Diary of a Mad Editor

Macmillan chief, John Sargent has already demonstrated that he has no love of eBooks. But, according to statements made during a Q & A session at the Publishing Point in NYC in response to a query by blogger, Eric Hellman, Sargent is no fan of eBooks in libraries either:

"That is a very thorny problem", said Sargent. In the past, getting a book from libraries has had a tremendous amount of friction. You have to go to the library, maybe the book has been checked out and you have to come back another time. If it’s a popular book, maybe it gets lent ten times, there’s a lot of wear and tear, and the library will then put in a reorder. With ebooks, you sit on your couch in your living room and go to the library website, see if the library has it, maybe you check libraries in three other states. You get the book, read it, return it and get another, all without paying a thing. "It’s like Netflix, but you don’t pay for it. How is that a good model for us?"

"If there’s a model where the publisher gets a piece of the action every time the book is borrowed, that’s an interesting model."

Sargent’s comments are not surprising given his previous views on the subject of eBooks. (His hair looks a little thin in that picture, though. Can’t decide if its the haircut or maybe he needs to start taking vitamins for hair or something) Seriously, does Sargent even understand how libraries work? In order to borrow anything from a library, including eBooks, you must be a member of that library. You cannot access a library website 3 states away and borrow an eBook. I know at my local library, you not only need a library card, but a PIN number to access eBooks. I would imagine it’s like that at all libraries. Hellman, himself, points this out. I do think it’s quite clear at this point the Sargent is not really interested in new business models for publishing. His own words betray him.

Some years ago, when I first got online and began surfing the Internet, I discovered that there are at least two distant cousins who share my name. One is an artist and the other is a Dermatologist. I come from parents who both came from large families so I have a lot of cousins, even a few that are kind of famous like noted character actor Phillip Bosco and Top Chef, Katy Lee Joel (yes, I come from a long line of creative, smart people).

Anyway, back to the Dermatologist who shares my name. Well, Dr. John Erianne did, at some point, in the last year or so, change his ISP. So did I. Here’s where it gets weird:

Apparently, his old ISP is my new ISP and when I chose my new email, I chose his old one. So, as a result, I’ve been getting some of his email from people and places that haven’t been made aware that he doesn’t live at that Internet address anymore. I’m getting garbage from drug companies and museums and restaurants and travel sites and messages from people I do not know. Just today I got a message from a company selling eczema treatments and another from a Viagra distributor. I think it’s funny, actually. It would be even funnier, I suppose, if Dr. John had switched to my old ISP and is now using my old email address as well. Then, he’d be getting stuff from literary magazines and video game companies and probably invitations to poetry readings and things like that. I can’t help thinking there’s a story in this somewhere.

The other day, I was reading an article on some tech news website in which the author was lamenting the "inevitable" death of print magazines and the lack of quality control online (terribly ironic when one considers that he had written this article for an online publication). I am always suspect of an advocate of print publishing who makes a blanket statement about the poor editorial standards of online publishers. Not that there aren’t plenty of instances of lackadaisical editorial standards online (which we’ll get to shortly), but given that there are plenty of instances of lapses in both editing and fact-checking in offline publishing, it’s not at all fair to say that offline automatically equals quality and online automatically equals low quality. To prove his point, though, the author pointed to a well-known article farm. The term "article farm" is obviously a derogatory term. Simply put it’s a site that offers both free and custom-written articles about a variety of topics based on certain keywords. Like me, if you’ve been involved in online writing and publishing, you’ve probably written for these sites at some point and used some of these articles for your newsletters and websites.

Which brings me to a site called articlealley.com. Just this morning I was asked to review this site. It is, by definition, an article farm that employs many, many writers to produce both free and custom articles. There are a number of custom-writing packages offered ranging from $40 for a single article to $23 per article for bulk purchases. I couldn’t help think about the previously mentioned article while I browsed this site. Although this company promises high standards of quality control for it’s custom articles, I am assuming that the same writers creating this content are the same guys and gals writing the free articles available on the site. If so, let the buyer beware. Having read a number of the free articles on the site, I have to tell you that the quality control is non-existent. The information contained in the article is generic and unoriginal. Copyediting and proofreading are likewise non-existent. Many of the articles don’t even seem to be written by writers who speak and write English as a primary language. One such article, “Kanye West Lady Gaga A True Rock Performer” is the perfect example of what I’m talking about. That gives me pause.  Read that article and tell me honestly you’d pay Azeem to write for your website. Because if you are paying $40 for an article that you have to edit and rewrite yourself, you’d be better off  writing it yourself to begin with and saving your money.

I know of several of these so-called article farms that actually do demand a certain standard from their writers and do take some time with an article and demand rewrites prior to approving an article. Unfortunately, many don’t and that makes everyone who publishes online look bad. My hope is that articlealley.com has higher standards for its custom articles and will be more discerning in the future when it comes to their free articles. Because when it comes to generating traffic and ad revenues, quality is much more important to the equation than keyword density.