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By dave, on November 11th, 2010%
For some reason I don’t quite understand, Google has basically shut off this site in its index. I can even tell the day it happened, last week between November 3rd and 4th. Via searches, we were getting something like 200-300 hits a day and just like that, it dropped to 30. Yesterday it was 12.
I’m not sure exactly why this happened or how to rectify it. One of my fears is that this site appears spammish to search engines or to first time visitors. It’s true that there is a certain pattern to the posts, but also true that when you post links to books a dozen times a day there are only so many ways to say it. I have automation to gather up the book links and to scour the TV guide information. In same cases it has to scrape the websites as they don’t publish to the TV guide sources. (This is also why there is so little CNN and Fox News programming on here – it’s very hard to get that information in an automated way.)
I try to write at least a unique blurb for the guests and their book each time, specifically to make this site seem less mechanical. It appears that isn’t enough for Google . At this point, that puts the site at a crossroads. If I’m getting penalized and will remain like this indefinitely, then I can’t really justify dumping 1-3 hours of my scant free time every day into making these posts and maintaining the site. On the other hand, whatever is happening with Google isn’t going to be made any better by failing to put new posts up. I’m just kind of stuck.
For a week or two, I’m going to reduce the comprehensivity of my posts. I’ll do a few each day but I’m backing off of my stated goal to publish every single author TV appearance I can find. I’ll evaluate where things end up from there. If anyone has any suggestions on how to figure out what happened and/or fix the situation, please leave a comment on this post. Thanks.
By dave, on September 26th, 2010%
For the week of September 26th to October 2nd, this blog and its proprietor are on vacation in a place with no internet. I’ve scheduled ahead some of the posts from the next week’s television listing data. Normally I go back through every day and reconcile the posts with what shows actually aired and what guests were actually on (sometimes they get bumped or cancel last minute.) I also add in the video embeds if they exist. That will happen seldom or not at all during the next week, but next week I should be able to go back and catch up on all that.
There is some good reading in the posts I’ve scheduled. While I’m on vacation I hope to work through my own to-be-read pile on my Kindle so I’ll come back fresh, relaxed, and in the market for some new books I saw the author talking about on TV. May we all be so lucky!
By dave, on September 8th, 2010%
As we turn the corner from the summer into the fall TV season, a lot of shows that have been in repeats are coming back with new episodes. As well, the long Labor Day weekend threw a little bit of a monkey wrench in the EBFTV pipeline. For the next few days I’ll be playing catch up. I prefer to work ahead on these shows, writing the posts in advance from the TV guide data and then sometimes reconciling them with reality when an announced guest is bumped or cancels or whatever. With the extra load of new shows and new books coming out, I’m fighting to not lose ground.
I’m always trying to improve the data gathering processes so I can get closer and closer to blogging every ebook on every national TV show. I’m not there yet but I’ll keep trying. For a few days the updates will be less timely than they have been, but it will get caught up. Thanks for your patience and I welcome all feedback about how this project can be of better use to the ebook reading community.
By dave, on August 17th, 2010%
Via the Twitter account, I have fielded questions as to whether this site will ever be Kobo bookstore friendly. The goal is to be comprehensive in the ebook field, so I want to support as many stores as possible. As of today, I have figured out how to do the Kobo links. As an experiment, I will go back and add Kobo links to a couple of the recent posts where the book is available there. Going forward, any book that exists in the US Kobo bookstore should get a link in the post. I get a dump of the entirety of the Kobo catalog, and it does seem that it doesn’t have future books so there may be a week or two lag between a book getting published and this site having links to it. I’m still feeling my way around it.
At this point, we are supporting Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, Powells.com ebooks (Adobe DRM on EPUB) and Kobo. That seems like it should cover practically anyone with a dedicated e-reader. If you have one and use a store not on this list, leave a comment and let me know about it and I’ll see if I can add support to that one too.
By dave, on August 4th, 2010%
As an aside from what we normally cover here, today I downloaded the first two Kindle API games, Every Word and Shuffled Row. I tried them both and found Every Word not so terribly much fun but Shuffled Row tremendously addictive. It’s basically playing Scrabble minus placing the word on the board and with a clock running that makes tiles disappear if you play too slow. Thus far, my personal best word is when I was able to play “azimuth” for over 100 points. At least at the moment, both games are free to download so check them out. At least in the short term until the novelty wears off, this might mean terrible things for my reading.
By dave, on June 19th, 2010%
This new project is now a few weeks old. I am still wildly open to feedback that anyone might have about how this site is working. I’m still feeling my way around the format and the absolute minutiae of how to do this. I spent a lot of time trying to decide if the post titles should be “June 17, 2010″ or “June 17th, 2010″ or “6/17/2010″, etc. It seems like a trivial and non-important type of thing but I’m trying to be consistent as possible with all aspects of the formatting and posts.
Since I began I’ve been adding links to Nook books where I can find them. Amazon makes this much easier, but I’m taking the extra effort to find the Nook links. I remain open to suggestions about shows covered and how the categories are broken down. I am adding more and more shows and I’m not sure the current set of categories are the best ones. I’m about to make a big CSPAN Book TV post for this weekend and I’m not sure if the one huge post works best. This is all still a work in progress and for those folks finding this site of use, please let me know how to make it more useful to you.
By dave, on June 12th, 2010%
I’ve substituted a new, more appropriate header image for the flowers and butterflies that came with the WordPress theme. All of these images that make up the collage came from Flickr via the Creative Commons search. In accordance with the license, I’m giving all of these images the necessary attribution. From left to right, the pictures are:
Sony Reader, Nook, Kindle image from librarianbyday
Flatscreen TV image from rockinfree
Kobo image from jivedanson
Flatscreen TV image from editor
Three Kindle image from inju
Vintage TV image from videocrab
Kindle and Sony Reader image from jblyberg
Vintage TV image from phrenzee
Image of Nook and Kindle by samuraislice
By dave, on June 2nd, 2010%
Hello, world! This is a brand new blog that came out of conversations about the Kindle specifically and ebooks in general that I had at Balticon 44 in Hunt Valley MD. I discussed my dynamic of hearing about a book on TV, checking if it was available in the Kindle store and either buying it right there or with 99.99% probability never thinking about the book again. Someone suggested “Why not create a website to track ebooks that appear on TV?” Why not indeed? That was Sunday, it’s Wednesday and the site is live.
There may be some growing pains and the site design and functionality will get tweaked for some time. Here are the basic ground rules as I see it: if one of the major national TV shows mentions a book that has an ebook version that was published within the last 6 months, I will blog about it here and post a link. This isn’t super hard and fast, but that’s the rule of thumb. I’m generally not covering every single book and I may not be able to watch every second of every show, so if a celebrity with a book out doesn’t actually mention it on the show, I may link to the books anyway. These will all be affiliate links. Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is purely altruistic, I do have an angle and I’m being up front about it. I’ve got an affiliate application in to B&N for the Nook store, and when that comes through I’ll begin linking all available
You’ll begin to see over time which shows I cover. The original inspiration for this came from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report but I’m also planning on covering all the national daytime and nighttime talk shows, PBS interview show, etc. If there are particular programs I’m not covering that you’d like to see added to the list, drop me a line at dave@ebooksfromtv.com .
For now, please feel free to leave comments or email feedback. This is a work in progress and will be for some time, but why let perfection be the enemy of progress? Put another way, “close enough for rock and roll! Let’s hit it!”
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