The refresh of macwhiz.com is complete!

Don’t worry about your old links. Most of the content has been moved to the new content-management system; there are redirects in place to make sure that you get to the latest version of those pages.  Anything that hasn’t been updated will continue to exist at its old location for the foreseeable future.

Link permanence: an important part of the customer experience for your website.

A few months ago, I finally got around to sending my Saab 9-5′s Information Display off to be repaired.  (That story would make a good blog post itself…)  Soon after it came back, now with 100% working pixels, my Saab wanted to test it out.  It did so by telling me: BRAKE LIGHT FAILURE.

Okay, no big deal; you can replace the brake light on a SportWagon with the provided screwdriver and about three minutes’ time.  (The only trick is realizing that you have to sort of rip the thing back and to the side after undoing the two screws, as the front edge of the light assembly is held in place by two friction-fit pop-in pins.)

I have my girlfriend Kim go around back while I step on the brake, so we can identify which light has failed.

They’re all working.

So this happens sometimes; you get a bulb with a loose filament that gets intermittent.  I push CLEAR on the SID.  A day or two later: BRAKE LIGHT FAILURE.

But they still all work.

This goes on for a few weeks, before I remember to go searching the Internet for the answer.

The first recommendation: Sometimes the sensor gets confused if the impedance of the bulbs on either side of the car becomes different.  That could happen if the bulbs are from different manufacturers, or if the contacts in the bulb socket on one side have gotten corroded.

I replace both bulbs from a new package. While I’m at it, I clean the sockets with a pencil eraser, even though they look reasonably clean.  I also don’t see any broken wires.

A day later: BRAKE LIGHT FAILURE.

Well, according to the Internet, that left one thing: the center high-mounted brake light. It’s an LED strip on the SportWagon.  Apparently, sometimes the circuitry flakes out and it ceases to identify itself as “good” to the sensors even though it works just fine.  (I wonder if it’s yet another component sourced from Lucas Electric, the Prince of Darkness.)

Being LEDs, the CHMBL is expensive: $142.99 at eeuroparts.com, my preferred vendor of Saab bits.  But I’m tired of BRAKE LIGHT FAILURE, so I pony up.

There’s another problem that this may help, as well.  For some time, I’ve had water leaking in through the back hatch, making wet spots on the cargo cover. It seems that this can also be caused by the CHMBL.  Sometimes the foam seal around the edge goes. Sometimes the lens cracks. Sometimes the plastic ears on the back that hold the bolts in place crack and it loosens from the car.

Soon thereafter, the replacement CHMBL arrives.

Among the things I adore about my Saab is that the engineers clearly considered routine maintenance when they built it.  The parts you might have to replace are generally easy to get to.  In this case, the trim panel at the top of the back hatch pries off easily, and there’s the three nuts that hold the light in place.  Disconnect, loosen, remove, insert, tighten, connect, and pop the cover in place… no sweat.  The hardest part was finding where I’d left my metric socket set; it’s one of the few lighting repairs that can’t be made using the tools provided with the car.

(I really love that Saab, unlike other GM vehicles, uses stout metal push-clips for trim pieces that are designed for repeated use without loosening or breaking.  American carmakers have always loved those plastic once-if-you’re-lucky trim panel clips that usually need to be replaced every time you remove a panel…)

The original CHMBL did indeed have a cracked lens, and the plastic ears for the center bolt were loose as well.  My theory is that water got in through the crack and/or seal when it poured, and possibly damaged the circuitry, as well as causing the damp spots.

A few soaking rain storms later, I have no damp spots in the cargo area, and no more BRAKE LIGHT FAILURE on the SID.

Hopefully this post helps a few other people who run into a similar pattern with their Saab.

In the past I’ve written about my esteem for Cook’s Illustrated. They make it easy to be a great cook.

Tonight, however, Cook’s has lowered their reputation with me considerably, by trying to scam me out of my money.

I got a telemarketing call from them.  They wanted to reward me for being a valued subscriber by sending me their “Summer Grilling” special, and another book.  The young man on the phone said it was free, but upon close questioning allowed as how the other book was a “free trial,” and if I decided I didn’t like the book I would only have to pay for it.  Is it okay, he asked, for them to go ahead and send it?

My reply:  Sure, send it… but understand that I have not ordered anything and if Cook’s decides to send me anything in the mail without my having ordered it, I’m keeping it and I’m not paying a dime for it.

The call ended quickly thereafter.  You see, Cook’s Illustrated wanted to sucker me in by sending me the book, hoping I’d keep it so they could bill me for it later… even if I simply forgot to send it back.

Every month, my subscription copy of Cook’s comes wrapped in extra pages detailing the latest book they’ve published, offering it to me at a low rate. In the fine print, one discovers that ordering the advertised book actually signs you up for a book-of-the-month club, where you’ll start getting volumes in the mail as a “free trial” unless you return them or cancel.  I thought that was a shady way to do business; the fact is I would have ordered several cookbooks direct from Cook’s if it weren’t for that bit of legerdemain.

This phone call, however, was a straight-up con job.

The sales rep went to great lengths in how his words were phrased, and in the speed and manner that they were presented, to gloss over the fact that this was an attempt to get me to “order” a book-of-the-month-club subscription.  If I weren’t already aware of this type of scam, I might have said “yes, send me the free stuff!” and then, when the bill arrived later, be told that I was on a recording having “placed the order.”

Even if Cook’s didn’t intend to pull this, it still comes off as incredibly shady.  The offers every month around my magazine tell  me that it isn’t just an overzealous telemarketer—it’s something Cook’s has decided to do to make money.

I don’t begrudge Cook’s finding ways to stay afloat.  But this is dishonest, and beneath them.

And it has me seriously considering dropping my subscription at the end of my term.

Few people are aware of Title 39, United States Code, Section 3009.  That’s the part of the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 that covers unsolicited merchandise.

In the United States, if you receive merchandise in the mail and you did not order it, you have no obligation to return it or pay for it. You may keep it.  You can mark it “Return to Sender” and the Postal Service will send it back at no charge.  Or you can throw it out.

This law was passed to prevent shady organizations from sending items to people via mail, and then billing them for things they hadn’t ordered.

Under this law, sending that bill is now a Federal crime.

Unless.

39 U.S.C. §3009(d):

(d) For the purposes of this section, “unordered merchandise” means merchandise mailed without the prior expressed request or consent of the recipient.

What Cook’s telemarketer was trying to secure was the “consent of the recipient” for the unordered merchandise (the cookbook).  That’s the out.

And it’s a damn shady end-run around the law.  I’d expect it from a fly-by-night encyclopedia company, not Cook’s Illustrated.

Shame on you, Christopher Kimball.

Cook’s Illustrated should immediately cease using this underhanded sales tactic. They should be up front about their “book of the month club,” and they should cease cold-calling subscribers to get them to sign up.

For that matter, if Cook’s is going to make sales calls, they should pay attention to the Do Not Call Registry. Although the law doesn’t prevent them from making calls where there’s an “existing business relationship,” a wise company will note that people who are listed on the Registry don’t like being interrupted by telephone sales pitches, and that calling them anyway will usually lead to a reputation hit.  Send mail instead—the Postal Service could use the cash.

Or perhaps give up the book-of-the-month stuff altogether, and just rely on a compelling product at a good price.

Before I got my iPad, I didn’t think I’d use it much for reading books.  I love books.  The house is full of books. I’m proud that I am perennially short of bookshelves.

Now, I find myself leaning toward buying books via the iPad more than going to the bookstore.

The thing is, I usually have my iPad with me.  It’s easy to carry. That means I can read nearly anywhere, and as a result I can read more often. I’m already a devout reader, so this just feeds the addiction.

Of the available readers, Apple’s iBooks is my favorite.  By no means is it perfect, but it’s good enough.  With the right font, and the right type size, I don’t find the iPad’s LCD objectionable.  It certainly gets dim enough to read comfortably in bed. (It lights up the room considerably less than the LED miner’s lamp I use for reading physical books in bed.)

Where iBooks falls down is in the texts themselves.

Texts

Some publishers are doing right by the electronic reader, and are releasing books that match the formatting and copy-editing of the paper version.  Others are taking various shortcuts.  Browsing the iBookstore, you’ll find many bestsellers getting poor reviews because of editing and typographical errors.  I suspect some publishers are sending off their uncorrected galley proofs for digital conversion in the name of speed, hoping that the electronic buyer won’t notice or won’t care. I suspect those publishers are wrong. I certainly avoid those electronic texts, and as a result those publishers have to wait until I’m done reading eBooks and get to the store… or sometimes, they don’t get my money at all.

Note to publishers: An impulse purchase is a potential sale only so long as the impulse exists.

Even otherwise well-done books have odd flaws.  For example, Preston and Child’s Fever Dream on iBooks looks very close to the print layout, except that the word “fixing” is set as “fi xing” throughout.

Some of the texts from established e-book vendors are highly uneven. Baen Books has embraced free e-book versions of their authors’ back catalogues for some time. They even bind CD-ROMs of their e-book library to new hardcovers for some titles.  Some of these versions are well formatted. Some are okay, but are missing niceties like “curly quotes”—something forgivable on a blog site, but uncomfortable in a book.  A few have obviously taken a detour through plain-text-file-ville at some point in their life, making them awkward to utterly unreadable.  (Imagine reading a book where all the extra line breaks signifying a change in scene or point-of-view have been elided.)

Okay, but those are free e-books, so you have to make allowances, right? Unfortunately, I’ve found the same flaws in Baen’s paid DRM-free ePub e-books as well. If I’m paying for the book, I expect a well-edited text that is properly “typeset.”

If e-Books are going to take off, publishers have to make them as close to the print version as possible, especially in terms of layout and editing.

Readers

I’ve tried the big three iPad e-book readers: Apple’s iBooks, the Barnes & Noble eReader, and Amazon’s Kindle app.

All have flaws.

iBooks limits you to a small handful of fonts. Only one of them resembles anything you’re likely to find in a well-designed mass-market book: Baskerville. I suppose Palatino and Times New Roman aren’t horrible, but they aren’t typical book faces. Cochin is too ornate to be comfortable as a text font, and Verdana… well… it’s Verdana. It’s an ugly Microsoft sans-serif typeface designed for reading on Windows 95-era CRTs.  I suppose it has its fans, but then, the same could be said for velvet paintings of dogs playing poker.

On the plus side, iBooks does a very good job rendering those fonts. Apple’s Type Services are used to full effect; you get ligatures (fi and fl instead of fi and fl, for example) automatically. The letters are well-kerned, and the line-spacing generally matches what you’d expect in a real book.  The result is comfortable to read, especially in Baskerville.

The B&N eReader gives you more font choices: Amasis, Century Schoolbook, Georgia, Joanna, Times New Roman, Ascender Sans, Gill Sans, and Trebuchet MS. With the exception of Trebuchet, all are reasonable fonts. The serif fonts wouldn’t be out of place in a real book. However, the font rendering is fatally flawed. The lack of ligatures is bad enough.  However, except for Century Schoolbook, none of the fonts provided will display italics. Any italicized text gets rendered as plain text.  This can render a book utterly incomprehensible.

Even Century Schoolbook is flawed. While you can make out italic text in Century Schoolbook, it isn’t set in a true italic face. Instead, the font is mathematically slanted (“oblique”) to make a pseudo-italic appearance. The result is ugly, and very reminiscent of early Mac typography circa 1984. The poor typography of B&N eReader is indefensible in a book-reading application.

I also find the line spacing and page width options uncomfortable.

I quickly ruled out the B&N app.

The Kindle app gives you one typeface, reminiscent of paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s. It’s not bad for reading, but it is what it is. It also comes with relatively unimaginative page design as a result. However, it does scale to small sizes very well, and is very legible on the iPad’s screen.

Like the B&N app, the Kindle app fails to take advantage of iOS’s built-in support for advanced typography, such as ligatures.

The B&N and Kindle apps both lack an in-app bookstore, forcing you to jump out to Safari and use the vendor’s web site to purchase new books.  On the other hand, both the B&N and Amazon web sites are far easier to browse than Apple’s iBookstore.  Trying to “browse the shelves” in iBookstore can be infuriating, as you see only a fraction of the content unless you perform a search.

All three apps have a common failing: None of them implement proper hyphenation. This leads to some ugly typography, especially for certain texts at certain font sizes. I don’t find it as objectionable as some, but many book snobs find it painful. The B&N app offers an option to display ragged-right text, which reduces the need for hyphenation; the other two only offer full justification.

* * *

So far, all three readers are flawed, but I find iBooks’ flaws the least objectionable. It looks good, it works well, and it feels polished. B&N’s app is decidedly half-baked, and not up to professional standards—never mind professional book publishing standards. The Kindle app shows more experience with e-Books, but is definitely “Kindle lite” and short of the mark.

I look forward to future versions of all three, hopefully combined with a more serious commitment to quality from the publishers.

What can you do when you just can’t get satisfaction from a software company despite your best efforts? What if the company’s tech-support script monkeys have left your computer nonfunctional, worse than it was when you started, and they refuse to provide any more assistance?

Sue them in small claims court.

Since I got my iPad, I’ve been a bit worried about dropping it.  The aluminum back doesn’t give one a lot of confidence; while I’ve not dropped it yet, it sometimes feels distressingly like it could slip out of one’s grasp.

It seemed like a silicone slipcover would be just the ticket.

I bought the Incase Grip Protective Cover at an Apple Store. Admittedly, I confused it with the almost identical Incase Protective Cover.  It was the Protective Cover I was really looking to buy.

I have several Incase protective cases, and I’ve been happy with their design and construction.  But…

The Grip Protective Cover isn’t just a straight silicone slipcover.  It adds two humps near the top and bottom of the iPad.  They provide a bit more heft to grip the iPad when it’s held in landscape orientation.  Some may find they help in the normal portrait orientation, as well; I find them sort of awkward.

There are two major flaws with the Grip Protective Cover:

1. The humps add weight.  A noticeable amount of weight.  With the cover on, my wrists complain more quickly and more loudly about trying to hold the iPad one-handed.
2. It doesn’t fit tightly enough.  If you hold the iPad in portrait orientation with your hand about halfway up the screen, your grip will tend to peel the Grip Protective Cover off the side of the iPad.  It could stand to be a good deal tighter.

There’s also the common flaw to silicone slipcovers for any iPod or iPad: although you can use a docking cable, you can’t use a dock without removing the cover.  This is especially true for the Grip Protective Cover; the humps eliminate any question of docking.

I’m not impressed with this product.  My objection to the humps are my own mistake, but the loose fit is a problem.  I recommend passing on this product.

While visiting New Jersey this weekend, I stopped at the Williams-Sonoma store in the Short Hills Mall.  Williams-Sonoma is an upscale kitchen-accessories store.  The Short Hills Mall is an “ultra-premium” mall, the sort of place where the anchor stores are Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Bloomingdale’s instead of JCPenney and Target. What should’ve been a premium shopping experience turned into a frustrating trip that makes me unlikely to visit that store again.

I’ll admit I’ve always had a mixed opinion of Williams-Sonoma.  They carry some nice items, but they also carry a lot of useless things.  True “gourmet cook” cookware is mixed with the culinary equivalent of the motorized tie racks you see in department stores around Christmastime—useless and tacky things that mostly appeal to frustrated gift-givers.  A savvy shopper can find better deals at local restaurant-supply and cooking stores (such as my local favorite, Warren Kitchen & Cutlery).

Anyway, I needed a new steamer.  Grandma’s old collapsable steamer insert had finally completed its utter collapse, and I’ve been steaming vegetables a lot more lately.  I very much like All-Clad cookware, and Williams-Sonoma carries a good range of All-Clad.  So, into Williams-Sonoma.

I found the All-Clad 3-quart steamer set. That’s pretty much what I was looking for.  They had two of them, apparently identical, on display.  Now all I need to do is buy them.

Williams-Sonoma, being upscale, doesn’t keep cookware stock on the display floor.  So the first thing was to get someone to help me.  There weren’t any employees near me, so I headed to the central checkout desk.

It took a little while to get help, because the checkout was a bit understaffed for the crowd that Sunday.  As I waited in line, I did notice employees milling about, occasionally helping other people.  I think they might’ve been more effective at the checkout.

I told the employee at the checkout that I wanted the All-Clad 3-quart stainless steel steamer set.  She wasn’t clear on what this was, and got on her walkie-talkie to ask for help. After a confused moment or two, she asked me to come over to the display and show her what it was that I wanted.

We finally wound up with three employees standing around the All-Clad display, looking at the floor sample and trying to explain over the walkie-talkie, in loud booming voices that carried throughout the store, what it is they were looking for to some mystery person in the back room.  ”It’s a steamer set, it’s like a pasta pentola but smaller,” one yelled into her neckline.  (The cord-mounted microphones of their walkie-talkie headsets made for some odd body language.)  After a few minutes of trying, and failing, to explain to each other which product they were trying to sell, another employee took the tag off the shelf and went back to the service desk.

At the desk, she looked up the SKU code on her computer. Directing the faceless back-room man to look harder, she told me “the computer says I have five of these in stock, so there should be at least one back there.”  Her tone of voice expressed doubt, and made it clear that she could very well have none.

It was then explained that it wasn’t in their stockroom on this floor, and their back-room man would have to check the other storeroom on the other floor of the mall.

I was then left to my own devices for about ten minutes as everyone left to help other customers.

After about eight minutes, I was strongly considering just walking out.  I’d already spent three times longer in this store than I’d expected, almost all of it waiting for the employees to get their act together.

As the fellow finally arrived with my pot, it was unceremoniously dropped on a sales counter, and no one made any acknowledgement to me.  All the staffed registers were busy, so I waited, mostly patiently, for one to free up.  The one that opened first was the one right next to the box with my steamer in it, the one the fellow had delivered it to.  The woman staffing it asked for the next customer, and someone who had approached the desk well after me darted in with her items.  The employee didn’t say a word and started ringing her up.

When the next register opened, I asserted myself with extra vigor and got rung up.  Good thing, too; the reaction to the box sitting on the counter was “oh, is this yours?”

One high point for Williams-Sonoma: Instead of putting the large, heavy, square-cornered cardboard box into a plastic or paper bag that would be sure to fail before I reached my car, they instead gave me an inexpensive but reusable shopping bag, similar to some cheap types of reusable supermarket shopping bag but larger.  While this must be an added expense for the store, it’s a good call given the nature of their merchandise and their premium brand positioning.

Summary: How Williams-Sonoma Short Hills Failed

1. Employees in a specialty store that don’t know their product. When I go to a premium store like Williams-Sonoma, I expect that the sales help will at least know all the products they sell that require assistance to purchase.  If I ask for a three-quart stainless-steel All-Clad steamer, they should know what I’m talking about, or know what to ask to clarify it.  A blank stare and a request to point at it is not a premium experience, it’s a Wal-Mart experience.
2. Let’s say that again: Employees in a specialty store that don’t know their product. If you have to tell another employee “It’s like a pasta pentola, but smaller,” you really have a training issue with your staff.
3. Inefficient stock-keeping. At worst, the floor employee should’ve been able to read off the SKU to the back-room guy and get the item out front quickly.  Places like Sears have had stock-keeping systems that quickly direct the warehouse folks to the right shelf to fulfill a customer order for decades.  Williams-Sonoma has no excuse for needing to hunt through two storerooms to find one pot.
4. Inaccurate computer records. If the computer says there are five pots in stock, there should be five pots in stock.  There should be no reason for the staff to be unsure of their inventory, especially when the inventory is kept solely in a back storeroom.  Do they have that much employee theft going on?
5. Yelling is not a premium experience. Using walkie-talkies can enhance customer satisfaction by making employees more efficient.  However, if you’re a premium store, you need to buy premium walkie-talkies so that your employees can communicate clearly and calmly.  You need to train employees on communications etiquette.  Having three people surrounding you yelling into their lapels like over-caffienated Secret Service agents does not make you feel like you’re being pampered for the money you’re about to spend.
6. Long waits are not a premium experience. If you’re a high-end store in a high-end mall, you need to have smooth procedures and sufficient staffing to be efficient and quick at customer service.  Customers with disposable income are often impatient.  Sometimes, if you have a high-demand item like an iPad, you can get away with lines.  However, there’s plenty of places to buy pots.  Cookware purchasers are not a captive audience.
7. Waiting customers get precedence over walk-ups. If you have someone who is waiting for you to get your act together and find an item so they can give you money for it, that person is always the next in line.  They have already made it through the queue to ask for the opportunity to pay you.  Now you owe them the courtesy of expediting the rest of the transaction.  The moment the item reaches the checkout stand, acknowledge it, acknowledge them, and make it clear to the line that this person is next.

Keep in mind, this wasn’t a customer service issue at a mass-merchandiser like Target or Wal-Mart, where many of these inconveniences are to be expected because you’re getting a low price due to lower overhead.  This is a premium store at an ultra-premium mall.  People go here because they are willing to pay more, and they expect better service as a result.

If stores take the route that this Williams-Sonoma did, they’ll find themselves losing business.  If you can get better customer service by ordering from Amazon or another online vendor, why would you bother wasting your time waiting for the guy in the back room?

Are you responsible for writing policies at your company? Whether you’re writing them for the entire company or just your own group, are you writing effective policies?

Too often, I’ve seen business policies at are very poorly written. They aren’t comprehensible, or they say things they don’t mean. If you ever have to tell people “I know the policy says that, but it doesn’t mean that,” you have a bad policy that needs rewriting.

Rule 1: Use as few words as possible. Extra words produce confusion. Try rewetting your policy to eliminate as many words as you can without changing the meaning of the document. Enlist good writers to help you. Legislators follow a fundamental legal principle that every word in a law must be interpreted as if it’s part of the law for a reason. Your policy is a law within your company. Follow the same principle in your policies.

Rule 2: Use care when using terms. Be sure the term means what you think it means. This is especially true if you’re using a term that may have a very precise, technical meaning among members of your audience. If you misuse terms, assuming people will know what you really meant, you will write a policy that enforces rules you never wanted.

Rule 3: Be reasonable. Any military officer will tell you the truth of the old maxim, “Never give an order that you know will not be followed.” Before declaring a new policy, find out if it will be so onerous to your business that no one will follow it. There’s no point in publishing policies that will go unused from day one.

Rule 4: Watch out for unintended consequences. Check the impact of your policy with the people who will be affected. If your wordings overly broad or inappropriately narrow, you may end up restricting activities that are important to running your business smoothly. For example, you may have a legitimate need to restrict employee use of cellular phones, but a poorly worded cellphone policy could keep your information-technology employees from being able to receive and respond to urgent equipment failure pages sent to their BlackBerries.

Rule 6: Don’t assume that you’re a good writer. Very few people are good writers. Your organization undoubtedly has a few, and they probably have jobs at aren’t primarily about writing. Seek them out, befriend them, and get their help saying what you mean to say. If the policy will affect them, they’ll probably have a lot of intrinsic motivation to help you.

Poorly written policies infuriate employees and create resentment. They also make the company look bad. Neither one of these things is good for a manager.

It should go without saying that these rules are even more critical when you’re writing policies that impact customers. Employees have to deal with your poor policies, unless they are willing to quit and find employment elsewhere. Customers, however, can very easily take their business elsewhere, and they will rarely tell you that they’ve abandoned you because they found your policies asinine.

I miss the Lilac Festival in Rochester… even though when I was there, I always hated trying to navigate the extra traffic in the South Wedge… especially when I lived in the South Wedge…

When we moved into our current house and started sprucing up the very sad gardens that were there, my first order of business was planting some lilacs.

They’re definitely at peak bloom today.  For the past few days, if the windows are open, the whole house smells like lilac.

[View with PicLens]

I read today that the font foundry Monotype is now offering a service providing over 2,000 fonts for use on Web sites.  This sounded like great news—one of the things I hate about trying to make a decent web site is the horrid state of web typography.

Of course, it’s too good to be true.

Yes, there is a beta service offering 2,000 free fonts, if you add tracking JavaScript to your page.  It’s free until the beta period ends.  Then, you have two options.

1. Transition to a “free trial” account, which still includes 2,000 fonts, but injects advertising onto your pages.  According to the Terms and Conditions, you have no control over the content or nature of the advertising.
2. Pay an unspecified amount of money for an account.

Monotype won’t say how much the account will cost.  Apparently, it will be based on page impressions. I suspect it will be substantial.

The article also mentions FontShop. They offer pricing for their product.  If you want to use their FF DIN Web font, that’ll cost you $384.  That steep price doesn’t include the font files to install on your personal computer; those are sold separately for $282.  Yes, they want more money for the font that you can only use on your website, as opposed to the font file you can use on your computer and in print.  No quotidian blogger in their right mind is going to cough up this sort of money for a font.

A more reasonable service that offers large quantities of web fonts from smaller foundries is Typekit.  They offer a reasonable library of free web fonts.  However, there are strings attached:

• You can only use them on one website
• You can only use two Typekit fonts on that website
• The bandwidth used by your viewers downloading the fonts can’t exceed 5GB/month
• You have to add a Typekit badge to your website

Okay, if you don’t want to do much other than choose a headline and body font, this could work, except for one thing:  What happens if you get Slashdotted?  Typekit says they won’t cut you off, but they will call you up and expect you to start paying for bandwidth. Every time someone hits reload, it can cause the font to get sucked down again, burning bandwidth.  Since you don’t have control over Typekit’s JavaScript, this may be difficult to control.  Although Typekit’s first paid tier, “Personal,” is reasonable at $24.99/year, the bandwidth limitation is still troubling.

I understand that it takes a lot of talent and time to create a font. However, I think the foundries are generally being silly with their pricing.  If you want to charge me $40 per typeface, and count each weight and slant as another chargeable typeface, fine—but grant me the right to embed the font on my website, too, at that price.  Worried about piracy?  Fine, set up your own DRM-laden hosting, but don’t charge me extra for it: roll it into the price of licensing the font.  Send me the OpenType file so I can use it on my computer, and write Word documents with it, and give me access to your server for embedding.  (And trust me not to just serve up the OpenType file.)

I often hear type foundries complaining about piracy. I have no doubt that fonts are frequently pirated.  I think that they’re pirated because they are so often overpriced as far as the consumer is concerned.

Desktop publishing brought typography to the masses. Everyone has access to high-grade layout tools nowadays.  Even Word, pathetic as it is for page layout, offers capabilities far in excess of your average print shop from 1960.  The Mac and the LaserWriter were as big a revolution as Gutenberg’s press.  Before Gutenberg, books were owned by the very wealthy, because of the massive expense involved in manually copying a book.  Today, paperbacks are considered disposable by most people.

It no longer costs a lot of money to create good design… except for the cost of fonts.

The record industry complained about digital music piracy for years.  Then Steve Jobs convinced them that it would be more profitable to sell songs at 99¢ each—that people would willingly pay a fair price, especially if they weren’t locked into buying more than they wanted.  As a result, iTunes has made a lot of money for the music industry.

The movie industry started out selling videocassettes for $90 to $120, soaking the rental stores for all they were worth.  They fretted about rising piracy of videotapes.  When they knocked down the starting sale price of videocassettes to $20, it became much easier to buy a reasonably-priced copy of the movie than to go through the hassle of pirating it.  Result: Windfall profits for the movie industry.

As much as I’ve complained lately about Atlassian, they deserve a lot of credit for enlightened pricing: They offered their flagship products with a limited license for personal use at a very reasonable price.  Paying $5 or $10 for JIRA or Confluence is practically a no-brainer.  The license is useful enough to be worth the money for personal use, but doesn’t siphon off corporate sales.  No one was going to pay hundreds of dollars to play with JIRA at home… but a great many people were willing to pay $5 or $10.  Atlassian is donating that money to worthy causes, but they didn’t have to.  Rather than seeing these sales as “money left on the table” where they could theoretically have sold high-priced licenses, they saw that these were sales they were never going to make at full price.  Each starter license sold is $10 they weren’t going to make, and it brings new users who could become product evangelists for them.

So: Font foundries, wake up!  Charging hundreds of dollars for web fonts may bring you some profits, but you’ll be leaving lots of blogger money on the table instead.  You could be offering low-cost licenses for bloggers and making even more money.  You just have to do it so that it’s priced fairly, doesn’t interfere with the editorial content of the pages, and has predictable costs even if the site gets slashdotted.

Be like Typepad, but without the bandwidth limits.  Or, at least, with a clear idea of how many page views you get for a given amount of bandwidth, and an exception for the occasional traffic spike when one meme gets picked up by social media.