Bibs & Blather
Coming Soon: A Special Offer
The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look is almost ready. As I’m preparing this issue of Cites & Insights, I’m also doing final readthroughs of the book. Before or shortly after this issue appears, I’ll complete that process, upload the book and cover files and order my proof copy from Lulu.
With luck, the book should be available for sale in very late November or early December. I’ll announce it on Walt at Random as soon as it is available.
The book will be priced at $22.50—but only for a few weeks. At some point before the 2009 ALA Midwinter Meeting, I’ll reset the price to $35.00. If and when there’s an Amazon/CreateSpace edition, that edition will cost $35.00.
Even with Lulu’s shipping charges, most of you will save money by ordering from Lulu between now and January 16, 2009. (The reprice might not happen that day; it will definitely happen by January 22, 2009 unless something goes badly wrong.)
I think it’s a good book, easily worth the $35. Not that I’m biased or anything…
There will, of course, be lots more information about the book on the blog when it’s published and probably in the January 2009 Cites & Insights, probably with a cover shot. Meanwhile, watch the blog and save some money.
This issue could have been a single-essay special, and in some ways it is. The primary essay takes up most of the issue, with a few pages devoted to the continued Retrospective and a couple for My Back Pages.
Even at that length, I covered less than half the material I planned to. Does that herald a new section? I’m not sure. With the growing overlaps I’m seeing among the various running sections of C&I, I’m beginning to wonder whether it would be easier to drop most of them entirely—but that seems a little radical. (How much overlap? Consider the Google lawsuit settlement: It fits in the ongoing Google Book Search/Open Content Alliance thread, has huge copyright implications, relates in some ways to libraries and scholarly access—and certainly plays a role in making it work. More about all that later; just how much later isn’t certain.)
If you’re inclined to bind the year’s Cites & Insights, hold on—the volume isn’t quite complete yet. The index and title page should appear in two or three weeks, maybe sooner.
Or you can buy a paperback version of the whole volume with a snazzy cover…probably.
I suspect there will be a Lulu version of Cites & Insights Volume 8, probably $29.50, and maybe it will sell as well as previous volumes (two copies each—but I wasn’t anticipating much more). Will volumes 6 and 7 continue to be available? Unclear.
What is clear: Public Library Blogs and Academic Library Blogs are going away fairly soon, at least in print form. The PDF downloads from Lulu might stick around for a while, possibly at a slightly lower price. But if you want either book, I’d suggest buying them before the end of the year.
After some thought, I went forward with the research for The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 on my own—because it was a fascinating project and one I thought would be worthwhile.
I believe it would be worth continuing that project in future years. I’m not sure I can justify doing that on my own, when I could be doing freelance writing, designing courses or seminars that could yield income or greeting folks at some big-box store. (Well, maybe not the latter, at least for now.)
There are other potential projects where I believe the results would be worthwhile, but they’re not interesting enough that I would even consider doing them as labors of love.
The obvious answer is sponsorship. Such sponsorship would:
▪ Make it feasible to release The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look as a free PDF or print version priced marginally over production cost.
▪ Make it feasible to publish key conclusions (and, indeed, portions of most chapters) in Cites & Insights (or in a sponsor’s venues).
▪ Assure an ongoing project to see how English-language liblogs fare in the future, with annual updates.
▪ At some levels of sponsorship, make it feasible to carry out useful studies of library blogs and publish the results free as PDF or at marginal cost in print. (Those studies just won’t happen without sponsorship: I think they’d be useful, but don’t find them nearly as fascinating as the liblog studies. Then again, without sponsorship, I don’t know whether I’ll keep on with the liblog study.)
I’ve done a quick writeup of what various levels of sponsorship would involve. You’ll find it at waltcrawford.name/sponsorship.htm; I won’t repeat that text here. (It doesn’t include dollar amounts. Those are available on request. They’re not big figures by most standards. They may be negotiable.)
Possible sponsors could include regional networks, library vendors of almost any stripe, foundations, library schools, publishers… But, frankly, I’m rarely sure just who I’d approach.
If you happen to think this is a good idea and know someone who would be a plausible sponsor (and I wouldn’t rule out any name in advance), please let them know about this post.
I love doing this stuff and I’m good at it. I’m also dealing with the economic realities of a decimated retirement fund and where my time and energy are best spent (outside of my existing part-time job). Maybe this will help clarify matters. Maybe not.
Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large, Volume 8, Number 12, Whole Issue 109, ISSN 1534-0937, a journal of libraries, policy, technology and media, is written and produced by Walt Crawford, Director and Managing Editor of the PALINET Leadership Network.
Cites & Insights is sponsored by YBP Library Services, http://www.ybp.com.
Opinions herein may not represent those of PALINET or YBP Library Services.
Comments should be sent to waltcrawford@gmail.com. Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large is copyright © 2008 by Walt Crawford: Some rights reserved.
All original material in this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
URL: citesandinsights.info/civ8i12.pdf