Lost in Translation

The internet is a place that loves to hate things*. Its denizens love equally to make Top Ten Worst Whatever lists, because showing disdain is much more fun than showing enthusiasm. (I don’t really mean any judgment there; I think Roger Ebert was probably right when he wrote that a negative review is more fun to read than a positive one and more fun to write.) There are sites where the authors are so relentlessly negative about things that the pages they want to recommend are merely categorized “Things That Don’t Actively Suck”.

Since I’m a gamer I tend to run across a lot of Worst Games lists. Likewise with movies and Worst Movies lists. And since the Internet is a place with a lot of information, a large desire to fit in, and a disturbingly pervasive zeitgeist, a lot of games and movies make these lists time and again. For video games, we have E.T. the Extraterrestrial (which almost singlehandedly collapsed the home video game market in the early 1980s) and Custer’s Revenge (revenge rape porn** on the Atari 2600, and no I am not making this up, and no I will not link it to you). For movies, it’s fare like Manos: the Hands of Fate (“popularized” by its feature on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and North (great actors, actually kind of an interesting premise, catastrophically bad implementation).

These entries turn up a lot. And when I say “a lot” I mean “on every list of this kind”. So here’s a thought: let’s give them a bye. Let’s all universally acknowledge that yes, these games and movies are stinkers. If someone put one on the coffee table you’d run out of the room holding your nose. We get it. The next time you make a Top Ten Worst Whatever list, look for entries that you know are on every other list out there – and remove them. Make a note at the beginning: “Yes, we know ET was absolute crap. We’ve all agreed on that. It transcends the scale. For the purpose of this list, it’s actually in negative numbers. Let’s move on.”

Because, really, I’d like to see a Top Ten Worst Games where I didn’t know with absolute certainty what was going to be #1 on the list. I think we can all agree that that would be a good thing.

* It entertains me that I have a pre-existing WP tag for “kvetching”.
** Man, the Google hits I’m going to get for that.

Imagine that you have a large DVD collection, all of which have been given to you by well-meaning friends. Your collection requires several shelves. Each DVD case has a unique name printed on it by the friend who gave it to you, but the names are things like “movie” and “My Movie” and, if you’re incredibly lucky, “AScorseseMovie”. Every time you want to watch a movie, you have to figure out which one it is, and you have to do that by putting them into the DVD player and seeing what title screen comes up. If you’re feeling particularly enterprising you can then write the real name on the cover with a Magic Marker, but most of the time, frankly, you just want to watch a goddamn movie and can barely be bothered to put the ones you don’t want to watch back in their cases.

I download a lot of ebooks. Right now I have 238 PDFs in my “ebooks” directory, and that’s not counting the ones that I’ve downloaded but haven’t sorted yet (which is in the double digits). I’ve read most of the ones in “ebooks” – I’d say about 60% – and none of the ones in “Downloads”. The ones that I’ve downloaded but not sorted yet often have names like – I am not making this up – “download.pdf” and “My eBook.pdf” and “blogging.pdf”. These are not helpful names. These are names that are easy and convenient for the producer but have little to no bearing on the content or the source and are therefore of little to no value to the consumer.

Why is this so common? Because it’s easy and convenient for the producer. Maybe the producer assumes you’ll be reading it right away, so the knowledge of what PDF it is will be fresh; or you’ll be reading it in a browser, so the filename won’t really matter; or that this is the only ebook you’ve ever downloaded (believe it or not, I know one producer who relies on that).

But the truth is, people Save Link As… and then forget about it. Once a week when they clean up their Downloads folder they find “mygreatpdf.pdf” and decide to delete it so they’ll have the space for more downloaded episodes of “Laverne and Shirley”. Your ebook doesn’t get read, because your target reader doesn’t remember what it is, or from whom they got it, or why they even have it in the first place.

The important part:

Make sure the name of your ebook (or audio file or worksheet or whatever) is an accurate reflection of both the source and the content of the file. Sure, the consumer could rename the file to whatever she wants. But that requires opening the file, finding the name of the content (actually not always very easy), finding the name of the author, closing the file (since Acrobat won’t let you modify an open PDF), and renaming the file (“I double-click on the name to rename it and it just opens the damn file again“). Why take the risk that she’ll just say “eh, can’t have been that important” and delete it? It is trivial effort on your part when you’re making the file – you have to give it a name, after all, and you may as well give it a useful one – and significant effort when your reader is looking at the file.