were in the script or a fluffed line and an quick save.

Mandy Patinkin played Levin aka Silver. I always liked Patinkin in Chicago Hope. And the choice to play the Silver character is completely consistent with everything else I’ve seen him do. But…I dunno. Maybe he was just having a bad night. Or maybe the script, staging, and direction were really that bad. At best, I’d characterize his performance as uneven. He was on stage for nearly the entire play, and that’s a lot of material to master. Still, um, well, he’s a professional actor and I’m an amateur reviewer; so maybe he was just coming from somewhere I don’t understand at all. Or maybe he rose from his sick bed to be a trouper. Or something.

There were moments when I couldn’t tell if Patinkin was pausing for effect or had gone up on his line. If the pause was for effect, the effect wasn’t one I could identify. His rants, his moments of contrition, even his amorous moments with his wife (everyone keeps their clothes on in this one, for a change) all seemed rote, formulaic, phoned in. But I readily acknowledge that Patinkin may have signed on to the project despite a weak script and that he may be making the best of a bad situation. So I don’t want to lay the blame on him.

The puppeteers did everything that was asked of them and did so pretty well. This was straightforward marionette work consistent with the plodding expository nature of the script. No imagination was called for or in evidence.

The set is worth noting. I’ve seen great plays, okay plays, and stinkers at Yale Rep; but one saving grace of even the worst of them has always been the set design. With the resources of the Yale School of Drama, Yale School of Architecture, and Yale School of Art to draw on, the Rep is a showcase for brilliant, imaginative designers. As noted above, though, Compulsion is a co-production of three theaters, with a name star. I suspect this had something to do with the choice of Eugene Lee as the scenic designer. Lee “has been the production designer at Saturday Night Live since 1974,” according to the program notes, and “was recently inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in New York.” Uh-huh. Yawn. I think the set was a castoff from SNL, or else it was sketched on a napkin and faxed in. Blecch.

Don’t feel compelled to see this one. But read other reviews after the show actually opens. Maybe it will get better.

Sending a query to a literary agent?

2010-01-26T15:10:00.002-05:00

Ensure that the agent you are querying is legitimate. The Preditors & Editors site should be one place you check. It is not a comprehensive list of all legitimate agents, but it is a valuable resource for information on the snakes in the grass pretending they are agents.

The main rule to keep in mind is that if the supposed agent asks you for money, directly or indirectly, you should run the other direction.
Take a look at this great checklist from agent Janet Reid.

Typesetting myths you should have gotten over by now

2010-01-06T09:30:00.003-05:00

Having worked with and studied type for half a century, I have seen fads come and go. I have seen a lot of badly designed experiments by psychology undergraduates passed off as “research” into type readability. And I have seen a lot of opinion on the part of graphic design instructors passed off as fact.

But in the Dark Ages of my youth, type was set by compositors. Since the advent of desktop publishing thirty-odd years ago, people with no training in typography have been putting themselves out as experts. And that has caused the sewers to overflow, releasing all sorts of stuff into the mainstream. With the more recent advent of digital book printing, all sorts of people are typesetting their own books—or trying to. And when they dip their nets into that mainstream looking for tips on how to do the job right, they often come up with—well, you get the idea.

Naturally, I’d much rather see self-publishing authors avail themselves of my services or those of another professional compositor than do it themselves. But if you are a diehard DIYer, here are a few suggestions from a grumpy old typesetter on Internet myths you should ignore:

Don’t hyphenate; it slows reading and reduces comprehension.

FALSE. If you are publishing an edition specifically for groups with impaired reading ability, you should avoid hyphenation. For normal readers (the large majority of the reading public for trade fiction and nonfiction alike), a moderate amount of hyphenation improves readability when compared with the alternative of having letters and words badly and unevenly spaced. You do want to avoid having more than two consecutive hyphens or, in narrow columns, three consecutive hyphens, but there is no reason to turn hyphenation off altogether.
Don’t justify text; it forces uneven word spacing.

FALSE. Using modern page layout software such as InDesign, you can keep word spacing within an acceptable range, minimize (but not necessarily eliminate) hyphenation, and retain conventional justified text. Readability research confirms that normal readers continue reading longer and retain more of what they read when text is justified normally than when it is set ragged right.

But note: Hyphenation is not available in HTML, so justified text looks terrible on the Web. For online use, such as here, stick with ragged right.
Tight type looks better than loose type.

FALSE. Tight type increases reader fatigue and slows reading. If you look at books set on Linotype (hot metal) machines from half a century ago, you’ll see that the standard setting (governed by the mechanical limitations of the technology) was considerably more open than the default kerning values for modern digital fonts. Stay with the default or, if you want to be kind to your readers (especially at smaller point sizes), open the type up by a fraction. This is a good trick for situations where an old-fashioned appearance is desirable too.
You can typeset a perfectly fine book using Microsoft Word.

FALSE. You can reproduce the Sistine Chapel using a paint-by-numbers kit, but it’s going to take a long time and you’re not going to fool anyone. Word is a word processing program, not a typesetting program.
All you have to do is import your Word document into InDesign and you’re done.

FALSE. Composition remains an art that requires human intervention to produce good results. Learn to look at a page critically and to apply adjustments that improve the reader’s experience. Watch for ladders, rivers, pigeonholes, tight and loose lines, bad breaks, widows, orphans, and unbalanced spreads. Eliminating all of those at the same time is what separates the pros from the wannabes.

Finding a printer

2009-12-17T08:45:00.002-05:00

Full disclosure
I purchase printing and binding services as an agent for my clients. I pass through the exact amount I am charged. I do not charge a markup or receive a commission. This is just a service I provide, at no cost, to help ensure that my publishing clients receive finished goods whose quality reflects all the hard work that went into designing them and get them at a fair price. So what follows does not reflect any financial interest on my part.

What is a high-quality book?
In discussions on various LinkedIn groups (and in other venues as well), I regularly see people with a variety of backgrounds endorsing the “high quality” of books produced by one printer or another, one subsidy press or another. These statements don’t mean a lot to me, because I don’t know how knowledgeable these individuals are about printing and binding production values.

I’ve had printing company reps proud of their companies’ work send me sample books that ranged from bad to godawful. So I have reason to suspect the judgment of authors who tout the great quality they got from a vendor.

I’m picky. Here are some of the things I look for.

I expect good backup. What does that mean? It means that if I hold a leaf of the book up to a light, the type on the back of the leaf should align with the type on the front. The left and right margins should be exactly even and the top line of type should be exactly even. I should not see the type on the back misaligned from the type on the front by even a millimeter.
I expect black ink to be black, not gray, and I expect it to be that same black throughout the book. The type should not vary in density from page to page or from the front of the book to the back. There should not be reflective glare from the type (seen when toner is applied improperly in digital printing).
If there are halftones, I expect good tonal range and contrast. If there is line art, I expect good sharpness.
I expect precise folding. What does that mean? It means that if I riffle the pages (like an animator’s flip book or like a deck of cards), the top margin should not waver up and down but should remain constant throughout the book. I’m not talking about pages where the margin is designed to be different, such as chapter pages. I’m just talking about the work of the folder operator.
I expect the book to be trimmed square and to size. The dimensions of the front cover should match the dimensions of the back cover and both should be within a very close tolerance of the design size.
I expect the cover (for a perfect bound book) to be properly aligned, with the spine centered, all live copy within the safety margin, and bleeds intact (no white showing).
I expect the cover to be glued properly, with no excess glue squeezed out and with the cover glued evenly onto the edge of the first and last pages. Looking at the top and bottom of the spine, I expect the glue layer to be even from the front to the back of the book and the top to the bottom.
I expect coatings and laminations to be applied properly, with no peeling or curling.
I expect a printer that services small publishers to screen submitted files for suitability and to advise customers when the files have significant problems (such as poorly prepared images or low-quality typesetting). “We print whatever the client sends us” is not an appropriate policy for companies serving the self-publishing market.

Four tiers of printers
There are roughly four tiers, in my mind, of book manufacturing:

Non-specialists. These are printers for whom book manufacturing is an occasional job. The category includes the local Docutech center, accustomed to printing and binding documents that businesses distribute internally or to customers. It includes local job printers who send the printed pages out to a local custom bindery. It includes larger commercial printers who do that or perhaps have a small finishing department. It includes printers who solicit book business to fill holes in their schedule but really aren’t equipped for it; the shoddiness of their books is obvious.
POD. The major players in the print-on-demand market are like talking dogs: it isn’t that they’re good at it; the remarkable thing is that they do it at all. For the most part, their employees do not come from the book manufacturing industry; they are trained on the job, and they measure their success by how fast and cheaply they can fill an order for a single book. Book quality is passable, and it meets the needs of the POD market.
“Good” book manufacturers. This group includes many companies whose names are bandied about, with enthusiastic recommendations, on self-publishing mailing lists and websites. These are good, solid printers who produce acceptable books you might find on the shelves of any bookstore. Most people will be insensitive to defects. Problems I’ve seen include less-than-perfect backup, mediocre folding, some quality control issues in cover application, and—probably the biggest problem—a willingness to print completely unacceptable files. They are within ethical boundaries to simply print what’s sent to them. Nonetheless, if they are going to cater to amateurs, I think they should either push back when they receive garbage or they should fix the problems and charge for the service. At the very least, they should flag such jobs internally so that when someone like me asks for samples they refrain from sending out those books.

Another feature of this group is that their digital short-run books and their offset books are easily told apart.
“Excellent” book manufacturers. This group includes some of the largest book manufacturers in the country (as well as some smaller ones and some that are not in the country). While their bread-and-butter customers are large publishers, they are efficient enough that they can also happily serve the independent designer market (not sure how well they handle amateurs, though). Quality ranges from perfect to near-perfect, and only a technical examination can distinguish their offset work from their digital work. In my experience, prices in this category are actually lower than in the “good” category (I don’t know why, but I also don’t ask why).

That said, were I to have a job very different from past jobs, in terms of paper, page size, binding type, or quantity, I would certainly get bids from printers in both the “good” and “excellent” categories. It may be that one of the “good” printers has a sweet spot that enables it to come in with a low price. So far that hasn’t happened, but I’m not oblivious to the possibility.

Interesting software QA test case

2009-12-12T09:02:00.004-05:00

Hold those cynical thoughts for a minute. There really is such a thing as software quality assurance testing, an activity that employs a great many skilled and intelligent people. Despite the annoying flaws we users complain about in commercial software, it wouldn’t be on the market at all without the diligent and unsung work of QA departments everywhere.

Part of what QA departments do is a type of automated testing in which a script runs a piece of software through its paces, entering all sorts of rule-breaking text strings in input fields and seeing whether the software handles the rule-breaking gracefully. These test strings comprise all the weird cases analysts can think of—trying to type 100 characters into a field that is 30 characters long, using non-Latin characters into a field that expects Latin characters, typing letters into a number field, and so forth.

My serendipitous test case
My post yesterday is titled “<Redacted>.” Note that it begins and ends with angle brackets. Angle brackets have a special status in markup languages that derive from SGML, such as HTML, XHTML, and the others that the Web is built on. Angle brackets signal to the markup language interpreter that what is between them is a tag, information the software uses to decide, at the simplest level, how to display what follows (until a closing tag is encountered).

As a consequence of this special status, if I want you to see an angle bracket in the displayed text, I have to use a workaround. The workaround is to put in a character code (called an HTML entity) that will be interpreted as a mathematical less than or greater than symbol. Knowing this, what I typed into the Title field for yesterday’s post was <Redacted> (and I just applied a similar trick to make that come out right). So far so good.

But as you know, a blog post is more than a simple HTML web page. When I click the Publish Post button, my browser sends information to a server that triggers software to assign a URL-friendly name to the post and store what I’ve typed in a database. That database has rules for how text is stored. Other software extracts text from the database and sends an HTML page to your browser so you can read the post. Other software extracts the information in another way to supply your RSS feed reader. When you view my post, either as a web page on my domain or in your feed reader or in your email or…wherever, other software has intervened to process the text.

So there are lots of places where my angle brackets have to be interpreted and processed.

Complicating matters is that a lot of low-level text processing takes place inside software modules that are freely distributed to programmers. These modules may be written in a programming language different from that of the surrounding program, and the programmer who uses them may not fully understand all that goes on inside them. For example, if I want to build a web form that asks for a phone number, I may search around for a Javascript program that validates entries to assure they are legitimate phone numbers. I don’t have to know how that works; I only need to know how to use it.

Back to <Redacted>
Typically, Blogger creates a URL for blog posts based on the post title. It strips out punctuation and words such as a, an, the, and a few others. For example, my post titled “Do you have the willies?” became http://www.ampersandvirgule.com/2009/12/do-you-have-willies.html. For yesterday’s post, though, Blogger looked at the post title and threw up its hands (wise move), basing the post URL on the first line of the post body, instead: http://www.ampersandvirgule.com/2009/12/you-may-have-seen-story-other-day-about.html. So far so good.

But the post title gets reported in many other interfaces. It has variously shown up as:

<Redacted> [correct]
<Redacted> [user-unfriendly but not wrong]
Untitled Entry [uninformative, but a sign of recognition there was a problem]
[blank]

My humble suggestion to software QA professionals everywhere is that this is a test case they may want to add to their battery.

2009-12-11T08:42:00.005-05:00

You may have seen the story the other day about the US Transportation Security Administration manual that was posted on the agency’s website several months ago. It was a PDF in which sensitive material was blocked out with black rectangles placed over the text. If one has only a user’s eye view of software (if you’re a manager, in other words) and can’t be bothered learning anything about what the software does and how it works, this may seem like a reasonable way to secure the information. You can’t see it, so it isn’t there, right?

As Alexander Pope put it, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”

The fact, as anyone who has bothered to learn anything about PDFs knows, is that the text was always there, merely covered, and the simple expedient of choosing the text selection tool in the Acrobat or Adobe Reader toolbar allowed any user to select and copy the full text of the document. Oops!

A couple of months ago, before this news story surfaced, I was typesetting a manuscript in which the author attacked an advertisement for a weight-loss remedy. To dramatize the fact that he was saying some rather nasty things about the advertised product, he chose to use black rectangles to block out the product’s name (rather than use a more traditional editorial device such as underscored spaces: _______). But, as with the TSA functionaries, the author had left the product name in the manuscript and applied a black highlight, rendering the name invisible to the eye but not to the cursor.

When I typeset the passage, I used a similar technique (applying a character style that rendered the word as a solid black rectangle). But before doing so, I replaced the product name with “<redacted>.” This text is not visible in the printed book. But should the author decide to produce an e-book later, in PDF or any other format, the product name will not be inadvertently revealed.

This is not rocket science. It’s just responsible tool use. Top-down management often presumes that anything a manager doesn’t already know isn’t important for anyone else to know either and that therefore training for subordinates is unnecessary. The TSA is disciplining five people who believed that.

If one of those bottles should happen to fall...

2009-12-10T11:30:00.002-05:00

According to Poynter Online, Nielsen is shutting down Kirkus Reviews and Editor & Publisher. Kirkus Reviews was one of the very few remaining pre-publication book review journals and was one of two or three relied on by librarians in planning their new book purchases.

The rationale for producing bound galleys or advance reading copies (ARCs) of books, with its built-in delay of four months before publishing the finished book, is looking weaker by the day.

Do you have the willies?

2009-12-02T14:31:00.003-05:00

I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you no lies.
Grammatically, there isn’t a blessed thing wrong with using will as a verb auxiliary. If you look it up, you will find that I’m correct. If you enter a signed comment and satisfactorily respond to the Captcha challenge, your comment will appear. So don’t get me wrong here. I will not tell you that using will is grammatically wrong.

But in technical writing, particularly in American English (British English tech writing has different conventions), the best practice is to avoid the use of will unless you are talking about a future event. Enter your street address and city. The software looks up (not “will look up”) your zip code.

Why did this become a rule? Simple. Technical documents are written for a broad audience that may include a significant number of people for whom English is not the first language. Different languages have different arrays of tenses and different ways of indicating them. For a software user who is not a native speaker of English, will may always trigger the assumption that the writer is discussing a future event, even though that’s not always what the word means to a native speaker. The sentence then becomes ambiguous: The software looks up my zip code as soon as I tab over to the next field, the software will look up my zip code tonight, during a batch process, or the software will look up my zip code when the next version is released? I can’t answer that question with any confidence until I run a test case, and my boss told me not to run test cases because they will corrupt the database. So I’m confused; and if I’m confused, that means the technical writer let me down.

Where there’s a will, there’s a potential for confusion. If you are trying to communicate unambiguously in a context where you do not know the linguistic capabilities of your audience, don’t have the willies.

POP! at Yale Rep

2009-12-01T22:54:00.003-05:00

Props to my much better half for her one-liner on the way home tonight: “Reminds me of the Shakespeare play.” Wait for it. “Much ado about nothing.”

Don’t take that as a dig at POP! though. Yale Rep has mounted the world premiere of a rollicking musical about Andy Warhol, and it is Warhol who extolled Nothing.

The strength of musical theater, as of the operetta it derives from, is rarely the plot. Oh, there have been exceptions, but POP! isn’t one of them, and if that’s going to spoil your fun, stay home and read a mystery. POP! is an As you know, Bob, that consists of character sketches—and I do mean character—of a handful of the Factory regulars back in 1968. In structure, it is reminiscent of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile (maybe it should have been called Who Shot Andy Rabbit?).

The play unfolds—no, it exfoliates—in one long act (1:40). The sets and staging are at the same brilliant level we’ve come to expect from Yale Rep. Casting, acting, and singing were all superb. I especially appreciated the sound work, as I heard every lyric clearly, something I no longer expect but want to applaud when I get it.

The action—er, exposition—takes place on June 3, 1968. Bonus points and a discount blog subscription to the first commenter who names two other events, both fictional, memorialized in songs centered on June 3.

Good post on self-publishing

2009-11-21T10:08:00.001-05:00

Read Self-Publishing "Success" Stories, a post on Jim Hines's blog.

A typographer's Twitter tip

2009-11-15T07:01:00.007-05:00

Updated with contributions from anonymous and parkrrrr

I’m becoming accustomed to the 140-character limit on Twitter posts, and I’m abbreviating (2 for “to,” 4 for “for,” and so forth) when I have to. But I also see an opportunity for character-shaving that most others are not using, perhaps because of inconvenience. So, as a public service, here are some one-character punctuation marks for you to copy and paste, together with the Windows keyboard shortcuts and Mac keyboard shortcuts (last column, submitted by an anonymous commenter) if you’d rather type them yourself.


Replace "..." with ellipsis   …   Alt+0133    Opt+;
Replace "--"  with em dash    —   Alt+0151    Opt+Shift+-
Replace " - " with en dash    –   Alt+0150    Opt+-
Replace " + " with bullet     •   Alt+0149    Opt+8
Replace " | " with pilcrow    ¶   Alt+0182    Opt+7
Replace "ae"  with ligature   æ   Alt+0230
Replace "oe"  with ligature   œ   Alt+0156

The following have no shortcuts, but you can copy and paste.

Replace RT with ℞ but cpdavey suggests recycling symbol, ♺
Replace !? with ‽
Replace fi with ﬁ
Replace fl with ﬂ
Replace No with №

Do you have others you would like me to add?

Bragging on behalf of a client

2009-11-13T15:44:00.002-05:00

A client I helped with his first novel wrote another and asked me to give it a quick once-over. He now reports that he has signed a representation agreement with a literary agent and hopes to report back in due time that he has a publisher as well. Way to go, S.H.!

Buy me a copy for Christmas

2009-11-02T07:15:00.003-05:00

Here is a video that demonstrates a lot of old crafts and technologies in book production. Bibliophiles must watch this. People who think a font is a computer file ought to watch this. Enjoy. Thanks to Beth Burke for bringing this to my attention.

Novelists: read this!

2009-11-01T07:13:00.002-05:00

Here’s a bright idea. The author is a project management pro in his day job, so maybe this is easier for him than it is for you. Nonetheless…

“My writing is carefully planned, and a spreadsheet collects my scene-by-scene word count and provides a projection of overall word count based on average words per scene so far. Thus, I could quickly realize if, for example, I was headed for an impractical word count of 30,000 words or 250,000 words.”

—novelist David Chesworth

"Times more" and "times less"—a contrarian view

2009-10-31T11:15:00.002-04:00

As someone who gravitated toward math in school, I fully support, at the gut level, the proscription of the construction “A is three times more than B” and the construction “A is three times less than B.” Neither makes any logical or mathematical sense, as so ably explained by Bill Walsh on his blog, The Slot. This is not an argument about grammar; it’s about the semantic content of these expressions. Logically they have none, and yet people continue to use them and have meaning in mind when they do so.

And now I’ve come around to a view of the matter that goes against logic and against my gut preference. I think I now know how to understand where these constructions come from and why people use them.

Bear with me as I set forth a couple of vaguely analogous realities.

Retail markup
When calculating price markups, a manufacturer, distributor, or wholesaler divides the selling price by the cost. So if it costs me $1.00 to manufacture a good (would that we could manufacture good that cheaply in the world, eh?) and I sell it for $1.50, I have marked it up 50%.

However, a retailer does not calculate markup the same way. A retailer divides the selling price by the margin to calculate markup. If a retailer buys a good for $1.00 and sells it for $2.00, the margin is $1.00, and that is 50% of the selling price. So the retailer is applying a 50% markup. The same two prices, seen by the wholesaler, would result in a calculated markup of 100%.

In shoe retailing, to take an example, the standard markup is 66.7%. That means that a pair of shoes the store buys for $10 has a retail price of $30. A “50% off” sale leaves the retailer with a margin of $5, which is 33.3% of the selling price and 16.67% of the original price but 50% of the cost. To the wholesaler this looks like a 50% markup, but not to the retailer.

People who think mathematically find retail arithmetic illogical verging on deceptive. But it’s a natural way of thinking for retailers.

Baker’s percentage
Bakers have an even more bizarre approach to calculation. All ingredients are expressed as a percentage of the weight of the flour. Thus a formula for French bread (pain ordinaire) is 100% Type 55 flour, 60% water, 2% salt, 2% yeast. That adds up to 164%, which is absurd on the face of it. Yet it makes perfect sense to bakers.

Now to our quandaries …

Times more than
The positive integers (1, 2, 3, … ) are called the natural numbers. This makes sense. These are the first numbers we learn, because we can put them in one-to-one correspondence with out fingers, at least to begin with. We, along with some other species, are adept at comparing quantities, as well. We know that this pile has more sugar cubes than that pile. So understanding “more than” is a fairly primitive ability that requires no training in mathematics.

If we stay with natural numbers and never extend the number line to the left (even to zero!), we can nonetheless develop the ability to do simple multiplication (the times table). When we do that, all results are more than the multiplicand. Three times any other natural number is more than the number we multiplied by three.

Yes, “times more than” is an imprecise and logically ambiguous use of language, but it’s easy enough to see how someone who does not think about the world in numerical or mathematical terms can be perfectly comfortable with it. How important is it, in the grand scheme of things, if “four times more than” means four times as much or five times as much? All we need to know for the purpose of getting past this sentence to the more interesting parts of the article is that it’s a lot bigger. One, two, three, many.

Times less than
Still positing that we’re inside the mind of the bright, highly literate but innumerate reader who tuned out math class starting sometime around third grade, we recall that division is somehow the inverse of multiplication, whatever that means, and we know instinctively that “less than” is the inverse of “more than.” So it is intuitively obvious that “times less than” must be the inverse of “times more than.” If we multiply by 4 to get four times more than, then we divide by 4 to get four times less than. What could be simpler?

The fact that it makes no sense to those of us who were actually interested in math is irrelevant to the person who knows what it means and doesn’t care about calculating an actual number. “Four times less than” is smaller, and “a thousand times less than” is a lot smaller, and “a million times less than” is a whole lot smaller, and what more do we really need to know?

So the crux of my argument is that “times more than” and “times less than,” while they drive some of us (including me) nuts, just represent an alternative calculation system analogous to retail markup and baker’s percentage, and we should relax and let people say imprecise, ambiguous stuff if they want to, so long as the actual numbers don’t matter too much.

Be the publisher

2009-10-30T05:13:00.002-04:00

I find myself constantly having to explain to people that self-publishing is publishing and they should think of themselves as publishers. Antipodean colleague Gordon Woolf says it better in an ezine article, “What is a Self-Publisher and Why You Should Aim Higher.”

The short version? When you walk into a room to greet readers, you’re a published author, not a self-published author. When you walk into a room to sell books, you’re a publisher, not a self-publisher. Identifying yourself as a self-publisher in any context is bush league.

You should know this about book publishing

2009-10-27T14:03:00.002-04:00

Steven Piersanti, president of Berrett-Koehler Publishers wrote The 10 Awful Truths about Publishing. Worth reading. Thanks to Amy Einsohn for the link.

Book publication timeline

2009-10-23T07:28:00.002-04:00

Here’s a real-life timeline for a mainstream, agented book (thanks to @KOKEdit by way of @krishvenkatesh for the link).

In my experience, self-publishing is a more compressed process. It typically takes about six months from the time I receive a draft manuscript from an author until ARCs are printed (if the marketing plan for the book includes ARCs) or until finished books are printed. Some books go faster than that. Some go slower. The variable is usually the author’s turnaround time on revisions. The reason I can turn out a book faster than the traditional trade publishing industry is that I can focus on just a few projects at a time rather than having to fill a pipeline with dozens or hundreds of titles. Their process takes as long as it takes. For particularly time-critical books (occasioned by the death of a celebrity, for example), a large publisher can put a team together and knock out a book in three days. That’s not a process I can compete with.

Many first-time authors have unrealistic expectations about how long it takes to publish a book. Go ahead and click the link.

Wax on. Wax off.

2009-10-15T21:15:00.002-04:00

Earlier today, on an editing list, Odile Sullivan-Tarazi posed an interesting question. She wrote in part (and gave me permission to post here):

A terminology question for those of you working with software applications or websites.

Our group is looking at these sets of terms:

log on / log off

log in / log out

vs.

sign on / sign off

sign in / sign out

…

From your point of view, is this a valid distinction? Does it matter whether a user is working in an application that resides on her local machine, a company server, or on the Internet?

What distinction, if any, do you make between these two sets of terms, or do you see in your work being made between these two terms? Then when it comes to log on or log in, which do you think is more correct, more standard? And with sign on, sign in?

Here’s my two cents’ worth on the subject. See if you concur.

First, I vote for consistency across a company’s public interface (packaged software or Web presence). Either choose log in / log out or sign in / sign out and stick with it. (I’m not fond of the on/off variants, for reasons that will become clear in a moment.) And drum into the interface designers and software developers that you log in at the login prompt. Login is not a verb. If you can accomplish just that, you’ve performed a feat.

Second, I think the choice depends on which metaphor the anticipated audience is going to find more comfortable. Log is short for logbook. Logbooks are used by navigators and commanders of vessels (sea or air); by police department property clerks; and so forth. There’s something a little stiff, professional, technical, bureaucratic about logging in and logging out. This will be part of your permanent record, as they used to tell us in elementary school. Signing in is something you do when you visit a building, go to your doctor’s office, attend a funeral. It has more of a social, personal connotation. Your counterpart wants to remember who was there that day, and maybe the record will be put in a filing cabinet somewhere, but it’s a process accessible to anyone, not just the officially designated keeper of the logbook. And finally, signing on and signing off are what broadcasters do at the beginning and end of the broadcast day. So that just seems like the wrong model altogether.

In practical terms, logging in to a network and signing in to a network are identical. But in connotative terms, I think they’re subtly different. And that’s the basis on which I’d choose. Log in to a database administration interface; sign in to a social network.

Want to make a living as a novelist?

2009-10-14T06:25:00.001-04:00

Real-life income figures from a genre fiction writer. Fascinating.

The secrets to publishing success

2009-10-08T20:24:00.002-04:00

Jane Friedman’s 2009 Tough Love Guide is an index to lots of solid articles on the Writer’s Digest blog. Plenty to read there. What I’ve sampled so far has all been excellent. Thanks to Joel Friedlander for the link.

And as long as I'm being grumpy

2009-10-04T08:33:00.003-04:00

The New Yorker, October 5 issue, page 25 (“The Talk of the Town”). Four-count-‘em-four editing errors on a single page. Possibly a new record for the magazine that used to pride themselves on the excellence of their copyediting and fact checking.

carat instead of karat
Hooters (capped) instead of hooters
“hot-air balloon—you need the helium to get it up…” Okay, this was in a direct quote and Madeleine Albright should know better, but unless the point is to mock Albright’s unfamiliarity with how balloons work, the quote should not have been used.
“Smokey-the-Bear” instead of “Smokey Bear”

And I don’t know that a ranger’s hat is necessarily made by Stetson, although perhaps it is. So that might be five.