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April 2006

Messages on the Screen

By Jack El-Hai

We all receive way too much e-mail. Probably like you, I get more than I can read, respond to, or efficiently file away. Since I became ASJA's president, I have to admit, my e-mail burden has increased greatly, and sadly I can no longer take pride in the proficiency with which I handle the digital avalanche.

Many of the messages that reach me, simply because I am the president, come from the ASJA Web site, where there is a form anyone can use to get my attention. As my predecessors in this position can attest, the content of these communications range from the profound to the ridiculous. Last summer, when we were embroiled in the controversy surrounding our First Amendment Committee's recommendation of reporter Judith Miller for the prestigious Conscience in Media Award, the public's interest in contacting me spiked.

You'll remember that the ASJA board voted not to give the award to Miller. Once the news of that decision went public, I heard from dozens of strangers by e-mail. Most of these messages praised the board's vote, although some imputed to us political motives that we did not possess. Many of the remaining messages accused me personally of working to spread Marxism, fascism, and a variety of other ideologies that I have yet to look up in the dictionary.

More recently, I have been receiving messages for the president from correspondents who say they are destitute writers in Egypt, the Philippines, the Ivory Coast, and a few other nations. They have so much they want to write, they declare, but they lack the financial means to buy the typewriter, or the desk, or the iPod that will help launch their literary career. Can I send them some money? At first I referred these people to our Writers Emergency Assistance Fund, but I stopped when I noticed that many of their messages are identical except for a few details.

Once in a while, though, a gem drops through the electronic transom. A message recently arrived alerting ASJA of some new features in the book sales pages of amazon.com. One such addition is called Concordance, available for certain books. It lists the hundred words that appear most frequently in a book (omitting "the," "and," etc.). Then, if you click one of those words, you'll get a list of the pages of the book containing that word, plus links to the scanned images of those pages. The writer of this e-mail pointed out that if you've written a book about, say, volcanoes, and if you click the word "volcano" in the concordance, you will get links to scans of nearly every page in the book. Viewers cannot download these images, but they can save the pages as favorites in their web browser and return to them anytime they want. The correspondent asked: "Won't this accessibility of so many scanned pages inhibit book sales?"

That's a good question. I looked at the amazon.com page for one of my own books and found that clicking the most frequently used word in the concordance led to a listing of scans of 347 pages. (I also learned, to my dismay, that I had used the word "although" in 105 pages of the book.)

Another amazon.com feature, which the bookseller presents in tandem with Concordance, is Text Stats. A display measures on a metered scale the book's readability, complexity, and other attributes. To quantify readability, for instance, amazon.com runs the text through three measuring scales: the Fog, Flesch, and Flesch-Kinkaid indexes. By all three measures, my book is "harder" to read than others. Will that make some potential buyers turn away?

Are these features worth protesting? Will they cut into book sales? And if so, why would amazon.com add features that reduce book sales? I don't know the answers. I do know, however, that amazon.com has been unresponsive in the past to ASJA's concern about the company's policy of selling used books on the same sales pages as new books.

If you know the answers, or if you don't feel discouraged from e-mailing your thoughts to me after reading this column, please get in touch.

Jack El-Hai of Minneapolis, Minnesota, is president of ASJA. E-mail the president through www.asja.org/contact.php.