I was pleased with how Chris explained this choice, given that my book does not talk about SEO directly. He says:

“With our focus on search marketing at Search Engine Land, it’s unusual for me to review an academic textbook, but Search User Interfaces is an unusual book—and I mean that as high praise.”

He goes on to explain what he found valuable about the book in more detail. I am really glad to know the book is of value to practitioners as well as academics.

The short answer to how is that I chose Cambridge University Press in part because I saw they had allowed Chris, Prabhakar, and Hinrich to put their book Introduction to Information Retrieval freely online before publishing it in dead tree form.

CUP hasn’t done this with all that many books, but so far it seems to lead to more sales. So let’s hope that happens with Search User Interfaces as well.

The second reason I chose CUP is they have published the bulk of the books related to human information seeking, including Gary Marchionini’s Information Seeking in Electronic Environments and Rik Belew’s Finding Out About. (BTW, I just noticed you can search these books and see hits in context at the CUP website!)

As for why, I’ve long been of the mindset that my writing has value so far as it has impact, and the best way to do that is to maximize how many people read it. Along with many others, I’ve long been an advocate of freeing the content of academic journals, since the knowledge produced by research should be dispersed as widely as possible, and in my field at least the academics to all the writing, reviewing, and editing. Not to mention that the government pays for a large chunk of the research being reported. People used to laugh at me when I started saying this, but thanks to the hard work of lots of other people, that ship in the slow process of turning.

But I suspect my primary reason for putting the book up free is laziness: now when I’m having a conversation about a search interfaces topic I can just say “if you want to know more, go to section S.X of my book.” It’s like a mental subroutine call.

(NB: Much of this material appears in a response I made to a comment from Will Fitzgerald.)

The answer is that I spent a lot of time on the conversion, because there wasn’t any out-of-the-box solution that I could live with.

You may ask: why html rather than just making pdfs of each chapter? I feel that html is often more readable online, although sites like scribd and slideshare are doing a nice job of embedding pdf files. Also, I wanted to make it easy to navigate from the mentions of figures to the figures themselves, to pop up the citations, and to link the citations to places to find them in the literature. And oh yes, I needed to provide search over the book!

So on to the conversion. I wrote the manuscript in latex. There is a program called latex2html that automatically does the conversion, but the version installed on my system at least is from 2002 and doesn’t generate modern html. Therefore, I wrote special purpose code to convert the latex to html (although I did use bibtex2html for the references).

In retrospect, because of all the cross-referencing (in figures, tables, citations, etc), I probably should instead have started with the output of latex2html on everything and then modified the output.

I put a lot of thought into whether to break the text up into chapters or sections, because I didn’t want each page too long but I wanted the context retained. I think chapters works best in the end, and it helps a lot with the cross-referencing. I broke the text up into sections for the search tool, though.

I was a bit concerned about having comments appear on the chapters, as that text is frozen and should always look the same, so I decided on a link from the chapter pages to comment pages on the blog. I am also going to make a link from each chapter page to a list of relevant blog posts as they appear. This way, again, the chapters will remain pretty much static while linking in a straight-forward way to new content and corrections (in the unlikely event there are any … ha ha ha). We’ll see if that works or not. I did make a category for each chapter. I could also do it for sections but I think that is overkill.

I also wanted to use some of the whizzy features that javascript makes easy to employ now. For years I’ve avoided javascript in my interfaces because so many browsers were incompatible (and let’s face it, so I didn’t have to learn how to code with it) but now most browsers can handle it and there are terrific libraries like jQuery. I was careful to make sure that anything javascript was duplicated in title tags, or else irrelevant, so that screen readers don’t miss anything important.

So I have the pop-ups for the citations, implemented using qTip, and the cool figure reveals, implemented in slimbox2. I did have a problem with one script clobbering another, but that will be described in a subsequent post on implementing the search function.

I know that if I were reading this book I would want to have links to the actual articles that the citations refer to. But everyone has different access rights to journals and so on, so I wrote a hack to make the search over Google scholar; in the script, for each reference, I grab the text between the start of the cite and the journal name (the authors and title) and stick that in a query to scholar. It sometimes doesn’t work right when I grab too much text or weird characters get in there.

The graphic design took a long time. I wanted to make it readable, and not too website-ish. I also wanted to incorporate the image from the cover of the book. So although I don’t think the design is as cool and cutting-edge as some sites are, I do think it is aesthetically pleasing and leads to a good online-reading experience. If you think otherwise, please let me know how to improve it!

Also, I realize I need to improve the main landing page and integrate blog posts into it. That is future work. Suggestions welcome on that, though.