The TeleBlog‘s daily readership often surpasses that of LibraryJournal.com and normally exceeds the audience of The Book Industry Standard if you go by Alexa.com. Would you believe, the TeleBlog even beats Publishers Weekly on rare occasions. Check out the numbers yourself.
We may well be the most popular Web blog dedicated to e-book industry news and views, as opposed to, say, mobile news in general. Whether the topic is DRM or Iraq, we’ll generally cover it from an e-book angle, and this focus has helped put us on the map. At various times we’ve drawn links from major sites ranging from Wired News and Slashdot to the New York Times, NPR and the Chronicle of High Education, where we’re on the blogroll of the Wired Campus blog. Boing Boing and the Yale LawMeme have praised us, and if:book and MobileRead also have been gracious.
Problem is, I’ve ended up writing at least 90 percent of the TeleBlog’s posts, and to continue at this rate without an adequate revenue stream is out of the question. Google ads would not do the trick. And with a zillion free news sources out there, a subscription plan doesn’t make sense.
Bottom line: Less of David and ideally more of you
So here’s the deal. Effective immediately, I’ll post only when the muses drive me to it—maybe once or twice a week. I hope other contributors will fill the vacuum. I’ll provide editorial assistance if need be so people can appear here at their best, writing in the TeleBlog’s informal style. So feel free to pitch in with your own articles on relevant topics for a global audience.
Who knows? Maybe in the end the number of posts will increase. I’d love that. My goal is not to be indispensable.
The thank-you routine
Join Branko Collin, Robert Nagle, Jon Noring, Chris Meadows, Quinn Anya Carey, Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti and others in speaking your mind to thousands of readers.
I’m grateful to existing contributors and to our regular commenters, including Garson Poole (whom I keep asking to be a contributor in the main part of the blog), PARC‘s Bill Janssen (normally at odds with me but always interesting—and someone else I’ve asked to join the main part of the blog), Adobe‘s Bill McCoy (now a contributor), Richard (generous with hardware and software insights, including those from a Mac perspective), Roland Rohle (offering newsy comments on the hardware scene), John Mark Ockerbloom (behind the valuable Online Books Page), Roger Sperberg (who’s also been a contributor), Jane (at DearAuthor.com) and others whom I’ll leave out just for space reasons. I’d love for all these commenters to become contributors. I’ll also sneak in a word for an anonymous volunteer who, within time limits, has been trying to clean up the TeleBlog’s typos—a little like the legend of King Canute seeking to hold back the sea. I hope this unsung TeleHeroine will hang around and maybe even join others in writing for the blog. If some of of our friends from MobileRead’s forum-oriented site also want to be contributors here, not just commenters, so much the better.
With the new group-oriented approach, the TeleBlog ideally will offer a greater variety of perspectives, and I’ll have more hours left over for other writing and for a cause dear to me, LibraryCity, for which volunteers are also welcome. That’s not all. I’ll also be able to devote more time to my health and to e-book reading for the sheer fun of it, and I may even get a chance to catch the last of the TeleMice.
Photo credit: Creative Commons-licensed photo by Barnaby Jeans. Hey, help us nail down some news.
Hi
I’ve been trying to help David to turn TeleRead into a group – or I’d rather say community – oriented website.
Due to lack of free time on my end my apprach was to put the site together from readily available CMS modules which, well…, will never give a _great_ result but hopefully a good enough one.
David’s been asking the audience here for comments on what they’d prefer to see, I haven’t seen much feedback though.
Currently my efforts would let us set up a site with the following feature set:
– people can register and post articles on the site, ie blog on the site
– people can also decide to blog on another site in case they’re already doing it, we’d pick up their blog posts through RSS
– we’d also include some newsfeeds from Google and such to monitor some keywords like “electronic paper”, “ebook reader device” etc.
We can then gradually improve the site with more and more features depending on what there is need for.
I would be great to hear some feedback on this idea, please let us know what you would like to see.
Thanks!
Please help Tamas with feedback. At the same time please note that because I’d prefer that TeleRead remain noncommercial, some or all of these activities may be spun off to another site. Thanks! David
Also, for those who don’t already know, I’m working on a creative commons publishing site. I think a lot of us are working on related projects.
In the last few years teleread has helped to clarify many of the issues –technical, legal and cultural–that surround the emergence of ebooks. David’s contribution to this has been enormous; frankly, this was the first site I found that ever talked about ebooks (that was well before it ever was a weblog).
And actually, one of my first thoughts while reading this was: wow, here’s someone with more radical views about copyright than I had!
I’ve really enjoyed the old format–hope that the new format remains as vital, critically positive, and insightful as the old. Best of luck as you make this transition.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com