Comments on: Early Ink

By: Toni McGee Causey

Toni McGee Causey — Sat, 26 May 2007 05:29:09 +0000

“I didn’t know that was out already – I have to go home early, buy it, and ignore the family for the next 4-5 hours,” when really I won’t get to read it for months.

Yeah, this is exactly what I wrote to Mollie saying — it was cruel to be taunted with such a great chapter and then I could not go get the book already. Pre-orders should hit the roof with that chapter out there, though.

By: Susanna Hugo

Susanna Hugo — Fri, 25 May 2007 21:21:02 +0000

Okay – my two cents. I’m totally your audience for this site. I love the idea. I buy hardcovers the day they come out for all my favorite authors. My house will sink under their weight at some point, but it will be worth it. I really don’t like that the date that shows on the main page next to the entries is the date of the post, not the release date. What I would really love would be a calendar that shows me authors & titles on the release date – then I could quit haunting the 20 some sites I now check periodically and organizing the
info on my calendar program. In fact, if I’m dreaming big, I’d like to be able to sign up to get an email from the site for any author I’ve checked as being interested in (and not get spammed from Amazon on crap I’m not interested in at all).
But that might be going too far. Just don’t taunt me with a 5/23 date on Agnes and the Hitman, have me think
“I didn’t know that was out already – I have to go home early, buy it, and ignore the family for the next 4-5 hours,” when really I won’t get to read it for months.

By: Amanda

Amanda — Fri, 25 May 2007 15:38:54 +0000

In one write up they describe someone as a “rouge CIA agent” which I am assuming is a CIA agent working at the Clinque counter down at Macys.

They ought to have a proofreader go over the site.

Other than that, it’s a nice site and useful. I enjoyed the first chapters of all the books.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Thu, 24 May 2007 02:34:45 +0000

Golly gee, thanks you guys! I really do love the site though. Great job Mollie! A few kinks that others have already mentioned, but nothing that can’t be fixed.

By: sara c

sara c — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:19:24 +0000

I looked at this a few days ago but wanted to let it roll around in my head for a while before I commented. Several people asked where the reviews came from and I’m with them–wanting to who is talking to me. So maybe that should be noted clearly. If you read review in Publishers Weekly or Hornbook, each review has the reviewer’s initials and you know they come from paid staff, for example.

I liked that you could look at one book’s review and then click on links to find other books on similar topics.

Will the site be limited to popular fiction or will it eventually include nonfiction and children’s books? And what about books with crossover interest, like Harry Potter? Not that we need more HP hype, but you see what I’m saying.

Overall, it’s beautiful. Loved the staff “photos”.

By: JulieB

JulieB — Wed, 23 May 2007 13:57:08 +0000

Richa, Sheesh — 5 points for spelling? I’m probably in the hole by now. . .
I did like the other example, although it was still a bit small for me. OTOH, I know my prescription is off in my new glasses, so now that I think about it, that may be my problem.
Jamie, don’t worry, we all think you’re groovy.

By: Jude

Jude — Wed, 23 May 2007 04:01:07 +0000

Clean and succinct. I like the cross-referencing, too. Very nice.

On a similar topic, I like the preview for comments on this page. So very fun to watch my words appear underneath my post. It’s almost hypnotic.

By: monique

monique — Wed, 23 May 2007 01:20:28 +0000

Looks nice – but who is doing the reviews? Everyday folk or paid reviewers?

How much promotion is actually going to be in here? Lots of folks are already on their favorite authors websites/mailing lists. And alot of this info is available from your local bookstore – online or brick and from your library…

By: Jenny

Jenny — Wed, 23 May 2007 01:17:10 +0000

We love your enthusiasm, Marcia.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Wed, 23 May 2007 00:55:50 +0000

EEWWWWWW!!!! Did I really just say SUPER EASY???? Who am I, Marcia Freakin’ Brady?

By: Jamie

Jamie — Wed, 23 May 2007 00:54:48 +0000

I liked it quite a bit. I really liked the idea that readers can leave comments about the books. It’s clean and easy to read, as well as super easy to navigate.

By: Richa

Richa — Tue, 22 May 2007 23:36:01 +0000

Oh, minus 5 points for me for misspelling “readability”. I do humbly apologize.

By: Richa

Richa — Tue, 22 May 2007 23:33:58 +0000

@JulieB: I think my problem with the Poynter site in general is that they use like 5 different fonts on a page: Arial or some sans-serif derivative, Verdana, Trebuchet, Times or some serif derivative, and who knows what else. What’s more, the various sidebars (Three! Who needs three sidebars?) use a hodgepodge of font sizes and colors, with little discernible organization. All in all, the whole site is confusing and too busy; the eye doesn’t know where to go. They may know what they’re talking about when it comes to readibility, but good UI designers they are not.

When it comes to using fonts on websites, I’m a firm believer that less is more. Pick one or two and stick to ‘em.

All that said, I think you can design a good site using Trebuchet (here’s one). Notice the clean lines, uncluttered page, and ease of navigation and reading. But I agree with you that under a certain font size, Trebuchet becomes very hard to read and a bit too “busy”.

By: JulieB

JulieB — Tue, 22 May 2007 16:40:21 +0000

Well, I like fonts, so I have to chime in. I like the font in the logo and as headers. I also like the color combinations. I have to agree that in the text underneath the books it’s a bit too small, especially when it’s in blue for the hyperlinks. But I do not like the Trebuchet font in the Poynter article. I think the whole Poynter article looks awful, the headers are clunky and the text looks too “busy” to read. In fact, I only skimmed it the first time, because I thought it looked like too much effort to bother with. The whole article looked “icky” to me. How’s that for a professional opinion?
I know that the size is also probably a factor of getting more books on the page, so I know Molly will probbly be finessing that as it develops.
I also agree with Raina on the excerpt width, something I hadn’t looked at before. It is a bit wide, although it doesn’t seem wider than the excepts on Jenny’s site, so maybe the fact that those pages used Georgia had something to do with the ease of reading.
I see that we can click on the book image and go to the related book — Yay! I could not make out “The Cleaner” as the title, so I never would have found it otherwise. The same is true for “Hundred Years.”
Finally, I have to agree with the other sentiments that the farther we can see into the future, the better. It’s like a little crystal ball. . .

By: J.

J. — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:45:52 +0000

Excellent!!!

By: Richa

Richa — Tue, 22 May 2007 03:10:26 +0000

My theory on this is that the problem was with me having links (to some reference articles) in my comment, and Akismet has a threshold for how many links can be in a comment (evidently, no more than one) before it gets sent to the spam comments list. As for which ones to keep, please keep the first one that you let through: the one with the timestamp of 7:17 PM. You’re free to delete the later ones that I was able to post in two parts, with timestamps of 7:19 and 7:25 PM, respectively, as well as the other ones caught in the spam net.

Thanks, and sorry for all the fuss!

By: Jenny

Jenny — Tue, 22 May 2007 02:54:18 +0000

Sorry, Richa, you got caught in the spam filter and I have NO idea why. I despammed the one that had the most text in it, but I still have the others if you want those up, too. I think they’re duplicates but I’m not trashing them until you say so.

I love Akismet but every now and then . . .

By: Jennifer Talty

Jennifer Talty — Tue, 22 May 2007 01:17:05 +0000

Hi Jenny,

I really enjoyed the site. It’s very easy to navigate, which is key. Nothing negative jumped out at me.

Awesome job.

By: Richa

Richa — Tue, 22 May 2007 00:17:36 +0000

Things I love about this site:
- The idea. As an almost manic book buyer, and a picky reader to boot, having easy access to book excerpts is worth its weight in gold to me. Being able to go to one site to find this stuff: priceless.
-The clean interface. I do this stuff for a living, so I’ve got pretty strong opinions on good site/UI design. earlyink is well laid out and easy to browse, which is rarer than you’d think.

Things I’d like to see improved (brace yourself; some of this is kind of technical):
- The font choice. This is a site, like newspapers and blogs, that relies primarily on printed text as a content-delivery mechanism, and which will be read on a screen and not printed out. The upshot of this is that an easily-readable screen font should be chosen—a font with a tall x-height, a wide punch-width, and wide letter-spacing. And taking into consideration what the average user is likely to have, this leaves you with basically three choices: Georgia in the serif family, and Verdana and Trebuchet in the sans-serif family; a limiting choice, to be sure, but readability is paramount. It looks like Arial or something like it is being used on the site now, and I personally find that the letters are too narrow in Arial. I would find it easier to read were Verdana or Trebuchet used as the primary text font of the site.
- Font size. I’d like to see the size of the text in the long passages be bumped up to 11 or 12pt. Save the 9 and 10pt fonts for the sidebars.
- Line spacing. I think right now it’s a little too large. Increasing the font size a bit will help to mitigate this, but maybe the line-height can be reduced to around 1.2 or 1.3?
- Don’t justify. While justifying the text makes for clean lines in terms of page layout, justified text is much harder to read (see #2 on the page) than left-aligned text. To preserve the clean lines of the layout if left-alignment is used, perhaps some light-grey vertical rules could be used as section separators ?
- Make the content of the excerpt page narrower. If the text block is very wide, the reader is more likely to lose her place. My personal opinion is that long blocks of text should never be more than 500px wide. The width used on the overview page is just about perfect, IMO.

Hope this helps.

By: Richa

Richa — Tue, 22 May 2007 00:15:12 +0000

Kieran: you probably have your display settings on your second computer set to override any site’s default fonts.