Gordon Woolf's Blog

Open letter to a publisher thinking of switching to online

Yet another magazine sent me a notification that it was going online. This time it was to be just a trial, but here is a slightly edited version of my reply:

While I can understand the desire of publishers to change to online provision of magazines, I would suggest that this is not as much in a reader’s interest. It is largely a transfer of costs from publisher to reader rather than a true saving in costs (and therefore in resources).

For example, I have a 10GB monthly download limit and while I usually stay within that, it means that on the occasions when I might not, it is quite likely that a magazine file will have to wait until the new month or be ignored altogether. My minimum cost to add an extra couple of GB of download is a one-off $20 payment or, alternatively, to increase by $10 every month to go to a higher limit which may not be used.

If I wish to show something to my wife or look at it more closely it means printing it out which again increases costs at my end, and though I’d often choose to print on my relatively ancient laser printer at a few cents a page, it might have coloured content that makes it more likely that I’d print on my inkjet at perhaps a dollar or more a time for a 2- or 3-page article.

The print edition will also normally be passed on to someone at the local computer club or U3A or community house (or even the local branch of the Australian Shareholders Association  (though that I no longer attend with any frequency). At any of those it may well attract further interest and possibly subscribers before being recycled (at least I can hope it is recycled). The online edition, if downloaded, will consume electricity and broadband fees before being deleted, i.e. gone for ever. Online for you it will continue to cost storage fees.

I can see a lot of sense in making some content available only online, especially the tables which have to be printed in such small type that they cannot be read by most people with my aged eyes. News too may be better online but most articles tend to be scanned much more quickly on screen than in print...and therefore not read as thoroughly.

So, unless you plan to also reduce article lengths and their number and interest, I’d suggest that at the very least you investigate a thinner, more cheaply printed edition with web links, preferably in a short form or linking to an index page online for more information.

I note your comments that the online version is just a trial but it does take several seconds to go from low to high resolution on a page and I note that links within pages are not live.

Lastly, it is a Flash file and I presume you have noted that the iPad does not accept Flash files and does seem to be the only real eReader suitable for viewing online magazines, at least until we see HP’s contender.

'Large print' is not just type set larger

An interesting suggestion I saw on a publisher forum a while ago was to produce a large print edition and to just reduce the pages of this to make the standard edition. The logic was that some of the readers for which the book was intended were sufferers of diabetes, which often brings sight problems.

Unfortunately the internationally researched standards for large print books, are not just an enlarged form of normal typesetting. And there is a big difference in producing books for those who are substantially sight impaired, and books for those of us who may have a slight deterioration in sight within the normal ranges of variation with age.

A chapter in the current edition of Type & Layout (the book by Colin Wheildon republished by The Worsley Press) -- although this is a chapter in the additional material by Geoffrey Heard -- does describe how preparing a book for the non-fluent reader is different to preparing a book for a fluent reader who may have minor sight problems, or no problems at all.

Just one quick example: although Wheildon's research showed that for reasonably fluent readers, justified serif type is by far the most readable, that is not true for someone who is less fluent, either through education or sight.

The chapter also includes information on the alternative of "Clear Type", a standard developed by the Royal National Institute for the Blind, with standards which, while being acceptable to a wide range of those with site problems, is more acceptable to others. While tending towards sans faces it does accept fonts with a good serif definition such as Bookman.

I would therefore warn against producing a smaller version of a large type, or even "Clear Type" book as a normal edition.

If the text of a book is correctly tagged in its preparation it would be a very simple matter to run it through with alternative layout specifications. I'd estimate an hour or two in a program such as InDesign, maybe even less in an entirely tag based layout program such as TeX.

There will need to be an entire new round of research into legibility on ebook readers.

Surveys: do they tell you anything

A magazine editor asked about some suggested questions for a survey on responses to his publication to be put to those attending a forthcoming meeting.

It was an opportunity for me to explain why I hate surveys, especially those presented at meetings or conferences: you either fill them out at random or go for the middle answer after you realize that you've been talking to colleagues and there isn't time to read the questions let alone answer.

It's a question which came up when I was preparing a new edition of a book for the printers, Type & Layout. The author, Colin Wheildon comments "over the years of my research, David Ogilvy more than once raised the question whether I was measuring reading comprehension or merely readability. I'm grateful for his persistence in moving me to confront this important and difficult question."

In this research he was measuring the extent to which typography and design affected understanding. His answer was that to overcome statements which might just reflect that a person had perused the articles and thought they understood them, was that there had to be actual questions on content to see whether the subjects had not only read the content, or thought that they had done so, but that they could answer questions which showed they had done so.

I was, in a way, pleased that it presented such major problems for the academics and practical researchers who advised Colin on this research, because it supported something I wrote in my own book on magazine publishing:

'Let's put a reader survey in the next issue, to find out what the reader wants!' To my mind this is like governments forming a committee: it gives the appearance of doing something without actually having to take any possibly unpopular decisions. Surveys have to be exceptionally well designed to get useful answers and can be designed to produce mostly the answers those setting the questions want to get.

I also quoted Dick Smith, the millionaire businessman and adventurer who started Australian Geographic magazine as suggesting the best way to find out what needs doing is to talk to staff and customers. He was surprised how many companies, especially large ones, which forgot to do this.

So, I suggested better results would be gained by walking among the attendees and raising the subject of the publication, and have a few other people do the same.

Did I say that I dislike surveys?

What font should I use?

Someone asked the other day: "What font should I use to be sure that it will be easy to read?" There has been one piece of publicly available research carried out in the English-speaking world into what fonts and styling in text makes it easiest to understand the content. This was by Colin Wheildon in Sydney in the 1980s and was republished three years ago as Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes. It was carried out by printing sample articles of the kind intended for magazine or newspaper use and measuring the comprehension by asking questions to show whether the participants understood the content. There's a downloadable extract of the book at http://worsleypress.com/type/ and the book is available from Amazon as well as elsewhere. A couple of comments: This is based on whether the font choice and styling actually work, not whether they look good, and it is a book not only unpopular but campaigned against by some graphic artists. It also applies only to English speaking countries -- the very limited tests in European countries infer that sans may do relatively better than serif in that region. It was also mainly conducted with narrow columns -- newspaper and magazine style rather than books. I'd also better declare my interest -- I played a role in returning the book to print though I no longer have any ownership in the business which does publish it. It is sad that this is the only work which is based on research rather than opinion. Some work has been done privately on behalf of major publishing groups and associations but is not publicly available.