At the Chronicle of Higher Education's Lingua Franca weblog Carol Saller asks When the Book Is Too Big, Are Online Supplements a Good Idea ?
Sounds like a pretty good idea to me -- except, of course, that the logistics lag behind the theory.
Hilariously, for example, there's this exchange -- apparently meant seriously:
Yes, they keep coming up with new variations, promising to do better -- I'll believe it when I see it (and there are very few instances where I have, yet).
True, authors are pretty bad at this too, but on the whole they've proved (slightly) more reliable. (University-affiliated authors who have their own webpages as part of the university site tend to have pretty useful and decent pages -- but these often get lost when the authors switch jobs .....)
This is again one of those few areas where publishers could actually show they add value to the whole publishing process -- i.e. that there's a reason for authors to bother with them -- but so far they haven't made the case very well. (I would have figured this would have been one of the first things they'd embrace and show off on their websites -- all sorts of supplemental information on offer for all their titles (and on offer permanently, not just when the books comes out) -- but most don't seem to think it's worth bothering with yet.)
And then there's this:
Sounds like a pretty good idea to me -- except, of course, that the logistics lag behind the theory.
Hilariously, for example, there's this exchange -- apparently meant seriously:
Who will host the materials online, the author or the publisher ?Publishers are: "better able to ensure long-term stability" ? Theoretically -- sure. But as someone who is constantly replacing dead links to publishers' sites -- to the most basic book information/ publicity pages, most of the time -- here at the complete review I can assure you publishers are, in practice, unable to to come close to ensuring long-term or indeed any stability (really: I could spend every waking hour, every day of the year, checking and replacing links (many of them admittedly to reviews and other information for which publishers aren't responsible) and the job still wouldn't get done). University presses are slightly better than commercial ones, but over more than a dozen years that I've run this site the percentage of publisher sites I've come across that have offered reliable stability is ... practically negligible.
Mr. Tryneski and his colleague, Electronic Marketing Manager Dean Blobaum, agree that from the publisher's point of view it's best for the publisher to host the pages, since they are better able to ensure long-term stability. Mr. Tryneski notes, however, that authors routinely prefer to host their own work for reasons of control, but then either fail to carry through or fail to maintain the site for more than a short while.
Yes, they keep coming up with new variations, promising to do better -- I'll believe it when I see it (and there are very few instances where I have, yet).
True, authors are pretty bad at this too, but on the whole they've proved (slightly) more reliable. (University-affiliated authors who have their own webpages as part of the university site tend to have pretty useful and decent pages -- but these often get lost when the authors switch jobs .....)
This is again one of those few areas where publishers could actually show they add value to the whole publishing process -- i.e. that there's a reason for authors to bother with them -- but so far they haven't made the case very well. (I would have figured this would have been one of the first things they'd embrace and show off on their websites -- all sorts of supplemental information on offer for all their titles (and on offer permanently, not just when the books comes out) -- but most don't seem to think it's worth bothering with yet.)
And then there's this:
What happens when technologies change ?Interesting, too -- though I have to wonder why they're switching programming languages so much ..... (But then as far as publishers (and their websites) go, there's so much that I continue to find baffling.)
Mr. Blobaum points to an example where an author paid for the programming of materials hosted by the publisher, but IT staff have since then rewritten the site twice because the original programming language was no longer supported by their Web server.