Blogs / The Loom

How times have changed. Used to be, if I wanted to figure out what people were reading, I’d ask a few friends. This week, I got replies from 761 people.

On Monday I asked you to help me get a better sense of the science reader–how the science reader gets a science fix, what the science reader values, and what the science reader expects from the future. Thanks to everyone who responded–both directly to the survey questions and indirectly in the comments. Not surprisingly, commenters revealed to me some shortcomings of the survey itself–most glaringly, leaving podcasts, radio, and public libraries off the list of venues where you get your science fix. Despite these shortcomings, I still ended up thinking the survey was very useful. The picture it paints is pretty clear, and, in some ways, surprising.

And, of course, you generously donated your time and thoughts. I am no professional market analyst, but I’ve had a delightful time poring over the survey, as well as the comments of those who did not feel satisfied by the choices I offered. It wrecked a number of assumptions I had carried into the survey, and makes me think differently about where science writing is headed from here.

Here’s what I see in the results. (If you want to make your own interpretations in the comment thread, you can download the raw numbers in the survey report (pdf).)

First off, it’s clear that most of you no longer get science from print newspapers.

My first question was, “Where do you get your science fix, and how often?” I offered some formats; the choices for each ranged from avidly down to never. Of those who responded, 58% said they rarely or never read newspapers in print. A grand total of 17 of you–2%–said you read them avidly, and 7% said you read them occasionally. The rest said you read science in print newspapers only occasionally (22%).

Print magazines fared (somewhat) better in the survey. 31% responded rarely or never. 55% said you read science in newspapers occasionally or frequently.

News web sites and blogs scored big. 27% read news sites avidly for science, and 40% read them frequently. Only 1% said never.

Blogs did even better, with 50% responding with avidly and 36% frequently.

This does not mean that you love all things digital. Few of you get your science fix on TV more than occasionally; 23% said you never do so. I can’t report on podcasts, radio, and audio books, because I left them off the survey [d'oh!].

But the biggest surprise to me was ebooks. I assumed you were already riding the ebook wave. Nope. 64% of you said you never read them. Less than 2% said you read them avidly.

By contrast, you love old-fashioned paper books. Only 9% of you said you never bought science books.  67% of you said you bought three or more a year. About half of you subscribe to one or more print magazines for science.

I then asked about your digital habits in particular.

Most of you (67%) still use a computer for your digital fix. Only 15% use an Iphone. Only 5% use a Kindle–about the same number of you who are waiting for an Ipad to change the laws of physics.

You also proved to have a lot of stamina while reading on line. 62% of you said you click through long features to get to the end.

Ebooks have not yet cast their spell on you. 59% of you said you buy no ebooks a year because you’re waiting for them to get better; 19% said you don’t buy them because you just don’t like ebooks.

I rephrased the questions, asking about how you felt about ebooks: 70% of you said that ebooks were an interesting concept but not yet worth buying an ereader for. Another 7% said you can’t stand them. Only 3% of you have abandoned old books for the ebook future we’ve all been hearing about.

The last few questions of the survey dealt with getting stuff for free versus paying. And here’s where things got  interesting in a glass-half-empty-or-half-full kind of way. 40% of you said you would no longer pay for reading about science, because you can get so much for free. Only 20% of you said you’d pay to get past paywalls.

Then I described a couple possible pieces of science writing. In one case, I described an anthology of articles nicely designed in an ebook. Only 18% of you said you would not be willing to pay for that. 29% of you said you’d pay $10. 68% of you said you’d pay a price $4 or higher.

I also asked how much you’d pay for a hybrid article, with a short summary for free and an in-depth version for a payment. 63% of you said you would be willing to pay for such an article. 21% were willing to pay a buck, and 7% would pay two bucks, the highest price I put on the question.

The science reader that emerges from this survey is very comfortable online, getting a science fix from blogs and news sites. (And judging from the comments, a fair number listen to podcasts and radio, too.) But the science reader also reads a lot of books. Books made of paper, that is, not electronic ink. That pattern may change if e-readers get better, but probably not anytime soon.

The typical science reader will not be dropping a lot of money to get past paywalls. Some readers won’t pay anything online at all, but an appreciable fraction will pay for ebooks and individual articles–if they’re interesting.

It goes without saying that this survey is utterly unscientific and downright peculiar. But if it does reflect broader trends, it means that there are opportunities for small-scale, money-making experiments in new kinds of digital genres–including ones carried out by individual writers.

The comments are well worth checking out. A couple readers challenged my approach as being hopelessly twentieth-century, demonstrating my unwillingness to accept that information is too cheap to meter now. I’ve been skeptical about the alternatives, but Morgan Wirthlin made a passionate argument to turn away from ebooks and follow the lead of musicians:

I think you should consider taking your next microcosm (an /excellent/ book, by the way) and trying this model. Maybe you offer 2,000 copies of the “signature edition” on your website, which is just the normal book with your personal signature inside the cover, priced at maybe 10% above list price. Then offer 500 “subscriber editions,” which include a personalized memo and a big poster of one Carl Buell’s excellent illustrations to this hypothetical book. Finally, 50 extra special $100 “Zimmerfan editions” are sent to your most diehard readers ahead of the publication date, and include the poster, a hand-written letter of thanks, a polaroid you took, and a fossil (or even just a cool rock) you found outside. Etc., etc. It may sound ridiculous, but these are the sorts of things that people crave in the digital age. I can absolutely guarantee that you would sell out of all of these editions, and part of the reason is that your readers absolutely /want/ to support *you,* but they don’t want to feel cheated paying for something that they know they could get for free. An ‘art object’ with a personalized, cottage-industry touch is something that you cannot get for free.

And Scott Sigler, who started a novel-writing career by podcasting each chapter of his manuscripts, had this to say in my skepticism about podcasts:

Carl, podcasts DO generate revenue via advertising. I run an ad on most podcasts at scottsigler.com, and on my archived audiobooks (the back list) I have up at podiobooks.com. It took several years to generate a large enough audience, but now that I have it, I give away content for free and make money with advertising. This is nothing new — same model radio and TV have used for decades.

It’s all about the eyeballs (or earballs, whatever). If you create solid, free science podcast content, and that content resonates with an audience allowing you to consistently generate large numbers, you can earn revenue with advertising. Yes, you can still drive traffic to a site, and urge your listeners to buy print products, but the podcast itself becomes the primary revenue generator.

I’m inspired to go off to do some scheming. Meanwhile, what do you think of these results?

A quick note: I’ll be closing the survey on science reading habits at 1 pm EST Wednesday. The turnout has been great, and people are still joining in tonight. But I don’t want to let too much time go by before crunching the numbers and putting them back out for you again. So please have your say.

P.S. I know, I know–why are podcasts and public libraries not in the survey? I don’t know why I blanked on them. Register complaints in the comment thread.

Please be sure to fill out my quick survey on how you get your science fix! Thanks.

[As of 3/17 2 pm, the poll is closed. Thanks to everyone who responded. Results to be posted soon!]

[Update, 2 pm: Thanks for the big turn-out for my survey below. If you have trouble accessing it to enter your information, try again later today. I am hammering out some kinks right now. And I'll crunch the numbers once the responses start to taper off.]

We writers, in case you didn’t know, are scratching our heads about what exactly to do next. It’s hard to figure out, because there are so many things we could do, at least in theory. If we wanted, we could write a novel in tweets, record an epic poem as a podcast, or transform a history of inorganic chemistry into an Ipad app. In fact, I’m sure that someone, somewhere, is doing all these things and more–but not all at once. Each writer has to figure out how best to use the twenty-four hours in a day.

It makes sense for writers to choose work that makes the most of their particular talents. And for writers who depend on writing to pay the mortgage, it also makes sense to write things that have a chance of being read, and perhaps (dare to dream) earn their creators some money. Ten years ago, the course for a writer wasn’t easy, but at least it had some clearly marked sign posts. You could try to break into newspapers or magazines with pitch letters and clip files. You could try to get a contract with a publishing house and write a book. Today, of course, people read in other ways as well. They read blogs, Facebook posts, Kindle editions, discussion threads, and on and on. The sign posts have been moved, turned upside down, or taken down altogether.

The writer is left to wander across a confusing landscape. This morning, for example, the Pew Research Center released a report on the foraging habits of the online reader that Gawker summed up fairly well: “Paywalls are anathema. Nobody clicks on ads. The value of news is zero dollars and zero cents.” But wait! Yesterday Business Week reported that ebooks are selling like hotcakes on the Iphone.

One thing is clear: it’s no time to sit in the monastery and continue to illuminate vellum scrolls. It’s time to try new things. Recently, for example, the novelist John Edgar Wideman skipped past traditional publishers to self-publish an e-book over at Lulu. It’s too early to know the outcome of that experiment; for actual results, one can follow the blogging of novelist JA Konrath, who is chronicling his experiences over the past year  publishing short stories and rejected novels as ebooks. It’s working out well for him, and promises to get even better.

I suspect that the fate of different writers will depend, in part, on the nature of their readers. As a result, I think the Pew’s report has a fatal flaw to it: it’s based on the old-fashioned notion that readers form a homogenous swarm. If you call a few thousand phone numbers at random, you will get a meaningful picture of people’s reading habits. But if there’s anything we know for sure, it’s that the country does not sit down in front of the TV and watch Walter Cronkite en masse. The motivations of the reader matter. Some people love to read about sports online, to the point that they will pay to roll around in baseball stats like a happy pig in mud (and no disrespect intended towards baseball fans or pigs). A lot of people will not spend that money. They’ll glance at scores on Yahoo News and move on.

So this is where you, dear reader, come in. Clearly, the simple fact that you are reading this blog means that you are…well, let’s call you exceptional, shall we? You may not be a baseball nut, but you are interested in science. Right now, you’re reading a post on a blog hosted by a fine magazine and financially supported by advertising and paid subscriptions. I want to get to know the science reader in 2010 better–how you get your science fix, where you expect to be getting it, what you hope for the future, and how writers may or may not be able to supply that fix and make a living at the same time.

While the science reader may be a bit mysterious to me, I know that readers of the Loom are willing to share their opinions. Last year a bunch of readers of the Loom took part in a survey about the cover of my latest book that ended up improving it greatly. So I’m going to impose on you again to participate in a slightly scientific, extremely idiosyncratic poll. While I have built this survey for selfish reasons, I hope they’ll be of interest to other people–both other writers and readers. Once the voting tapers off, I will write a post reviewing the results and giving you my homespun analysis. If you click the link below, a window will open up with my questions.

While Polldaddy does a great job of programming surveys and such, there well may be a few bugs. Please let me know if you find any. And don’t forget–use the comment thread if the survey isn’t describing your reading habits well. Many thanks. (And thanks in particular to Scott Sigler for some brainstorming.)

[Image by the incomparable Berenice Abbott, via Flickr]

Good news! My brother Ben has been appointed the new language columnist for the New York Times Magazine, taking over from the late William Safire. Expect a few more shamelessly fraternal links next week to various appearances associated with his new position.

I promise to lobby hard for science-related language columns, nefariously using my family back channels. It’s all for a good cause! Here’s an example of my subliminal big-brother mind-control–a conversation Ben and I had on Bloggingheads.tv

And here’s the press release the Times just issued:

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The New York Times Magazine announced today the appointment of linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer as the new “On Language” columnist. Mr. Zimmer succeeds William Safire who was the founding and regular columnist until his death last fall. The column is a fixture in The Times Magazine and features commentary on the many facets – from grammar to usage – of our language. “On Language” will appear bi-weekly beginning March 21.

“I look forward to continuing this fine tradition with my own take on how language shapes our past, present and future.”

In making the announcement, Gerald Marzorati, editor of the magazine said, “Ben brings both an academic’s deep knowledge and a maven’s eye, ear and passion to his commentary on the way Americans write and speak now. We welcome him to our roster and know our readers and ‘On Language’ devotees will greatly enjoy his columns.”

“It’s an honor and a privilege to be welcomed in the space that William Safire called home for thirty years,” Mr. Zimmer said. “I look forward to continuing this fine tradition with my own take on how language shapes our past, present and future.”

Mr. Zimmer is the executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com, online destinations for learners and lovers of language. He is the former editor of American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and is a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. He was previously a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. He is a 1992 graduate of Yale University with a B.A. in linguistics. He studied linguistic anthropology at the University of Chicago and is the recipient of many fellowships including ones from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program and the Ford Foundation. He has taught at UCLA, Kenyon College, and Rutgers University. He was a frequent guest contributor to the “On Language” column, and his work has also appeared in The Boston Globe, Slate and several language blogs. He is on the Executive Council of the American Dialect Society and a member of the Dictionary Society of North America.

Mr. Safire served as the “On Language” columnist from its inception in 1979 until his death in 2009. In his columns he parsed words, phrases and points of grammar and usage about our written and spoken language.

Nature’s Nicola Jones interviewed me about the art and business of writing books, and you can read it in this week’s issue. It’s part of a series of interviews about books that will be appearing this month.

Here at Fortress Zimmer, we’re gradually getting buried under the latest Snowmageddon, Blizzaster, SnOMG, or whatever you want to call it. The real spectacle so far has been the giddiness of local meteorologists on television and on weather blogs. My wife Grace reminded me of this excellent 1954 essay by E.B. White, in which he described listening to the radio about Hurrican Edna. Suddenly, I feel linked to history.

It became evident to me after a few fast rounds with the radio that the broadcasters had opened up on Edna awfully far in advance, before she had come out of her corner, and were spending themselves at a reckless rate. During the morning hours, they were having a tough time keeping Edna going at the velocity demanded of emergency broadcasting. I heard one fellow from, I think, Riverhead, Long Island, interviewing his out-of-doors man, who had been sent abroad in a car to look over conditions on the eastern end of the island.

“How would you say the roads were?” asked the tense voice.

“They were wet,” replied the reporter, who seemed to be in a sulk.

“Would you say the spray from the puddles was dashing up around the mudguards?” inquired the desperate radioman.

“Yeah,” replied the reporter.

It was one of those confused moments, emotionally, when the listener could not be quite sure what position radio was taking–for hurricanes or against them.

The more people yell about Facebook, Google, and Twitter, the more I think back to Mark Twain, and his 1880 sketch, “A Telephonic Conversation.”

I consider that a conversation by telephone—when you are simply sitting by and not taking any part in that conversation—is one of the solemnest curiosities of this modern life. Yesterday I was writing a deep article on a sublime philosophical subject while such a conversation was going on in the room. I notice that one can always write best when somebody is talking through a telephone close by. Well, the thing began in this way. A member of our household came in and asked me to have our house put into communication with Mr. Bagley’s, down town. I have observed, in many cities, that the gentle sex always shrink from calling up the central office themselves. I don’t know why, but they do. So I touched the bell, and this talk ensued:—

Central Office. [Gruffly.] Hello!

I. Is it the Central Office?

C. 0. Of course it is. What do you want ?

I. Will you switch me on to the Bagleys, please ?

C. 0. All right. Just keep your ear to the telephone.

Then I heard, k-look, k-look, k’look— klook-klook-klook-look-look! then a horrible “gritting” of teeth, and finally a piping female voice: Y-e-s? [Rising inflection.] Did you wish to speak to me?”

Without answering, I handed the telephone to the applicant, and sat down. Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world,—a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay. You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says. Well, I heard the following remarkable series of observations, all from the one tongue, and all shouted,—for you can’t ever persuade the gentle sex to speak gently into a telephone:—

Yes? Why, how did that happen?

Pause.

What did you say?

Pause.

Oh, no, I don’t think it was.

Pause.

No! Oh, no, I didn’t mean that. I meant, put it in while it is still boiling,—or just before it comes to a boil.

Pause.

WHAT?

Pause.

I turned it over with a back stitch on the selvage edge.

Pause.

Yes, I like that way, too; but I think it ’s better to baste it on with Valenciennes or bombazine, or something of that sort. It gives it such an air,—and attracts so much notice.

Pause.

It ’s forty-ninth Deuteronomy, sixty-fourth to ninety-seventh inclusive. I think we ought all to read it often.

Pause.

Perhaps so; I generally use a hair-pin…

You can read the rest of sketch online (horrors!) in the archives of the Atlantic.

[Image: Wikipedia]

Thanks to the UK Times for including The Loom among their top science blogs. It’s great company to be in, including fellow Discover blogs Bad Astronomy and the Intersection. I am just going to assume that the Times has not yet discovered Cosmic Variance, because its omission is a gross oversight.

I also think their description of the Loom as “authoritative science writing” may be a bit of an oversight, too (as flattering as it maybe). I mean, really: Duck porn? Tattoo parlors? Cockroach zombies? Other adjectives come to mind…

I first met the writer Rebecca Skloot about eight years ago. She had been working on a book for a couple years and running late. The idea was brilliant, though, so I hoped she’d be able to get it done before too long. Many scientists who study human cell biology use a special line of cells known as HeLa. It came from a woman named Henrietta Lacks, who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Skloot was writing about Lacks, her family, and the way her body became dispersed around the world.

When I would see Skloot again, I’d ask how the book was going. Still going. After a while, I stopped asking, because I know how irritating that question can get when the answer hasn’t budged for a while. When the book was done, it would be done.

A decade passed before the book was done. When Skloot sent me an advance copy of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a few months ago, I discovered why it had taken so long. She doggedly pursued the story, reconstructing a fifty-year saga intertwining the experience of a family struggling in Baltimore and the rise of modern biology. It was worth the wait, and I happily provided a blurb–

“Rebecca Skloot has written a marvelous book so original that it defies easy description. She traces the surreal journey that a tiny patch of cells belonging to Henrietta Lacks’s body took to the forefront of science. At the same time, she tells the story of Lacks and her family—wrestling the storms of the late twentieth century in America—with rich detail, wit, and humanity. The more we read, the more we realize that these are not two separate stories, but one tapestry. It’s part The Wire, part The Lives of the Cell, and all fascinating.”

Spending a decade working on her book, Skloot became a literary Rip Van Winkle. She started her book back before the rise of blogs, before the annihilation of book reviews in newspapers, before Kindles and Ipads. When Skloot started her book, the book tour was still a relatively common feature of the promotion of a new book. But Skloot discovered that book tours had pretty much evaporated by the time her book was coming out.

As I’ve published books of my own over the past decade, I’ve watched these same changes accrue, book by book. I’ve tried to take more control over the promotion of my work. I look for ways to spread the word about my books online, not just when they come out, but long afterwards. I am grateful to readers who spread the word further on their own blogs and tweets. But I have to say that publishing books gets more and more nerve-wracking as time goes on. Writing books is a slow process, but the publishing industry is changing fast. I feel as if I am at an archery contest. I take a long, long time to aim at a target, but by the time I let the arrow fly, someone’s moved the target away.

So I was curious to see how Skloot would contend with the challenge of publishing a book in 2010. Fortunately, she has comet it with great creativity and verve. One of the thing’s she’s done is crowd-source a book tour. She has sent out a call to everyone she knows for help in lining up talks across the US and beyond. I don’t quite know how the whole thing came together, but she is now starting a zillion-city, multi-month tour.

I offered my help for the Elm City leg of the tour, so let me just take a moment to send out a call to everyone in and around New Haven, Connecticut. Skloot will be talking on Monday, 2/8, at 4 pm at a Morse College Master’s Tea at Yale. Morse College is under renovation this year, so the students are staying at Yale’s Swing Space at 100 Tower Parkway (Map).

Skloot has also been lining up lots of other opportunities to talk about the book. Today (2/2) is the official date of publication, and the book is #11 on Amazon. That’s a great thing to see (even if Amazon’s on my blacklist at the moment because of their ongoing book-disappearing act). It may be too early to pass final judgment on the book’s commercial success, but I’m impressed so far.

I think Skloot’s experiences are worth studying, although they are no guarantee for every writer insane enough to write a book about science. For one thing, Skloot has an exceptional subject, which she has written about exceptionally well. What’s more, the odds are getting tougher for all authors. With more and more book titles in competition for the shrinking amount of time people spend reading books, a lot of disappointment is inevitable. Still, it’s a good idea for writers not to become recluses. Sure, spend time in the monastic solitude that books require, but then emerge and engage. You don’t have to tweet with Skloot’s hurricane-scale intensity, but do forge the relationships in which you can support fellow writers, and they can support you.

I’m just back from ScienceOnline 2010, a conference unlike anything I’ve been to before. I usually go to conferences where my role is the journalistic fly on the wall, gathering story leads from presentations and hallway chats. Sometimes I go to meetings of fellow science writers, where it’s mostly hard-core job talk (with sporadic wailing and gnashing of teeth). ScienceOnline was a strange merging, where scientists talk about how to blog from a research vessel in the middle of the Pacific and journalists talked about how to teach Hollywood producers about quantum physics.

It is futile for me to distill all the stuff I learned into a blog post. There’s just too much, from the inspiring to the mundane. For example, for good podcasting sound quality, why not sit in a closet with a towel draped over your head? I’m also spending much of today surfing around to new web sites I heard about. Allow me to give a shout-out to fellow Discover-ite Darlene Cavalier’s newly launched Science For Citizens. It’s like Amazon.com for all sorts of possibilities for doing cool citizen science (such as studying fireflies).

Fortunately, later this week you can watch just about all the sessions on this YouTube channel. In the meantime, some audience members have already started uploading their own recordings. Embedded below is my seven-minute spiel. I was part of a panel on “rebooting science journalism.” Moments before I stood up to dispense my wisdom, I decided that nothing summed up the situation today with science journalism better than duck sex. And, as I discovered, ScienceOnline is just the sort of place where the audience gets it.

[More on Uff da here]

Time for some livestreaming! At the end of this week I’ll be heading to North Carolina to Scienceonline 2010, a confab about all things scientific on the Tubes. I’m going to be talking in a session on Saturday morning at 10:15 am called “Rebooting Science Journalism In the Age of the Web” along with fellow rebooters Ed Yong,  John Timmer, and David Dobbs. You can watch live on UStream and Second Life. Later, our session (and all the others) will end up where everything ends up sooner or later: on YouTube. (More details here.)

Here’s the official description of our session:

Are blogs and mainstream media the bitter rivals that stereotypes would have us believe, or do the two sides have common threads and complementary strengths? How will the tools of the Internet change the art of reporting? How will the ongoing changes strengthen writing about science? How might these changes compromise or threaten writing about science? In a world where it’s possible for anyone to write about science, where does that leave professional science journalists? And who actually are these science journalists anyway?

If you want something to read in advance, Bora Zivkovic, one of the prime movers behind this conference, has kindly organized a veritable banquet of food for thought on this topic. If you’re interested in the experiences and opinions I bring to the discussion, read this. Basically, I find kvetching and yearning for some global system a waste of time. I am interested in people doing new things.

ScienceOnline has a strong tradition of openness, and so you’re welcome to visit the session wiki and help us formulate the discussion in advance. You can also start a discussion here, which I will track.

[Image: 2001 Internet Archive]