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Six ways to help TeleRead
July 6, 2008 | 12:10 pm
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By David Rothman
TeleRead may be the world’s longest-running English-language site offering e-book news and views.
It often shows up on Techmeme and the New York Times’ Blogrunner service and is blogrolled by such major publishers as Simon & Schuster.
We’re particularly interested in digital divide issues and in e-book standards—which in turn are good for people with vision problems and other challenges. For years, we’ve advocated well-stocked national digital systems.
Here are six ways you can help:
1. Write for us or at least share news tips. You don’t have to agree with us—we’re after a broad range of well-informed perspectives on topics ranging from the Amazon Kindle to copyright. Just be factual, interesting and clear. As for news tips, we’ll credit you by name and, if you want, point to your site. Here’s contact information.
2. Link to us and otherwise spread the word about the TeleBlog, directly or via Digg, Slashdot or other sites. Click on the headline links in our posts to see the Digg icon and the rest.
3. Share business ideas, as Michael Harris recently did. As Michael points out, we want sponsors or others who will not compromise TeleRead’s independence. Would you feel uncomfortable about embedded merchandising links to books and other items we genuinely feel might interest you? By the way, Michael believes that many of our visitors aren’t seeing ads because of blocking software. True?
4. Use the TeleRead site to buy what you’d normally purchase from Amazon or Powell’s. Look in the two sidebars, to the right, for search forms. You can even buy a Kindle directly by clicking on the display ad we’re running. Recently two Kindles moved on the same day. Since then—no more. Oh, the mysteries of life and commerce. I personally dislike the Kindle’s DRM and some other aspects, but many of our readers love the machine, and we’ll continue running both the pros and the cons, along with tips.
5. Advertise your book or book-related product or service on TeleRead if it makes business sense to you. Here are the kinds of books that members of the TeleRead community go for.
6. Volunteer technical services or copy editing.
TeleRead in one form or another is not going away, not with the hundreds of thousands of unique visitors we’re drawing each year. But in the interest of long-term sustainability, Robert Nagle and I do intend to make changes, and we’ll welcome your thoughts.
Image: CC-licensed photo from Hulagway.
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Comments:
Adblocking varies by both browser and user. In Opera, I only see the NAEB and Moon Books ads, and only then because I haven’t explicitly blocked them, since I read the page at a zoom level that pushes the two less-useful right-side columns off-screen. The fanboy blocker I use also takes out other clutter from the page. In my backup browser, Firefox 3, Adblock Plus defaults to also allowing Feedbooks and Powell’s through as ads, but again, only because I haven’t bothered to specifically block them, because I only use FF for badly-written sites. I have to toggle Adblock off to see the three other ads.
But I know about adblocking, both how to use and how to disable it for false positives. My three less computer-savvy sibs, whose systems I’m responsible for when things go wrong, don’t use adblocking, because it’s easier for me to let them see ads than to have them complain about not being able to click the button they’re supposed to, but can’t because an adblocker mistook it for an ad and hid it from them. I consider it an accomplishment that I got them to use Firefox over IE. (Opera is better, IMO, but it does things differently enough that non-techy users can have problems with it, and some poorly written sites use incorrect browser sniffing, which lack of knowledge takes a bit of knowledge to work around.)
So, do you think your audience knows a bit about how their browsers work, or only knows what buttons to usually press? The former will likely block most ads, the latter won’t.
Big thanks, Dhamu. Default Firefox doesn’t seem to block any of the ads. While the TeleBlog’s audience is more technical than most Net users, I suspect most aren’t doing anything special with blockers. Sure would love to figure out ways of raising the click-through rates. Further ideas welcome from you and others! – David
I don’t know if it’s so much that people are using an ad blocker as people are probably just using a feed reader (like google reader that I use)…in fact the only time I ever click over to the actual site is to make comments like this…and so I never really see any of your ads or widgets, I just consume all the wonderful content and skip all the fat.
If you want your click-throughs to improve, you’ll probably have to figure out ways to get the ads worked directly into the post content…baking affiliate links directly into the content should also help.