I'm very excited to announce that Diane Cerra has joined our strategic advisory board. Diane is a publishing industry insider who's been wonderfully generous with her advice for our fledgling publishing house. It seemed silly not to formalize the relationship!

Diane serves as executive editor at Morgan & Claypool Publishers, where she publishes the HCI Series and other computer and information science-related series in the Synthesis Digital Library. She is former publisher at Morgan Kaufmann, where she founded and published books in the MK Series in Interactive Technologies, among other classic texts and references.

Welcome Diane; we're glad to have you!

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 05:42 PM | Comments (1)

An interesting suggestion came up yesterday in our Satisfaction customer service forum. Aileenf suggested selling digital editions of our books that are designed to be printed.

So far we've designed and tested our digital editions with the goal of supporting on-screen use. That means a large typeface for readability, no need to scroll within pages, and a bunch more screen-friendly features. Not surprisingly, it also means very long page counts. And though we've tried to make our digital design printer-friendly by removing toner-thirsty colored backgrounds, it's still no fun to print 400+ pages.

So, we could expand our offerings to include digital editions optimized for laser printing. This would certainly help our overseas customers who are concerned about shipping costs. But many questions remain:

• Would we cannibalize our paperback sales? (We've already spent lots of money printing thousands of copies of our beautiful four-color interior nicely-bound paperbacks.)
• How many pages to print is too many? Our two paperbacks run between 250-300 pages; is that so much better than printing 400 pages?
• Would it make sense to offer a printable PDF only in combination with an on-screen PDF? While offering options is a good idea, three or four variations of a product, as well as combinations, can quickly become overwhelming to customers (and difficult to develop from an interaction design perspective).

Those are a few of the questions we'll be mulling over; any feedback, suggestions or (egads) even more questions would be greatly appreciated.

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 01:18 PM | Comments (8)

We've just updated our author events page, and it's exciting to see where Rosenfeld Media's authors will be appearing during the next six months. Destinations include Australia, China, Canada, New Zealand, and all over the USA. Here are just a few of the newly-added events:

• Kevin Brooks' "Storytelling for User Experience Design" talk at UX Week 2008 in San Francisco
• Donna (Maurer) Spencer's "Designing Interaction in the Age of Ajax" workshop at Web Directions South in Sydney
• Luke Wroblewski's "Web Form Design Best Practices" workshop at the Involution Master Academy in Sunnyvale, California

We update our author event calendar every month or two.

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 01:04 PM | Comments (0)

A lot of thought went into the designs of both our paperback and digital editions. Not to mention the testing of those designs. Want to know how we did it? Read this brief interview in UXmatters magazine by Joshua Kaufman.

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 01:04 AM | Comments (0)

We're excited to announce that Luke Wroblewski's long-awaited book, "Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks," is now available! And with hundreds of sales since our soft launch earlier today, apparently we're not the only ones!

When you buy directly from Rosenfeld Media, you'll pay US$36 for the paperback and digital editions, US$19 for digital only. (Compare with US$36 for paperback only at Amazon.)

The paperback is 244 pages with high quality paper stock, a sewn binding, and a full color interior. At 6"x9", it'll be easy to stuff in your carry-on bag for reading during the flight to your next client meeting. And of course, the digital edition (373 pages) is pretty easy to take along too; in fact, it's been designed, tested, and optimized for on-screen use. Both editions are graced with 216 illustrations, which we've made available for you via Flickr to peruse, download, and use in your own presentations.

We're quite thrilled with Luke's work—from his original research to the volume of practical advice he's managed to cram into this book. We hope you'll enjoy it as much as we have.

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 03:15 PM | Comments (10)

Donna (Maurer) Spencer, author of the forthcoming Rosenfeld Media book on card sorting, will be speaking at Web Directions South in Melbourne on May 16. The organizers have been kind enough to provide friends of Rosenfeld Media with a discount on the registration fee; details (including the discount code) follow:

Conference: Web Directions User Experience - Melbourne
When: May 15 and 16 2008
Where: Melbourne Town Hall
ux08.webdirections.org/

A one-day two-track conference, plus optional extra day of workshops, focusing on the concepts, technologies and techniques for building great user experiences on the web: interaction design, usability and testing, user research and ethnography, Ajax and Javascript, content, designing for email and mobile and more.

Speakers include Rosenfeld Media author Donna (Maurer) Spencer, as well as Robert Hoekman Jr (Miskeeto), Andy Budd (Clearleft) and many others.

Special offer: register with the promo code "Rosenfeld" before April 25 to secure your ticket for just $AU445.

Visit our updated events page to learn where Rosenfeld Media authors will be presenting next.

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)

Over the past year or two, we've been working on a new service for the user experience, and it's now ready for you to use and, more importantly, participate in. It's called UX Zeitgeist, and our goal is to profile the books that the UX community uses, and the books that they want to see published.

All it takes is getting a lot of people in the UX community to answer three simple questions. We take your answers and aggregate them with information from a host of other UX-related sites. The results include some potentially wonderful benefits, ranging from a communally-developed and ranked library of UX books, an index of UX topics that the community is wondering about, and information on UX people that's useful for research and egosurfing alike. You can track all sorts of information by charts that show trends, and there are RSS feeds galore.

Want to try it out? Please do; it's free. Want to participate? Let us know; it should only take you a few minutes. Want to learn more? Watch the video on YouTube (it's short: 5:44) or right here:

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 06:37 PM | Comments (0)

Adaptive Path hearts Rosenfeld Media (see yesterday's announcement). So does A List Apart. They're providing a discount to friends of Rosenfeld Media to attend their wonderful An Event Apart conferences, the design conference "for people who make websites". Luke Wroblewski, Liz Danzico, and Lou Rosenfeld are RMers who've spoken at An Event Apart, and we've all enjoyed an excellent experience as both presenters and attendees.

This is truly a great value, and it's even better with the Rosenfeld Media discount. Use code AEASKLR to save $200 off at the An Event Apart site. We hope to see you at one of this year's AEA conferences:

• Boston: June 23/24
• San Francisco: August 18/19
• Chicago: October 13/14

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 11:31 AM | Comments (0)

Our colleagues at Adaptive Path would like to provide friends of Rosenfeld Media with a discount to the Managing Experience conference. MX San Francisco is coming up very soon (April 20-22); don't miss your chance to hear wonderful presentations from such luminaries as Matt Jones and RM board member Nathan Shedroff. You can learn more here; use discount code MXRM to receive 10% off the registration price.

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 04:13 PM | Comments (0)

We're quite excited to be publishing Luke Wroblewski's new book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. And based on the hundreds of requests we've received for publication notification, we're not the only ones. So it's a wonderful relief to report that the book should go to the printer this week, and be available in about four weeks.

Haven't yet signed up for publication notification? Do it now and we'll provide you a discount code you can use when you purchase Luke's book at the Rosenfeld Media site. Signing up will take you about 30 seconds. (And yes, it involves a web form.) We'll email you with the discount code sometime around April 20, when the book goes on sale.

Did I say that it's looking fantastic?

Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)