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Cartographer’s Toolkit Direct Purchase
A reader just asked me if I could direct-ship a copy of Cartographer’s Toolkit to him. The answer is yes! So add that to your options for purchasing the book. If you would like to get the book faster and a bit cheaper* you can simply email me. I’ll send you a PayPal invoice, and then drop-ship the book once the payment has gone through. It takes the printer approximately 2 days to get the book shipped out. In all, it generally takes about a week between ordering and receiving the book, if you are in the U.S.
If your address is within the continental U.S., the price of the book plus shipping will be invoiced as $40, via PayPal. If your address is outside the continental U.S., I will calculate shipping, and send an invoice accordingly ($36 + shipping). Email your request to gretchen *at* petersongis dot com. Be sure to include your mailing address in the email. I can drop-ship from the UK and AU as well, so if you are from either of those countries, the price will be close to US$40.
The printer for the book handles the order fulfillment and shipping, and I have not had any problems with them so far regarding speed of delivery. Getting your book directly from the printer will certainly speed things up.
I’ll try to get to all requests within 24 hours, if not sooner! Thanks for your emails, comments, and twitter comments, as always.
*as of today–the prices on Amazon and B&N change daily and they aren’t set by me
Cartographer’s Toolkit Availability
Cartographer’s Toolkit is currently sold through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The book has done decently on Amazon since its release 1.5 weeks ago* BUT it is having a perpetual stocking issue there. From time to time it has reached the top spot in the cartography best-sellers:
HOWEVER
Right now Amazon lists it as “usually ships in 1 to 3 weeks”, which any author will tell you should be death to a book’s sales prospects. Thankfully, the book is still selling okay on Amazon but I wanted to alert my blog readers to the fact that you might as well just buy the book from Barnes & Noble instead of Amazon, if you haven’t already. That way you will get it much faster. I won’t make any affiliate revenue from sending buyers to B&N but there’s no reason to ask people to wait 1-3 weeks, if that’s what it is taking Amazon to ship it.
B&N Cartographer’s Toolkit Listing
If the availability on Amazon changes I will be sure to post again.
*Careful readers will note that the publication date is officially mid-June, even though it was released in mid-July. This is a glitch having to do with when the files were submitted at the printers and when I finally allowed the book to be released for sale…which took a bit of extra time than usual because of the large amount of graphics in this book.
Look Inside Now Available on Cartographer’s Toolkit
For those who’ve been waiting to “look inside” the book on Amazon, it’s now available. There’s a link in the right side-bar to go to its Amazon page. The link gives me a little bit of extra affiliate revenue every time someone buys something (anything, not just the book) through it. Every bit helps.
I’ve noticed that Barnes & Noble has the book priced at about $12 less than Amazon right now. Amazon is also saying that it ships in 1-3 weeks. That’s supposed to change to “in stock” soon. We hope.
Map joke of the day, courtesy of @CanadianGISgirl via @amandahstaub:
Q: Why did the innocent map go to jail?
A: It was framed by the neatline.
Announcing The New Book: Cartographer’s Toolkit
Posted by Gretchen in News, Uncategorized on July 12, 2012
Cartographer’s Toolkit, a 184 page book of colors, typography, and patterns for map design is now available. I want to give a huge shout-out to the magnificent book design firm Longfeather Book Design, for their great job ensuring that things turned out absolutely perfectly.
The Look Inside feature over at Amazon will be available shortly. In the meantime, you are welcome to learn more about the book by clicking on Books>Cartographer’s Toolkit in the navigator at the top of the page.
Also, big thanks to the great editing capabilities of Becky Dobbins. And it goes without saying that I owe a debt of gratitude to the fantastic cartographers who allowed me to showcase their work in the Patterns chapter. I will be thanking them by name in a separate post. Also, I’ve got an interview over at VerySpatial coming up soon. More on that later too.
Please note: The first two chapters of Cartographer’s Toolkit are very similar to the two ebooks that I offer. If you already have the ebooks, and want a print copy, I would still suggest getting the print book. Plus, it has the Patterns chapter, which contains a lot of maps for inspiration, and information on how to create different types of maps. If you buy the print book, and want a digital version of the first two chapters, then you might want to buy them as well, as a supplement.
Making of High Park Fire Map
Snapshot of the map:
View the interactive map here.
The Colorado High Park Fire, which started on Saturday June 9, has burned over 56,000 acres so far, and continues to burn. On Sunday June 10, my husband, Kris, and I decided to get a map of the fire out to the public, since none existed at that time. Kris is the owner of Mapbiquity, which happens to be a service that is already built to allow rapid deployment of web maps, so it was natural that we should give it a spin with the fire data. Another reason we jumped on this was because the fire is very close to home. In fact, here’s a picture I took from our window on June 11, when the fire was 5.5 miles away as the crow flies:
You can see a couple of red spots–fire–on the foothills in the picture. Kris and I took Monday off work to continue to fine-tune the map, which was getting so many hits that it was running very slowly. I spent quite a lot of time interpreting Larimer County’s text on evacuation issues and lifts in order to digitize them.
To date, our map is the only one that has the evacuation areas digitized. I do have to caveat that there is at least one evacuation area that is not on our map. This is due to my inability to interpret the Larimer County text in sufficient detail to create even a semi-accurate boundary.
BIG THANKS to Nick Armstrong, a small business Colorado-based marketing expert, who read our tweets about the fire map and subsequently purchased a dedicated domain/host for us to put the map on: www.cohighparkfiremap.org. Prior to this we had been using a mapbiquity domain.
The map has had 50,000 hits. To deal with the traffic, we enacted the following measures:
1) Moved it to a larger server with more processing power
2) Disabled most of the log files
3) Moved the JavaScript file into the main html page, which creates some sloppy-looking code, but reduces the amount of calls back and forth to the server
4) Began caching, though this means some users need to refresh and reload the page before they see the updates, unfortunately
The benefits / design considerations of the high park fire map that we put together are as follows:
1) It is interactive, people can zoom in to see where their home is or where their relative’s home is, while also viewing the latest fire perimeter, to determine how concerned they need to be.
2) You can measure distances on the map with an easy tool. People have been using this to tell their family and friends “the fire is 6.5 miles away” for example.
3) Each layer has an “i” button with more information on the layer. For the evacuation areas, clicking the “i” button displays the official evacuation wording (though we had to fix many typos in the official wording. For example, they did not spell Hewlett Gulch correctly in one instance.)
4) Having a disclaimer noting that the map is not “to the scale of individual houses” was the best way to inform the public that the evacuation areas are not very high-resolution. They have to visit the text or call an official number (provided) to make individual house determinations.
5) Twitter was used as the main form of communication to let people know when map updates were/are posted.
The map is featured in the Coloradoan. We thank them for making it known to a wider audience.
Colorado High Park Fire Map
There haven’t been any new blog posts recently, because a small team including myself has been volunteering most of our time to the Colorado High Park Fire interactive map. The fire was close to home, literally.
The map is updated as continuously as we can with the latest evacuation information (both issues and lifts), shelter locations and status, and the latest infrared layers–which tend to be flown daily. I’ll write a longer post about the making of the map and some lessons learned once things settle down. In the meantime, it is time to catch up on existing client work and…sleep
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