Blogiversary Week – The Agony of A Bad Headline

It’s anniversary week here on the Jacke blog! That’s right, one whole year of bringing you writers laughing, objects, small-press shoutouts, and whatever the heck else I’ve been up to in these 300 or so posts.

So how to celebrate? I thought I’d run through the archives and feature the five most popular posts of the year. And the five least popular. (I’m going by straight hit counts here, not counting likes or comments or emails or reblogs or anything like that.)

Without further ado:

Jacke Wilson’s Anniversary Celebration

Least Popular Posts of 2013-2014

#5 

The Case for CodeX

 

Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich argue for the need to replace the word “ebook”:

We need to embrace digital reading as its own medium, not just a book under glass. That means imagining a new language for reading as an experience, starting with a new word to use instead of book.

Their solution comes from “a crack team of novelists, journalists, and publishers conducting a gonzo experiment in the future of publishing”…

You hated this one. You really hated it. Or at least ignored it.

At first I was surprised to see this one here. It has a nice picture? But then I realized the problem with the headline. Who the heck knows what CodeX is? In fact, it’s a name made up by guys who want to rename the ebook. And in the end, I basically say I think it’s an “interesting” idea (my recollection is that I never figured out why “ebook” isn’t far superior). So I used in the headline a made-up word that a) nobody knows, and b) I myself think is probably unnecessary.

“Renaming the Ebook” probably would have gotten more attention. But alas, the post had the headline it did and got the attention it deserved. Poor little post! Drifting out there all on its own.

I had a lot of posts like this in the early days. I think I was so immersed in ebooks then, as I was putting my own out, that the world of publishing and formatting and handcrafting and DIYing and all of that was endlessly fascinating to me. But not to you!

Congratulations, The Case for CodeX! You made it onto this year’s list of least-popular posts at #5. That’s your last hurrah. No go get back in your dark little corner until I call for you again (which might be never)!

8 thoughts on “Blogiversary Week – The Agony of A Bad Headline

  1. I do think that CodeX would have been a dreadful choice of word as ‘codex’ is already a long established word for a bound book. It would have been a massive cultural travesty to confuse the two concepts in the minds of the public forever.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. CodeX could work in spoken English, though, if the capital X were pronounced like “-ech.” Even better, though, would be to re-purpose an existing word that means more or less the same thing as “book,” but that is rarely used anymore. I suggest “book.”

      Like

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