Friday, February 02, 2007
Print is dead. Long live the book.

My piece yesterday on BookStore prompted my good friend, colleague and author Jeff Gomez to remind me of the blog he's set up to support his forthcoming book, Print is Dead, which we are publishing in print and electronically later this year. Jeff is responsible for the electronic publishing and marketing of much of Holtzbrinck Publishers, our sister company in USA and he knows what he's talking about.

And another sister company has just launched a new service to showcase the fruits of Chinese science to the world. It is Nature China. This has been made possible by the generous sponsorship support of AstraZeneca and is another example of the development of multiple business models to support the dissemination of scholarly material.

Yesterday I was asked in the comments for more detail on our visitors. Here are two pretty pictures showing which websites feed this blog and which countries during January. I hope they are helpful.

#    |  Comments [9]  | 
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2/2/2007 10:09:39 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I don't mean to be mean, and I could well be wrong, but I'm not sure that your 'total visitors' stat quoted yesterday is not perhaps misleading.

Google Analytics will give you a total of *unique* visitors - i.e. completely different people - who have visited over whatever period of time you ask it to run. Your previous stats package will do the same. This is probably the most accurate, although not most impressive, number to consider. Unfortunately it is also the lowest!

I'm not certain you are doing this, but just totting up the number of monthly visitors and adding to an accumulated total may not be the figure you are meaning to calculate. Unless it is explicitly 'unique' visitors, such a calculation will include each visit made by every visitor; I probably visit 20+ times a day because my RSS feed is set up to check for updates every hour.

So, whilst the figure of nearly 500,000 visitors is very impressive, it is more likely to be the total number of visitor sessions recorded in that time. Because you have built up a loyal readership, it's likely that lots of those sessions are repeat visits by the same people...

Apologies for the geekiness of this comment, but as we all know publishing is prone to overstatement (international bestseller etc) as much as the web business ('hits').

What is very weird though is that your referrers - the sites driving traffic to yours - are almost identical to mine...

Peter Collingridge
2/2/2007 11:45:26 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Delighted to be referring yet more visitors to you Richard.
SUSAN HILL
2/2/2007 1:04:38 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Peter

You're absolutely right and I have tried always to use the word visit rather than visitor for that reason. And I think I once tried to estimate unique visitors from IP addresses etc.
richard charkin
2/2/2007 3:36:38 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I am not sure your geographic map is entirely accurate either, as I have visited from Norwegian IPs numerous times and I am not even getting a tiny dot on the map! :)
Mae Dagre
2/2/2007 9:07:52 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I'm shocked that the Google map hasn't picked up the Norwegian visits as Oslo is one of my favourite cities.
richard charkin
2/3/2007 1:49:47 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
That dot in Perth, Western Australia has to be me.
Simon Haynes
2/4/2007 7:15:26 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
And that dot on the UAE has to be me.
Sheila Hutton
2/5/2007 2:34:11 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
If that's a dot over Greece, then that's me :-)
Malcolm Mann
2/5/2007 3:34:25 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
That dot in London isn't me.
Mick