• The DTTF team:
• David Ream, who has been working so hard on the IPDF spec, giving presentations everywhere he can to help push indexing and ebooks further, and writing tools to help ASI’s books wind up as ebooks, and being my mind-meld partner. He also forgives me when I misspell his name, which I appreciate.
• Michele Combs, right by Dave’s side making sure that the spec was good, and the most cheerful committee person ever. She is a true diplomat.
• Glenda Browne, who navigated the depths of the spec with our American team and made sure it was internationally great as well.
• Steve Ingle and his team who gave hours and hours to work with Dave to bring ASI’s ebooks to market-ready stage, test tools, and has been working on the web site updates.
• Mary Harper, who has kept the DTTF team sane, kept me sane in particular, kept our reports in order, can find any document we need, and always thinks about the diplomatic solutions or implications of the team’s actions. She is our heart.
• Ina Gravitz, who happily said about ebook testing: “I have no idea, but I am willing to learn” and has been managing the quality assurance program for ASI’s ebooks effort. There was a recent article that said ebook QA was essential but too few publishers do it. Ina put us ahead of the curve!
• Paul Sweum, who will forever be known as the man who knocked on Amazon’s doors.
• Charlee Trantino, who has been the greatest board liaison we could have had.
• Sheila Ryan, who has been mastering the art of the tweet, and has been documenting how to get through an Indesign linked index with Gale Rhoades.
• And Pilar Wyman… You all know she has been President this year, but over the last two years Pilar has gone way way above and beyond her official offices to be a force of nature, doing webinars, international presentations to publishers, and setting a course for where we need to go. We are a buzzword now due to her dynamite onstage presence and networking. Believe me, Pilar has been up late working on both her presidential duties, Skype conferences, resolving issues, and trying to get DTTF demos done, speeches ready, and materials prepared. She is amazing, and she has kept us going when personal troubles hit every member of the team over the last two years.

• The ASI board members, who were visionaries and decided we needed to do something, to act now, about indexing in the ebook age. Frances Lennie, Richard Shrout, Pilar and now Ina have been the presidents who kept this ball rolling, and the board has been so supportive. We hope we have fulfilled your wishes, and I thank you all.

• Everyone who posts on LinkedIn or calls the team’s attention to important technologies and news. Yes, everyone of you! You have been our eyes and ears, since none of us can be everywhere at once or read everything there is. Thank you! You are too many to list, but I want you to know you are invaluable. Rebecca McCorkle has been gathering your news up every week, and letting everyone know.

• I want to also mention the importance of teaching, in which Janet, Nancy Mulvany and Sylvia Coates have all been my mentors. It’s been a joy to see students go on to become great indexers: Lucie Haskins, Teri Lefever, Kay Schlembach. I have been privileged to teach them. Every student has taught me something about our craft. It’s a two way learning experience. Let’s also remember Vicky Agee, who not only taught for decades, but was a major factor in making sure that anywhere she lived, there was an ASI chapter going strong. We all wish her health and strength.

• And lastly, since this is going to sound like the Oscars if I go on any longer, I want you to know that my Mom and my husband Chris should be up here by my side. When I found out that I had won the Wilson award, I was at my Mom and Dad’s house. When I heard that I was being put forward for the Hines, I was again at Mom and Dad’s. Something about that house makes you win awards, I think. It’s too bad we are selling it now, but hey, if anyone here would like to put down an offer, it is an award-winning location! And as for Chris, those of you who know him, you know why he should be here too.

This has a lot to do with the people who write, publish and sell books. The big threat to Amazon’s Kindle isn’t people reading e-books on the iPad or the Nook. It’s that books are becoming fringe media.

So what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.

On one end you have AOL and their Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media. That leads to a whole lot of really, really crappy content being highlighted right on the massive AOL home page. This article, for example, is just horrendous. One of AOL’s own blogs trashes the company’s spinoff, rambles for miles without any real point, and adds a huge factual error to top things off (”the company is losing money”). Hiring a bunch of people who couldn’t keep their old media jobs and don’t have the stomach to go out on their own and then slapping little or no editorial oversight onto these masses of sub-par journalists leads to an inevitable conclusion – cheap, crappy content. And that crappy content is given a massive audience on the AOL portal.

On the other end you have Demand Media and companies like it. See Wired’s “Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model.” The company is paying bottom dollar to create “4,000 videos and articles” a day, based only on what’s hot on search engines. They push SEO juice to this content, which is made as quickly and cheaply as possible, and pray for traffic. It works like a charm, apparently.

These models create a race to the bottom situation, where anyone who spend time and effort on their content is pushed out of business.

We’re not there yet, but I see it coming. And just as old media is complaining about us, look for us to start complaining about the new jerks.

My advice to readers is just this – get ready for it, because you’ll be reading McDonalds five times a day in the near future. My advice to content creators is more subtle. Figure out an even more disruptive way to win, or die. Or just give up on making money doing what you do. If you write for passion, not dollars, you’ll still have fun. Even if everything you write is immediately ripped off without attribution, and the search engines don’t give you the attention they used to. You may have to continue your hobby in the evening and get a real job, of course. But everyone has to face reality sometimes.

Forget fair and unfair, right and wrong. This is simply happening. The disruptors are getting disrupted, and everyone has to adapt to it or face the consequences. Hand crafted content is dead. Long live fast food content, it’s here to stay.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
ASI Announces Golden Turkey Award

Press Release
Sarah Palin's Book receives ASI's First Golden Turkey Honors
Wheat Ridge, CO (November 20, 2009)

The American Society for Indexing (ASI) wishes to present its Golden Turkey Award for misadventures in indexing to Sarah Palin and HarperCollins for Going Rogue. In these days of Google and full-text search, many people don't realize how crucial the art and science of indexing still is (see the comments at http://www.thedailybeast.com/...) for some particularly disturbing evidence of public failure to recognize the value of good finding aids). Palin's book performs a crucial public service. The inaccessibility of information in this text makes it clear to any reader that a good index is essential to a book's long-term value.

Sarah Palin's Going Rogue has no index at all - a brilliantly simple if deviant way of proving the need for an index, worthy of one who prides herself on being a bit of a maverick. The sheer difficulty of using Going Rogue for any purpose beyond that of a doorstop turns it into an ironically elitist text. Now, other tomes from diverse parts of the political spectrum have been published without indexes (most recently and egregiously, David Plouffe's The Audacity to Win). What makes Going Rogue stand out is its sheer importance. Whatever one thinks of Ms. Palin, no one can doubt that she was a principal player at the center of an historic campaign. Scholars of the political history of the early 21st century will have to consult this book, a task which the lack of an index has made nearly impossible. If Plouffe's account were compared to Eusebius of Caesarea's biography of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, Palin would be Constantine's rival Maxentius, defeated at the Milvian Bridge. Valuable as Eusebius's manuscript is, late antique historians would kill for a first-hand account from Maxentius - and if it were 432 pages long, as Palin's Going Rogue is, and as full of public and personal incident, their first job would be to give it an index.

Why does any of this matter? If all one is going to do is read a book from front to back and then forget about it, indexes don't matter. But books are our way of storing and accumulating knowledge, checking facts, comparing viewpoints. It's very hard to do that without an index. What about full-text search? Well, all I can say is, how is that working out for you?

Electronic searches are very good at finding words, but they're bad at finding concepts. If you're looking for information on "agriculture," you might miss all sorts of valuable information that uses the term "farming." A good index, written by a professional indexer (who is an actual person with a brain, not a piece of software, although indexers use dedicated software programs to perform mechanical aspects of indexing such as accurate alphabetizing) will pull together all related concepts regardless of the words used to express them. Ever had the experience of entering a search term and getting 45,679 hits, and had no luck narrowing the parameters? An index will provide subentries for major terms in a text so you can find the aspect you're interested in. In other words, an index does the full-text search for you.

Why are books published without indexes? Publishers and authors usually cite time and cost as the reasons for putting out a book without an index. Neither is a very good excuse. Indexers go to work when the text has been finalized and is going through the final proofreading stage, so there's no need to tack on extra time to do the index. In a pinch, a good indexer can produce a satisfactory index to a 400-page work in three days. Indexes can add to the final cost of the book in two ways. First, the indexer usually makes between $1,000 and $1,500 for the index to a standard-size text. For a book with the projected sales of Going Rogue, this is hardly likely to break the bank. Second, depending on the book's length, including an index may require the publisher to add another quire or signature of pages, which will affect the paper and binding costs (this consideration is not an issue for e-books, which as the technology improves will be released with embedded indexes that hyperlink to relevant parts of the text). Palin's book has, on my count, at least seven blank pages available, which could have held a respectable index. (Plouffe's Audacity to Win, on the other hand, has none, and an index would have required an extra quire.) In any case, given that the index often helps sell a book (by giving potential buyers a taste of what's in store) and greatly improves its functionality and long-term value, leaving the index out is a false economy. That is why ASI awards its Golden Turkey to the publisher, as well as the indexer. HarperCollins deserves as much credit for Going Rogue's lack of an index as does Palin herself.

The "context" argument: Commentators on Palin's missing pages have suggested that she perhaps deliberately left out the index to foil "the Washington read," a practice whereby one skims the text by judicious consultation of the index, particularly for instances of one's own name. The Washington read, it is argued, results in snippets from the book being taken out of context. T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) refused to have an index for The Seven Pillars of Wisdom on this account, and the French literary establishment not infrequently argues against the use of indexes on this basis. (I would not have thought Sarah Palin would be inclined to side with Lawrence in particular or the French in general, so I assume, if she does indeed espouse this view, that she came to it via a different route.) In any case the argument is specious. Biased readers can take snippets of the book out of context without any assistance from the index; news coverage of Palin's book so far has made that abundantly clear. Rather than ensuring contextual reading, the abandonment of the index ultimately ensures a book's place on the remainder shelf - your own, or the bookseller's.

So congratulations are due to both Sarah Palin and HarperCollins for their outstanding demonstration of why every serious book needs an index. ASI salutes you.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
About American Society for Indexing

ASI is the only professional organization in the United
States devoted solely to the advancement of indexing,
abstracting, and database building. Come visit us
and learn more about indexing at www.asindexing.org

This just in on ASI-L:
As president of ASI I am the author and responsible for its content, as I am for all ASI messages that are distributed. The message is emphatic (and nonpolitical): Going Rogue is an important contribution to political history and as such it should have had an index. I do not apologize for that message in any way. Promoting indexes is part of my job, and so far we have had an overwhelming non-ASI reponse to the posting from people wanting to know more about indexing.

Best, Kate Mertes

Kate Mertes Mertes Editorial Services 118 N. West Street Alexandria, VA 22314 703-549-4574 kmertes@hotmail.com www.katemertes.com

The web has been abuzz the past few weeks with chatter about Microsoft’s announcement today at its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans about the new version of Microsoft Office 2010. There’s even a mini-movie about its debut. Facing potential challenges from Google’s browser-based Apps products and its new Chrome OS, Microsoft has been touting its three screens strategy, which is the ability for products to synchronize across the phone, browser, and desktop, for some time now.

With the release of Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010 and Visio 2010, we finally see the implementation of Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s mantra. We had the opportunity to see an in-depth demo of the new suite of products from Microsoft’s Group Product Manager for Office 2010, Chris Bryant. Here’s a complete breakdown of all the functionality that has been added...:

The Move To The Browser

Most certainly a direct response to Google Apps, Microsoft is rolling out lightweight, FREE, Web browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. All based in the cloud, the web-based versions of these products have fewer features than their desktop cousins but still give users basic tools to edit and change documents.

Yes, Stewart is publishing his entire 480,000 character book at 130 characters at a time (to leave room for hashtags and links) on Twitter. To be clear, the book, called The French Revolution... is already written. But Stewart and his agent couldn’t get any publishers to bite, so they decided to go the non-traditional route, to say the least.

Here’s how this works: Every so often, Stewart is tweeting out sentences (or incomplete sentences) from the book. No, he’s not doing this by hand, he got a programmer to help him automate the process. The result is slowly spilling out the entire narrative of the book to his Twitter feed.

If you think this would be impossible to follow in a regular stream of tweets, you’re right. That’s why Stewart has a website chronicling the whole story thus far (or, of course, you can simply click on his Twitter page to read it — though backwards). Stewart expects that will will take about 3,700 tweets to get the full story out there.

The general theme of Challenger’s advice isn’t to actually work, but to look like you’re working. That’s productive. Here’s Challenger’s advice with my comments in italics:

• Arrange with your hotel to have a fax machine installed in your room. Chain hotels favored by business guests already have done so. Yes, your boss will be damn impressed that you have a fax machine in your room—especially since he hasn’t used one since 1995.


• While most of the large hotels now offer Internet connections (some free, some for a fee), some of the smaller hotels and motels favored by budget-conscious travelers may not. Prior to leaving, visit websites that can help you locate Wi-Fi hotspots near your hotel. Translation: Spend your vacation in Starbucks.


• If traveling internationally, check with the hotel or car rental agency about leasing a cell phone capable of receiving/making international calls. Or call your carrier for a global card.


• Do not change your voicemail to say you are on vacation and unavailable. Customers may respond by seeking out a new source where someone is available. Many newer phone systems allow you to forward calls to a cell phone. Yeah, that would be great for me. PR calls at the beach woo hoo!


• If you don’t have call forwarding, check voicemails throughout the day and respond personally. Damn, I’m screwed. I don’t do this when I’m working.


• Check e-mails regularly and respond or arrange for someone at the office to respond. This is just in case one of those 1,000 emails a day are worth anything.


• Provide cell phone number, hotel phone number and/or e-mail to your supervisor so they can reach you. That way it’s easier to find you amid layoffs.


• Make sure your laptop or smartphone is set up to retrieve your emails on the road. Probably doesn’t apply to our audience.


• During the workweek, check in with your supervisor and/or a colleague in your department at least twice a day (once in the morning and once in the afternoon). The goal: Be as annoying on vacation as you are during the workweek!


• Make sure you have synched up your PDA so that your calendar, Rolodex, e-mail history, and to-do list are current. And we’re trying a vacation why exactly?


• Make sure to bring the various chargers and A/C adaptors for your cell phone and laptop. The only sane advice here. This applies to all travel.

David's blog about the award is here.

Reading various accounts around the web of the Amazon press conference this morning, I’ve seen some lamenting that there was no announcement of an iPhone app, with the suggestion that was expected. Certainly the remarks last week begged speculation, but the more I think about it, the less I think they’re on the brink of simply making Kindle-format books available for other devices. That’s what they’ll have to do if they want the whole Kindle concept to survive for the long term, but it seems to me that, for now at least, they’re deeply invested (literally and figuratively) in the device—in making Kindle-format books available to Kindle owners. So while I can see them releasing an iPhone app this year, I don’t see it as standalone access for the purchase and enjoyment of Kindle books. I see it as a way to enable people with Kindles to sync those books onto their phones when going places without the Kindle. (In fact, here’s how PW put it: “… Bezos said Amazon is working on ways to sync the Kindle to other mobile devices.”) In other words, an iPhone app will cost you $359, Kindle included.

"The index entry for ‘Cambridge Colleges, Peterhouse’ betrayed uncanny parallels, some believed, with Trevor-Roper’s perception of its members in the 1980s: ‘high-table conversation not very agreeable . . . four revolting fellows of; main source of perverts’. Just as admirers of his hero Gibbon often head straight for the footnotes, so the first port of call for connoisseurs of Trevor-Roper is the index."

]]>jancw@wrightinformation.comindexing2009-01-12T15:46:52-07:00http://www.wrightinformation.com/blog/files/36c3e3cd580cfefe3df8d67d47d774a1-10.html#unique-entry-id-10http://www.wrightinformation.com/blog/files/36c3e3cd580cfefe3df8d67d47d774a1-10.html#unique-entry-id-10
From "Tracking Ghost Railroads of Colorado" by Robert M. Ormes. 1975 Century One Press, Colorado Springs.]]>jancw@wrightinformation.comreading2009-01-22T15:41:45-07:00http://www.wrightinformation.com/blog/files/d3dcaca8f3040f6e7fad698f0411840a-9.html#unique-entry-id-9http://www.wrightinformation.com/blog/files/d3dcaca8f3040f6e7fad698f0411840a-9.html#unique-entry-id-9Are people reading less deeply and just skimming? Loren Dempsey suggests a new problem with information gathering, perhaps influenced by soundbites, snippets, twitter, and other short-but-sweet ways of information input, resulting in people just glossing over material and looking for highlights:

The network style of consumption -- particularly mobile consumption -- calls forward services which atomize content, providing snippets, thumbnails, ringtones, abstracts, tags, ratings and feeds. All of these create a variety of hooks and hints for people for whom attention is scarce. It has even been recently suggested that this pattern of consumption is rewiring our cognitive capacities (Carr, 2008). Regardless of the longer term implications, it is clear that people need better clues about where to spend their attention in this environment, and that this is one incentive for the popularity of social approaches. This attention scarcity is apparent also in the academic environment where a bouncing and skimming style of consumption has been observed (Nicholas, et al., 2006). Palmer, et al. (2007) talk about actual 'reading avoidance'. Researchers may survey more material, but spend less time with each item, relying on abstracts and other content clues to avoid reading in full.