Librarians' Group

At Brooklyn Library’s New Center, Books Are Secondary

2013-05-22T17:00:00.000-04:00

by: Eli Rosenberg

The young couple burst through the great bronze doors of the main Brooklyn Public Library 15 minutes before closing time one recent Sunday with an unusual request: Was there somewhere they could recite their vows?

It was a blustery day, and the two — a military man and his fiancée, according to librarians — wanted a place they could finish their nuptials away from the chill at Grand Army Plaza.

Fortunately, the library had not long before opened a $3.25 million addition to its central branch, complete with conference rooms available to anyone with an adult library card. Librarians showed the couple to Room 5, the lack of a reservation notwithstanding.

“This may have technically been a violation of our meeting room policy,” Jesse Montero, the library’s coordinator of information services and public training, acknowledged of the impromptu ceremony, which added “wedding chapel” to the facility’s growing list of descriptions.

The four-month-old Shelby White and Leon Levy Information Commons replaced the branch’s media section, providing a wood-paneled center with space for 70 laptop users, a 36-seat classroom and 7 meeting rooms, including a digital studio with green screen, microphone and video equipment.

It quickly became popular with freelance writers and other creative minds, but its uses have been quite varied, like as a safe space for immigrants to learn about the naturalization process and for parents to hold meetings about charter schools. And yes, even as a warm environment for a wedding.

“This is a sanctuary. It’s beautiful,” said Freddy Quevedo, 64, a retired construction worker originally from Ecuador. He was attending a CitizenshipWorks event, where representatives of groups like the Immigration Advocates Network and Pro Bono Net helped prospective citizens fill out naturalization forms, with lawyers on hand for private counsel in the meeting rooms.

Equipped with a projector (new and working) and a cart of laptop computers (also new and working), the classroom has allowed the library to work with other nonprofit organizations and residents to offer a class on podcasting, hosted by BRIC Arts Media Bklyn, a primer on Medicare and a workshop on Revolutionary War genealogy with the Daughters of the American Revolution.

It’s this diversity of new uses, most of which have little to do with reading or books, that the library says is part of a larger campaign to maintain relevancy in an increasingly digital world.

“The business of being a public library is much more complicated today than it was when it was conceived,” said Linda E. Johnson, the president of the Brooklyn Public Library. “We’re still trying to level the playing field. It’s just not about books as much as it is about access to the Internet.”

The 5,500-square-foot space is among the first of its type for a public library, according to planners, who drew inspiration from the Research Commons at New York University’s Bobst Library, and took aesthetic cues from Apple stores.

The library benefited from the largess of Shelby White, a philanthropist, self-described “Brooklyn girl” and founding trustee of the Leon Levy Foundation, which awarded the library a $100,000 grant in 2009 to study the project, and $3.25 million in 2010 for its construction.

Not that the operation has gone off entirely without a hitch.

The wing initially suffered from slow Wi-Fi service — a striking flaw for laptop users — before an upgrade.

The commons have also suffered the occasional disruption, like when a packed meeting about a Citizens of the World charter school spilled out of a room and disturbed the quiet of the work area; the meeting had been overwhelmed by protesting parents.

But with $1 coffee in the library’s lobby, why would a freelancer spend time working in a cafe or home office again?

“It’s not what you expect when you walk in a library, but to have a professional, upscale place to meet with clients is incredible,” said Don Noble, 40, a film producer from Crown Heights who uses the commons every other day. “It’s good to get away from the house.”

from: NY Times

Reading increases empathy, study says

2013-05-21T17:00:00.000-04:00

Academic development and civic engagement also positively affected.

by: Paul Irish

Forget the cliche of the introverted bookworm: A recent report suggests people who read more may have better social skills than those who don’t.

A recently released report commissioned by the National Reading Campaign (NRC) titled Towards Sustaining and Encouraging Reading in a Canadian Society found that reading increases empathy, academic development and even civic engagement.

The NRC, a volunteer group of writers, teachers, librarians, parents and publishers dedicated to making Canada a country of readers, analyzed close to 100 domestic and international studies on the subject of reading.

Sharon Murphy, lead author of the paper and associate professor of education at York University, says reading — especially fiction — shows preferred behaviour by example (through characters, plots and situations).

“It helps the reader understand relationships better and how to act in our society,” she says. “Readers can become civic minded … they understand the concept of volunteering and co-operating.”

She also said sitting down with a book increases empathy and, of course, academic development.

As well, the research discovered that if children were allowed to choose what to read as children — instead of being forced to read certain texts — they would be more likely to read as adults.

Ben McNally, owner of the Ben McNally Books on Bay and Richmond Sts., said the findings don’t come as a surprise but agrees it’s refreshing to hear the message when it may be needed most.

“Yes, reading is good … but don’t confuse reading with that flash of information you get off your phone or computer,” he says. “Even to comprehend basic news — what’s happening in your community — needs more than a casual glance at a screen. It’s ludicrous to believe you can really understand the issues without spending some time reading.”

McNally says social media and the internet have their place, but the benefits following the nuances, plots and character compositions of a good novel aren’t likely duplicated by Facebook.

The report also confirmed that boys and men don’t read as much as girls and boys.

“It’s not quite clear why,” said Murphy. “It could be that they’re doing more online activity (than females) and it’s certainly an area for a lot more documentation leading to a bigger study.”

Lisa Heggum, the Toronto Public Library’s Children and Youth Advocate, said the library has been an enthusiastic partner and advocate for the NCR sharing the same goals.

“The important research that the NRC is gathering shows that choice, variety and access to reading materials are critical in promoting reading for all ages,” she says. “Libraries are uniquely and ideally positioned to provide universal access to a broad range of materials.”

Rick Wilks, vice-chair of the NRC, says the findings confirm reading creates benefits through all the social interaction linked to reading, including people connecting through book clubs.

“It confirms our understanding of the individual and societal importance of reading, but perhaps more importantly, it confirms that getting people talking about their reading is the best way to encourage others to read,” he says.

from: Toronto Star

Libraries: Cathedrals of Our Souls

2013-05-20T17:00:00.000-04:00

by: Caitlin Moran

This piece was previously published in The Times of London, and is included in Caitlin Moran's new book, Moranthology ($14.99, Harper Perennial).

Home educated and, by seventeen, writing for a living, the only alma mater I have ever had is Warstones Library, Pinfold Grove, Wolverhampton.

A low, red-brick box on grass that verged on wasteland, I would be there twice a day--rocking up with all the ardor of a clubber turning up to a rave. I read every book in there--not really, of course, but as good as: when I'd read all the funny books, I moved on to the sexy ones, then the dreamy ones, the mad ones; the ones that described distant mountains, idiots, plagues, experiments. I sat at the big table and read all the papers: in public housing in Wolverhampton, the broadsheets are as incongruous and illuminating as an Eames lamp.

The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books--but they were, of course, really doors: each book-lid opened as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the lock. I spent days running in and out of other worlds like a time bandit, or a spy. I was as excited as I've ever been in my life, in that library: scoring new books the minute they came in; ordering books I'd heard of--then waiting, fevered, for them to arrive, like they were the word Christmas. I had to wait nearly a year for Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire to come: even so, I was still too young to think it anything but a bit wanky, and abandoned it twenty pages in for Jilly Cooper. But Fleurs du Mal, man! In a building overlooked by a Kwiksave where the fags and alcohol were kept in a locked, metal cage, lest they be stolen! Simply knowing I could have it in my hand was a comfort, in this place so very very far from anything extraordinary or exultant.

Everything I am is based on this ugly building on its lonely lawn--lit up during winter darkness; open in the slashing rain--which allowed a girl so poor she didn't even own a purse to come in twice a day and experience actual magic: traveling through time, making contact with the dead--Dorothy Parker, Stella Gibbons, Charlotte Brontë, Spike Milligan.

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate "need" for "stuff." A mall--the shops--are places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthy's taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary, instead. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power.

Last month, after protest, an injunction was granted to postpone library closures in Somerset. In September, both Somerset and Gloucestershire councils will be the subject of a full judicial review over their closure plans. As the cuts kick in, protesters and lawyers are fighting for individual libraries like villagers pushing stranded whales back into the sea. A library is such a potent symbol of a town's values: each one closed down might as well be six thousand stickers plastered over every available surface, reading "WE CHOSE TO BECOME MORE STUPID AND DULL."

While I have read a million words on the necessity for the cuts, I have not seen a single letter on what the exit plan is: what happens in four years' time, when the cuts will have succeeded, and the economy gets back to "normal" again. Do we then--prosperous once more--go round and re-open all these centers, clinics and libraries, which have sat, dark and unused, for nearly half a decade? It's hard to see how--it costs millions of pounds to re-open deserted buildings, and cash-strapped councils will have looked at billions of square feet of prime real estate with a coldly realistic eye. Unless the government has developed an exit strategy for the cuts, and insisted councils not sell closed properties, by the time we get back to "normal" again, our Victorian and post-war and 1960s red-brick boxy libraries will be coffee shops and pubs. No new libraries will be built to replace them. These libraries will be lost forever.

And, in their place, we will have thousands more public spaces where you are simply the money in your pocket, rather than the hunger in your heart. Kids--poor kids--will never know the fabulous, benign quirk of self-esteem of walking into "their" library and thinking, "I have read 60 percent of the books in here. I am awesome." Libraries that stayed open during the Blitz will be closed by budgets.

A trillion small doors closing.

from: HuffingtonPost

Reading Around

2013-05-17T17:00:00.000-04:00

On board a Freightliner M2 20K lorry, a mobile library devised by Alumnos47 and PRODUCTORA uses whatever changes it finds in the city to create its stage, turning imagination into collective memory.

by: María García Holley

At a time when digital information is replacing almost every kind of printed document, iPhones, iPads, Kindles and other similar portable devices have become books. It is hard to imagine the concept of a mobile library without immediately thinking of downloading its volumes from the Internet. Many people would regard it as an anachronism to think that a library could still have any relevance as an architectural typology in the face of the digital upheaval that has changed the ways we approach information and objects, transforming entire industries, such as the video, music and printing industries.

Unlike the idea of electronic books and digital collections, the A47 mobile library is a counter-current notion. It champions the physical nature of the printed book, which it supports with a full cultural programme. A truck carrying over 1,200 volumes of visual art and culture, the A47 travels the streets of Mexico City, providing the residents of various neighbourhoods in the capital with access to its contents.

The A47 Mobile Library is a project developed by the Fundación Alumnos47, a civil society organisation that brings learning communities together around contemporary artistic practices and visual culture. Given that the foundation's major project is to build a public contemporary art museum by around 2014, it seemed reasonable to use a mobile unit to activate the museum's existing collection until the building to house it is completed.

Alumnos47 and PRODUCTORA, A47 Mobile Library, Mexico City

Designing this unit turned into a veritable challenge. How do you take something so opposite to a piece of architecture as a lorry and turn it into not just a library, but a structure capable of hosting an entire spectrum of cultural activities? Looked at in this way, the archaic idea of building libraries started to regain a sense of modernity. Working on this premise, Mexican architecture studio PRODUCTORA came up with the design for a cultural centre within a 20 square metres space on board a Freightliner M2 20K lorry — a travelling building.

The lorry operates primarily as an itinerant collection of contemporary art books. However, beyond this use, every centimetre of its 20 square metre surface area is harnessed to maximum effect to achieve true functionality of space. The bookshelves have left their traditional form behind, instead being dismantlable trays floating above the library users, visually crowning the interior space. The free plan becomes a flexible, transparent platform that relates directly with the urban and social context. The lorry is a forum that can be used as a venue for an endless number of activities: book presentations, film clubs, poetry readings, workshops, as well as the opportunity to consult its bibliographic holdings.

The floor of the lorry comprises a series of mobile platforms giving access to the bookshelves, allowing the space to be re-arranged according to the different activities taking place. The micro perforated sheet surround acts as a permeable membrane that merges the outside and inside, making the space an exercise in honesty with its environment. From the street, one's view of the transparent intricacy that suspends the large solid volume allows a glimpse of the diverse range of titles inside, while also acting as an urban beacon through the night. This illumination — produced by the lorry's own integrated electricity generator — provides a reassuring glow when the streets fall dark, and announces the start of its nightly programme.

Famous names such as Lola Álvarez Bravo, Paul Strand, Roland Barthes and Laurie Anderson are among those to be discussed in the workshops that give purpose to this modern device. There are story readings and drawing sessions for children, while for adults there is the historiography and oral history of the colony. The raised platform of the A47 allows users to make use of the library in much the same way that an actor appropriates the stage.

Alumnos47 and PRODUCTORA, A47 Mobile Library, Mexico City

It is through this quest for new purposes that users experience the change in the idea of what a library means. Far from being an inert archive, the A47 mobile library is a living organism enabling new approaches that turn imagination into a collective memory. This is a lorry that uses whatever changes exist in the city to create its stage. A mechanical insect that, when night falls, can fold away its legs, stow away its stories and continue with its journey.

from: Domusweb

Author Gives Fake Writing Assignments to Online Cheaters

2013-05-16T17:00:00.000-04:00

by: Jason Boog

Term paper writing companies flourish online, but few people ever get to read their handiwork.

South Park, Louie, and The Chris Rock Show writer Vernon Chatman sent surreal homework assignments to writers working in the cheating industry. He republished his homework assignments and the actual essays he received in the new book, Mindsploitation: Asinine Assignments for the Online Homework Cheating Industry. Here’s a sample request:

"My midterm thesis essay paper is an exploration of Alternate Endings To Great Works of Literature. All I need from you is to come up with some Alternate endings to some Great works of literature … Provide a new ending to Catcher In The Rye where Holden Caulfield turns into a crawfish and goes into some kind of retail business."

from: GalleyCat

How a Scottish farmer became crime fiction’s next big thing

2013-05-15T17:00:00.000-04:00

James Oswald thinks up plots on his cattle and sheep farm, and has just won a six-figure deal

by: Tom Rowley

James Oswald is talking about his success as a crime writer when he suddenly becomes distracted and turns to the computer on his battered desk. His “lamb cam” shows a live feed from the shed some 500 yards across the fields. “I think that’s a little head,” he says, pointing excitedly.

We cut across a field of ewes to his polytunnel. Inside, a tiny newborn lamb is crouching next to a ewe. “Here comes the second one,” Oswald shouts, as it emerges and crouches on the straw while the ewe licks it warm. He creates a new pen so the ewe and its lambs won’t be disturbed by the rest of the flock. At last, Oswald is satisfied: “I’ll leave her to clean them up.

“I’ve been up since 5.30am,” he explains as we head back indoors. “As I was giving them hay earlier, I noticed one of them was struggling a bit and I had to help the lamb out. This is as hands-on as it gets.”

Oswald’s days are about to get even busier. On Thursday, his debut novel, Natural Causes, will be published, and two more are expected to hit bookshelves by next spring. He will have to juggle writing and farming with interviews and book-signings.

The 45-year-old already has experience of such success, however. In fact, he has become a self-publishing phenomenon, racking up 350,000 online sales for Natural Causes and its sequel, The Book of Souls, when he released them last year for download to e-readers such as the Kindle. The figures astonished publishing houses that are normally impressed by first-time authors who can sell 20,000 books, and Oswald was soon at the centre of a bidding war to publish his work in book form. Penguin won the auction, while the international rights have already been sold to six countries. The book has proved a critical success, too, making the shortlist for the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award.

So Oswald could be forgiven for relishing this moment in the limelight, booking a London venue for a glitzy bash on Thursday night. Instead, the book will be officially launched in… the Dundee Waterstones.

He points across to the city from his window, showing how convenient the party will be. His view is rather wider than that, however. His home overlooks the River Tay, some two miles wide as it reaches its mouth. Twenty minutes’ drive south of Perth, Oswald can see the Grampian mountains to the west on a good day, while the Tay stretches to the North Sea beyond Dundee to the east.

Oswald shares the study-cum-kitchen with three dogs; his partner, Barbara, will soon join him. Logs stand next to the wood-burning stove, and a whiteboard pinned above his desk is covered with scrawled ideas for future novels.

“I’ve always wanted to write,” says Oswald, perched on a black leather chair, incongruous among the dog blankets that clutter the floor. “I just love telling stories. My uncle told my mother when I was four that I’d be a writer because of the tall tales I used to tell. But you can’t be a full-time writer unless you’re really, really lucky, so you need to have a day job.”

He has worked on farms since he graduated from Aberdeen University in 1990, first doing odd jobs in Scotland before settling in rural Wales, working as an agricultural consultant.

He had just bought a house there with Barbara five years ago when two police officers knocked on his door one day at 3am to tell him his parents, David and Juliet, had died. Their pick-up truck had collided with a car on the A9 in an accident that also killed a Dutch man and his young son. Oswald inherited the 350-acre farm he had hungered for in the toughest of circumstances. “I’d always wanted to take over – but after my dad retired, not after an accident like that. It was enormously traumatic. I had no enthusiasm for anything at all. I certainly didn’t want to write, and I didn’t write for about two years.”

He moved to the farm and prepared to abandon his dream to tend his 12 Highland cattle and 50 New Zealand Romney sheep. In despondent mood, he realised the publishers had been right to turn down Natural Causes when his agent had hawked it around a few years previously.

But at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival a few weeks later, he got talking to Allan Guthrie, whose first e-book had just sold very successfully. “I hadn’t really cottoned on to the whole Kindle thing, but I just had to pay $80 for the cover to be designed and for a few beers for my friends for proofreading. I thought I’d give it one more go.”

Within weeks Oswald was shifting 2,000 copies a day. Readers loved his protagonist, Edinburgh’s Det Insp Tony McLean, who combines old-fashioned sleuthing with supernatural intuition, and Natural Causes soon topped Amazon’s e-book chart.

“Nothing gives you your self-confidence back like 350,000 people downloading your book,” he grins. “The sales figures are updated in real time and it was really addictive. I had to ration myself to only checking them after a day on the farm.”

Far from finding it a bind, he says his day job helps him to write. “If I’m on the tractor, it’s not mentally taxing so I can just think through plots. If I go for a walk and I lose the dogs because it’s all going off in my head, then that’s brilliant. My notebook is never far away, so I can scribble things down. It has all sorts of questionable stains on it.”

He was mending a fence in a hailstorm when his agent called with the result of the auction. “My fingers were barely working, but I managed to get the phone out. She said she’d done a six-figure deal. I thought, 'I can pay someone to come and do this fencing for me’.” He quickly frittered some of the money away on such luxuries as a new tractor.

The hefty advance suggests that Penguin considers Oswald in the same bracket as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. So surely he can give up the day job? “I could never move,” he insists. “For all that it is bloody hard work, there is something magical about lambing and calving. I could do my writing in a city staring out at a brick wall – but this is the view I want.”

from: Telegraph

Used e-books for sale? Not so fast

2013-05-14T17:00:00.000-04:00

by Hector Tobar

Is it legal to sell a used e-book?

A Massachusetts start-up that hopes to start selling used e-books and other used digital content this summer suffered a legal setback in court recently when a federal judge ruled that it had infringed the rights of Capitol Records by facilitating the resale of copied digital music.

And now a judge in Germany has ruled that digital books can’t be resold by purchasers, ruling against a consumer group that was seeking the right for German readers to do so.

At issue is a very simple legal principle. You can resell a printed book because in doing so you’re not making a copy of it and thus not violating the author’s copyright. What you're not allowed to do is make a copy of the original work and sell that. Generally, when you buy a digital work of art, such as an MP3 or an e-book, what you download is considered an original and if you circulate it, you're making a digital copy.

The Boston start-up ReDigi believes it had solved that issues by giving digital content “physicality.” “ReDigi wants to take legally purchased e-books off your computer, digitally watermark them, and then store them on a cloud-based server,” Boston Magazine reports. In that cloud, the company argues, “it is effectively the right of ownership that is bought and sold.“

A federal judge disagreed.

But, as Boston Magazine writes: “Legal issues aside, many analysts feel these markets are almost inevitable. Amazon has acquired a patent for its own used-digital-media market. Already, each Amazon book page has a space for the price of a used Kindle edition. It’s still blank -- for now, anyway.”

Already, Amazon has a digital lending library, whose content continues to grow.

from: LA Times

A glimpse into Guantánamo Bay's library

2013-05-13T17:00:00.000-04:00

From the well-thumbed – Danielle Steele – to the untouched classics, pictures posted by US journalists show the reading matter permitted in the world's most controversial prison

by: Nina Martyris

The Pentagon doesn't let journalists talk to prisoners in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, where more than half of the 166 detainees are currently on hunger strike, but reporters are granted access to the prison library – inspiring a blog from the New York Times reporter Charlie Savage that collects pictures of books uploaded by journalists reporting on Gitmo.

Prisoners aren't allowed to go the library, but they can put in requests for books they want to read. The books are thoroughly checked in case they are being used to exchange messages – any attempts to do so are punished with a suspension of the library facility.

The few thousand titles offer a strange mix of books ranging from the pulpy – Danielle Steele's The Kiss (in Arabic) – to the classic – six copies of David Copperfield – to the canonical – seven copies of Homer's Odyssey. The Steele book looks pretty well-thumbed but it's doubtful if anyone has borrowed Homer to pass the time, although some detainees have been there 11 years – longer than it took Odysseus to return to Ithaca via a perilous journey that included more than a spot of waterboarding at the hands of Poseidon.

Other books include seven copies of Pearl S Buck's The Good Earth, CS Lewis's Narnia series, Tolkien, Stieg Larsson's trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz, a Pashto-to-English dictionary, Captain America comic books, puzzle books, a Russian edition of a National Geographic magazine, Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Khaled Hosseini's maudlin hit The Kite Runner. Watership Down and Star Wars share shelf space with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Apart from the books, the video game Angry Birds is also available.

Earlier reports have said that the most popular books are Agatha Christie's mysteries, Kahlil Gibran and the Harry Potter novels. Harry Potter has also been used an in interrogation tactic. According to Fox News, members of Congress visiting the prison in 2005 observed how one interrogator tried to break down a prisoner by reading aloud from a Harry Potter novel for hours – the detainee turned his back and covered his ears to block out the sound.

Among the spy novels is a paperback copy of The Tailor of Panama, John le Carré's hilarious but stinging indictment of fraudulent intelligence gathering – a subject that cuts close to home in a prison of this kind. The 1996 novel was seen as a prescient foretelling of the weapons of mass destruction intelligence scam that paved the way for the US invasion of Iraq. President George Bush opened Guantánamo in 2002 as a important plank of his "war on terror". The 81-year-old le Carré, who has been scathing in his criticism of "Bush and his junta", recently told the New York Times that he keeps a rubber cartoon figure of the former president in his bathroom. He also said he was disappointed in Obama for not closing Guantánamo as he promised to do when he ran for office in 2008.

Obama did sign an executive order to close the prison in 2009 – it was one of the first things he did on entering office – but Congress remains implacably opposed to doing so. With the hunger strike making international headlines, Obama has renewed his call for closure, saying that "the notion that we're going to keep 100 individuals in no man's land in perpetuity" was not "sustainable".

Miami Herald journalist Carol Rosenberg posted a picture of an Arabic translation of Gabriel García Márquez's News of a Kidnapping. She said the book looked "well read". Incidentally, two years ago, this non-fiction book on how the Medellín cartel kidnapped a group of Colombians in the 1990s at the height of the drug war became a bestseller in Iran, after opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi told his compatriots that if they wanted to know what it was like for him to be under house arrest, they should read this book.

One of the most borrowed titles is the Arabic self-help book Don't Be Sad, published by the International Islamic Publishing House in Saudi Arabia. It advocates patience, hard work and keeping one's faith in Allah. In the foreword, the publisher states that the book is for everyone, Muslims and non-Muslims, though the solutions are offered from an Islamic perspective. Chapters have titles such as "Extract the honey but do not break the hive", "Isolation and its positive effects", and the quintessentially American "Convert a lemon into a sweet drink". According to Wikipedia, Christian anarchist Elbert Hubbard coined the phrase in 1915 and it was later popularised by Dale Carnegie.

The religious section – inmates are given a copy of the Qur'an to keep with them in their cells – includes Fatwas of the Pillars of Islam and the biography of the Prophet (in French) and several copies, also in French, of Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi. The Hindu spiritual teacher, who helped popularise yoga in America, was a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi – the most famous hunger striker of the 20th century.

from: Guardian

Physical Books Are Dead...Long Live Physical Books

2013-05-10T17:00:00.001-04:00

by: Matt Peckham

A little less than two years ago, one of the largest physical booksellers in the U.S. shuttered forever, saying farewell to nearly 400 stores and about 11,000 employees. At least three of those stores, including the company’s 330,000-square foot headquarters, were in my backyard (Ann Arbor, Michigan). Borders’ departure left us with a handful of secondhand booksellers, one notable independent and a single Barnes & Noble. The sense that we’d gone from feast to famine overnight was indelible, a sense driven by presumptions that physical books are doomed, to be assimilated by the Borg-like inexorability of the digital medium. If you hold with some of the less optimistic analyst predictions, the writing may even be on the wall for the company Barnes, Noble and eventually Leonard Riggio built.

Each year the Publishers’ Association rolls out a bunch of numbers canvassing the last year’s book sales. Given what we think we know about physical books, this year’s numbers are something of a surprise. For starters, book sales overall — that is, both digital and physical formats — actually rose 4% in 2012 (over $5 million). That’s a record, made even sweeter because 2011 revenue had been negative — a 2% slump from 2010.

We can thank digital for much of the gain, of course, with overall digital sales up a whopping 66%, split between e-book sales (up 134%) and digital fiction sales (up 149%). And yes, physical book sales were down, though with a mere 1% dip, only slightly. But what I’m not sure anyone was expecting was this: Total sales of physical books in the fiction genre actually grew by 3%. Take a bow, Fifty Shades of Grey.

Another area physical book sales grew: children’s books. Why? Well, the rate at which readers are shifting from physical to digital books appears to be related to what each genre tends to do best or uniquely: PA reports 26% of fiction sales were digital, but that figure drops to 5% for nonfiction and just 3% for children’s books.

As the BBC notes, it’s probably a matter of why you buy (and what you can do with) different types of books. You’re not losing much in the translation, going from Fifty Shades of Grey on paper to the e-ink version. But e-readers pale in comparison to physical objects when the physical object happens to be two or three times the size of the average slate, harbors giant splashy color pictures, and — as I’ve come to understand with my nine-month-old — can just as often be “read” with one’s mouth as one’s fingers (a definite no-no when it comes to our tablets and smartphones). In fact it’s hard to imagine tablets ever doing stuff involving irregular sizing or extensibility — say pop-ups — all that well, holography or no, or presenting the same sort of rigid physicality you want when your child’s flipping through one of these extra-durable infant books where each page is roughly a quarter-inch thick.

No, that doesn’t mean the audience for physical books won’t continue to decline — digital convenience will continue to outbalance what’s surely a generationally linked fondness for physical paper artifacts (if anything, that accelerates as the digital aesthetic improves). But it’s a reminder that there’ll probably be some things digital readers will never be able to replicate about the reading experience in certain genres or styles, and for the moment, that’s keeping physical sales buoyant.

The biggest losers here? Probably brick and mortar booksellers. With book sales experiencing actual growth, it’s not that people are spending less, it’s that they’re increasingly likely to do so through an e-tailer, either beaming books to an e-reader instantly at cut-rate prices, or willing to wait the extra day or two it takes for the physical object to arrive in exchange for significant price breaks over rent-beholden traditional retailers.

from: Time

When Will Amazon Come to the Arab World?

2013-05-09T17:00:00.000-04:00

by: Michael Bhaskar

When will Amazon come to the Arabic world? We know they are playing a global game. However as yet they have shown little interest in Arabic publishing. The Kindle, for example, does not support right to left text or Arabic characters, which means it is effectively useless for Arabic literature. It’s conversion and display of PDFs is lacking. And, perhaps of most importance, there is no Arabic store.

Amazon likes to bide its time. A Japanese store has just opened, as has a Brazilian Kindle store. Meanwhile Apple iBooks can comfortably work with Arabic text — and with a representative based in Abu Dhabi who is in charge of the region, one expects it will launch sometime soon. Google’s localization to the Arab world has always been very effective, much more so than many US firms’ efforts.

The main barriers are neither linguistic nor technological. If Amazon can produce a Japanese store, then it can produce an Arabic store. I suspect the main barrier to Amazon is the multi-state nature of the market. There are many jurisdictions, local cultural factors and the like for it to customize and Arabic store to. The complexity, to Amazon, of establishing an “Arabic Kindle” is therefore greater than other potentially lucrative markets, like in India (where it is now selling a rupee denominated offering), Russia, Latin America or as yet Kindle-less territories in Europe.

In the short run this probably limits the size of the Arabic ebook market. This is not necessarily a bad thing; many in the book industry complain about Amazon, more than they laud its successes. Arabic publishers and book sellers have some breathing space.

In the long term the Arabic market will, I think, be too big and important for Amazon to ignore if it wants to be a genuinely global company, as it’s rare public missives repeatedly state that it aspires to be. This means eventually there will be considerable investment and the ebook market is sure to see lift off in the region. The only real question then is whether a home grown or rival ebook service will get there first, or whether an alternative model, like Japanese keitai fiction, will thrive in the interim.

Agree, disagree? Let us know what you think in the comments.

A version of this story first appeared in the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair Show Daily.

from: Publishing Perspectives

The dictionary man: 'These days I won't get out of bed for a word unless it's been used hundreds of thousand of times'

2013-05-08T17:00:00.000-04:00

The OED’s outgoing editor has overseen the title’s transition to digital, and now the problems of documenting language changes in our texting, tweeting age

by: Tom Peck

There is something faintly comic, now, about the pioneering work John Simpson did when he took over the Oxford English Dictionary in the mid 1980s. Not the concise one, at one point in almost every home, the grand solver of Scrabble rows, but the massive 20 volume one that haunts the corner of serious libraries the world over.

"At the end of the 1970s, the university was considering mothballing it," he says, in his office at the Oxford University Press, next to, predictably a fairly large library containing nothing but dictionaries. "Then, in the mid 1980s this opportunity arose to scan or keyboard the whole of it, and transfer it on to CD Rom and magnetic tape."

He may not have saved the OED, a work of not even nearly paralleled significance as a historical record of the world's pre-eminent language, but he certainly re-invigorated it. Later this year, after 37 years of historical lexicography - searching for uses of words as far back as records will allow, and using their evolution to illuminate the history of culture and civilisation - the 59-year-old is to stand down as the dictionary's Chief Editor.

After the magnetic tape, and the CD-ROM came, you may have noticed, the internet, but Simpson is more sceptical than some about just how revolutionary its implications are on the language.

"People write more now than they did even in the very old days. When I was growing up, apart from what you wrote at school, and maybe birthday and christmas thank you letters, that was it. Now you're doing it in all your spare time, you're texting somebody Even if you don't know how to text, your grand daughter or someone knows how to so you have to learn. So people are much freer and more open in what they write about, and you're more likely to accept acronysms, SMS speak. LOL is in the OED already. Some of these things are older than you think. You see C.U. way back in history, far older than its SMS usage. But that doesn't upset the core of the language, which is pretty solid and pretty standard and has been for a long time.

"Big changes aren't happening so fast as they were in the old days. If you lived in 1000, and then looked ahead to 1500 you wouldn't understand the words and the accents that were being used then, especially with the influx of French. I don't see such cataclysmic change happening in the future.

"From 1750 or so, from Samuel Johnson's dictionary, things really haven't changed so much. Whereas 250 years before Johnson it was dogged by non-standardisation. In the middle ages it was a series of dialects.

"I'm probably slower to accept that there is a massive change on the way, because I'm aware that there has been a lot of stability over the last few centuries. I don't think a completely new form of language is going to come out of the technological changes we're seeing now. I'd be very surprised if it did. "

Ever since the OED was founded, in the mid-nineteenth century, English has been the language of the world, a notion that only recently has been under threat - at least through peaceful means. Whether it outlasts the transferring of power and wealth to the east, is not simply a socio-economic matter.

"In the 80, my predecessor Bob Burchfield, gave lectures where he claimed that in 200 years time, British and American English would be mutually incomprehensible. Now the question is more whether in 200 years time whether English will be of any significance on the world stage at all, whether it will have been overtaken by Chinese, or Indian. I can't tell where things are going to go, but there are difficulties with the Chinese and Indian languages becoming the principle language, because people from outside those areas will have to learn new alphabets. It would be quite a complicated shift. But perhaps the Chinese and Indian languages will shift themselves, in such a way that makes them more easy to accommodate. I would be suspicious of the possibility at the moment, but things change so quick that who's to say in 50 years things won't be very different."

On Mr Simpson's watch the OED is now updated every three months, far more regularly than before, and over 60,000 new words and definitions have been added. On his desk is a stack of A4, 107 pages thick, with a post-it note on the front on which the word 'EYE' is written. "Yes, these are all the definitions for eye. I've been looking at eye-shadow recently," he says. "I've found early uses of the term on databases for American local newspapers. Eye-wash. A wash or lotion from the eye, from the 19th century. Now we've found examples back to the 18th century. And it also means nonsense, which comes from the late nineteenth century. But we've just found an example from The Times, in 1872, of that usage, so that'll be in the next edition."

The work is essentially the same in nature to when its first editor Sir James Murray, began in 1879, except there is more emailing and less letter-writing. But the 21st century dictionary is a subtly but noticeably different undertaking.

"When I started writing in the 1970s we were aware that our target audience was Oxford dons, the sort of people who would have access to and be interested in this 20 volume thing. Now it's online we're conscious that its accessible to a much wider range of people. We don't want to lower the quality of the analysis that we do, but we do want to make it more open and more accessible to a broader range of people."

The opportunity to link too, is a landmark shift. In a computerised world, "You could link through to the OED in poems, for example. Take a word like darkling. A pupil comes across that word in a poem, and if he can link through to the OED entry for it, it can tell you something about the resonance of that word for the poet - what the word meant when he or she wrote it. That's far more effective, if you come across a word that you don't understand, than you putting your hand up and your teacher saying 'oh it means this.'.

Simpson refuses to be drawn on his favourite words, regarding them as "objects of scientific study rather than cosy little things", explaining his interest is more in "what image you can draw of a word, in terms of what compounds and derivatives it has, in examples from the past." One example is "civil" and "uncivil". "Why should civil have such such a different profile to uncivil. Civil has all sorts of meanings. Uncivil is used in a much narrower context."

The dawning of the on-line age has, if anything, made it harder for new words to be included. Once, "five references over five years" was enough, but now with Google, that means every spelling mistake imaginable would be worthy of inclusion. If say, a new word went rival, as the imaginative and newly coined insult, cockhat, did on Twitter, after it was used in a rather rude email, it would now need "to be used in a variety of sources, hundreds of thousands of times, before I would even get out of bed to look at it."

from: Independent

E-Books and Democracy

2013-05-07T17:00:00.000-04:00

by: Anthony W Marx

WRESTLING with my newspaper on the subway recently, I noticed the woman next to me reading a book on her smartphone. “That has to hurt your eyes,” I commented. Not missing a beat, she replied, in true New York style, “My font is bigger than yours.” She was right.

The information revolution raises profound questions about the future of books, reading and libraries. While publishers have been nimble about marketing e-books to consumers, until very recently they’ve been mostly unwilling to sell e-books to libraries to lend, fearful that doing so would hurt their business, which is under considerable pressure.

Negotiations between the nation’s libraries and the Big Six publishers — Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, Random House and Simon & Schuster, which publish roughly two-thirds of the books in America — have gone in fits and starts. Today Hachette, which had been a holdout, is joining the others in announcing that it will make e-books available to public libraries. This is a big step, as it represents, for the first time, a consensus among the Big Six, at least in principle, that their e-books should be made available to library users.

E-book readership is rising much faster than readership of print books; digital books could soon be the most popular book format. Readership of our e-books soared 168 percent from 2011 to 2012; print circulation, while much larger, remained constant.

Over a quarter of New York City’s 8.2 million residents borrow books from the city’s three public library systems. For those who cannot afford to buy downloads, digital books from libraries are essential to improving literacy, civic engagement and the technological facility necessary for economic success.

The Great Recession triggered a nationwide surge in library usage. Total circulation at the New York Public Library’s 87 neighborhood branches — in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island — has risen 44 percent since 2008.

Libraries remain essential repositories of books, periodicals and research collections, but they are also places to check e-mail and browse the Web — a third of New Yorkers lack home broadband — and to learn computer skills, seek jobs and get information about government benefits. At a time of painful austerity and rising inequality, we are raising money to rapidly expand English-language classes, computer training and after-school programs. Along with our counterparts in Brooklyn and Queens, we are supplementing school libraries by delivering print books directly to schools.

E-books might not seem like a priority given those daunting tasks — but as the nature of reading changes, access to these books is essential for libraries to remain vital. The New York Public Library helped lead talks with the publishers over e-books. Before today’s breakthrough, we had some false starts. While HarperCollins, in 2003, was the first to provide access, after the downturn, it limited the number of times each e-book could be lent, while Hachette decided to no longer sell new e-books to libraries, and Penguin, which had agreed to do so, said it might back out. To their credit, the publishers have now each come around.

Last September, Penguin agreed to make its e-books available to patrons at the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library, but with a six-month lag for new titles. Penguin recently agreed to release e-books to libraries at the same time its hardcovers came out. In April, Simon & Schuster agreed to sell e-books to the city’s libraries. Today’s announcement by Hachette (whose imprints include Little, Brown) is the capstone of that process.

Many issues still need to be sorted out. Five of the Big Six are making their entire e-book inventory available to us to choose from, while Macmillan is offering only a limited selection. HarperCollins allows us to lend each e-book we acquire only 26 times per title; Penguin and Simon & Schuster offer one-year licenses; and Random House sells licenses without time limits but charges much more per license. (In all cases, an e-book can be borrowed by only one patron at a time.) Prices charged to libraries vary widely according to the kind of license agreement, and we hope they will be reduced as demand increases.

Selection remains limited. The New York Public Library had 100,000 copies of 37,000 digital titles in circulation last year, compared with 6.5 million copies in circulation of 1 million print titles. Just as libraries decide which physical books to purchase and how many of each, we now will be deciding the same for e-books. We also have to educate patrons that they can download library e-books anywhere and on any device. Most Americans don’t even know that libraries offer e-books, according to national surveys.

We have every interest in seeing that publishers remain sustainable enterprises and that authors are paid fairly for their work. But those economic imperatives must be considered alongside the role of libraries in a democratic society. The challenge is to ensure that the information revolution provides more, not less, access for the public — including that subway rider.

Anthony W. Marx is the president of the New York Public Library.

from: NY Times

Libraries; maintaining a role in the digital world

2013-05-06T17:00:00.000-04:00

By Design's Janne Ryan spoke with architecture critic Elizabeth Farrelly and architect Tone Wheeler about the powerful connection between knowledge and the design of libraries. As the digital world changes our lives, so too do the design of our libraries and their role. Are they still important?

by: Janne Ryan

The upper wing of the Mitchell Library is, as architect Tone Wheeler describes it, 'the traditional idea of a library'.

It's here that the massive skylight towers over the card indexes, and where studious researchers sit quietly at large communal tables surrounded by piles and piles of books.

Melbourne's main public library has its own octagonal reading room, and both echo the function if not the design of iconic spaces in the great libraries -- the British Library Reading Room and Trinity College Library in Dublin.

'I think this is one of the best rooms in Sydney, possibly one of the best rooms I know in Australia,' says architecture critic Elizabeth Farrelly. 'I love it for its ‘libraryness’ but also for its ‘roomness’, the shape and the quality and the sense of an ideas space.'

I'm taking Ms Farrelly and Mr Wheeler on a tour of the library, and we're trying to discover how these traditional spaces might function in a new digital age, where the books on the walls are all digitised and accessible from home.

'[W]hen you see libraries where books were written…I think that's the thing about the British Library when you go in the British Museum and you see there is a corner devoted to all the works that Karl Marx referred to in that library when he was writing and researching there,' Mr Wheeler says. 'There's a sense of the ideas being made evident and you can see it, and I think that's the thing about seeing rows and rows and rows of books, the wealth of human endeavour in all of its spines all showing to you in all the different colours. There's a sense of the grandeur about that and that's matched by the grandeur of this room.'

Grandeur is evoked not just by the books and history, but by the architecture itself. Libraries, like other 'essential' municipal buildings such as schools and hospitals, have traditionally been designed to elicit a certain feeling. But can that design purpose, and that feeling, survive a change of function?

'[W]e now start to think of the book as an endangered species, so the question of the library and the future of the library also comes into play,' Ms Farrelly says. 'And if you talk to librarians now they'll talk as if the future library is terribly exciting -- but it's really a kind of combination of community party space and computer room with internet. And you think, well, everybody has already got their own computers, so what is it actually, this thing? Maybe it's a whole lot of comfortable chairs with some sort of decorative books around.'

'That ancient tradition which started with Alexandria, where the books weren't even replicated, they were original copies, [in those libraries] they were terribly precious,' she says. 'And as [books] got printed and replicated and then digitised, the sense of specialness has disappeared. Now... no one would build a three-storey, galleried, glass-ceilinged, vaulted space.'

With the idea of books changing from something 'precious', to something replicated and common, to something potentially worthless, our sense of knowledge as belonging to books is beginning to fade. Mr Wheeler says that this change in how information is stored has altered both the role of books and of readers in modern libraries. The process of change started well before the internet though, with the introduction of public lending.

'I think once you start lending them [books] out they're no longer inside the vault and therefore I think you dissipate the notion of going to the library to read or to find what you've got,' Mr Wheeler says. 'And I think that's the start of this change. Many people would think it's a downward trend, I think it's just rapid change.'

Most libraries are designed to accommodate the dual purpose of book repository (the stack) and reading room, and it's challenging to rethink what these two areas could be re-purposed towards, Mr Wheeler says.

'I think probably the clearest one of those is Ken Woolley's version for Sydney University, where the stack was a concrete structure then clad in bronze on the outside of it, and that was all very vertical. And next to that is a horizontal building with glass all the way around, fantastic views looking back at the city and places to sit where you read. So that was the perfect evocation of the book on one side and the reader on the other.'

Ms Farrelly is less sanguine, and worries about the future of the stack as a space where students can wander through and dream about books and knowledge.

'The space in the stack [at Sydney University Library] was so beautiful,' she says. 'I mean, you walked on those wire floors, so you could actually read that sense of the whole vertical connection of the space which was lovely, and it was like…it always used to remind me, although it wasn't really like it, of that Borges story of the infinite library, where the library is a metaphor for the universe, and it's actually quite Kafkaesque because the library ends up being meaningless and all the books are free of content and you can't get anywhere. I actually think it is a downward trend, I think the loss of beauty is always a downward trend.'

But in transforming from a 'church of books' to a different kind of public spiritual place, the library doesn't necessarily have to lose its function as a place of beauty, contemplation and community, Mr Wheeler says.

'We're talking about a modern church being much more about people singing and coming together as a community, and I think that's what the library now wants to be,' he says. 'The library can't stand alone now. Take the Surrey Hills Library in Sydney, the library itself is down underground, with computers, and above that is a big community reading room and above that a childcare centre. It's almost as if the library can't stand alone anymore, it needs a number of other things to assist it.'

However, in new libraries like the Surry Hills Library in Sydney where the books are underground, does the design have less authority? And if so, what element of design has taken away that authority?

'I think to some extent Tone's right, the borrowable nature of books makes them seem less special,' Ms Farrelly says. 'And that sort of municipal library plastic-covered, dog-eared book that you get is less impressive as a tome than the books that I saw recently, for example, in the Hunterian Library, which is the Royal College of Surgeons library in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London, which is a very tall room like this one but with those lovely full-height windows with reveals, which are about a metre deep of the windows, [and] are actually book lined.

'There's no way you go in there and have a conversation,' she says. 'You go in there and it immediately says to you 'treat it with respect'. There is definitely a power relationship, and the room is running the show, the consumer is not in charge. And modern consumers find that quite uncomfortable I think.'

That charge, though, could potentially be made of most modern architecture, not just libraries, Ms Farrelly concedes.

'Architecture doesn't even want authority anymore, architecture wants celebrity,' she says. 'Everybody wants to be a Bilbao, nobody wants to be dignified and serious and respected. They just want to be admired and loved and read about. So it's all about the wildly weird front-page picture. Most architecture is after that single image and it's certainly not an interior image, it's always the picture of the form, which is ironic, we're back to outright formalism, which is kind of interesting, like the end of 19th century formalism. So we're due for a revolution here I think.'

from: ABC

Men Read Jane Austen, Stephenie Meyer, and Ursula K. Le Guin

2013-05-03T17:00:00.000-04:00

Female authors can teach men more about themselves, and women, and humans in general.

by: Noah Berlatsky

Do men read books by women? Do men read books about women? The answer, as Slate's Ester Bloom says, is "sure." To point to just the most obvious example: you don't sell as many books as J.K. Rowling does without appealing to men, women, and children of all ages.

A more interesting question, then, might be, why do men read books by and/or about women? The question comes up, perhaps, because we often think of identity and art as intertwined. Women, in theory, read Twilight to see themselves in Bella; men read Ian Fleming to see themselves in James Bond.

There's no doubt truth to that—but it rather elides the fact that lots of women have read Ian Fleming over the years, and a fair number of guys (like me) have read Twilight. So what do people get from books that aren't marketed to them, or aren't about them?

Part of the answer is simple enough—men and women aren't, or don't have to be, all that different. Lots of women enjoy shooting the bad guys with James Bond; I can identify quite easily with Bella's feelings of isolation, depression, and romantic angst. Men aren't from Mars and women aren't from Venus; we're both from Earth, and as such it's not all that hard to talk to each other.

But if similarity can be engaging, so can difference. For me, and I'd guess for a lot of men, part of the appeal of reading women writers is precisely the chance to know, or to be, someone else. Just as women are often fascinated by men, men—of whatever sexual orientation—are often quite interested in women. I know women read and enjoy Pride and Prejudice, too. But as far as I'm concerned, Jane Austen wrote is so guys like me can fall in love not just with Elizabeth's eyes or even with her wit, but with her whole self there on the page. Same with Dorothea in Middlemarch, or Dana in Kindred. If you're interested in how women think and feel—and what guy isn't interested in that?—then the best place to go is to books by women.

Books by female writers aren't just the best place to go to learn about women, though. They're also often the best place to go to learn about men. Take the passage below from Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Diagetically it's spoken by Estraven, an alien hermaphrodite, but it's also pretty clearly Le Guin's own half-loving, half-bemused tribute to masculinity and men.

"There is a frailty about him. He is all unprotected, exposed, vulnerable, even to his sexual organ, which he must carry always outside himself; but he is strong, unbelievably strong. I am not sure he can keep hauling any longer than I can, but he can haul harder and faster than I—twice as hard.... To match his frailty and strength, he has a spirit easy to despair and quick to defiance: a fierce, impatient courage. This slow, hard crawling work we have been doing these days wears him out in body and will, so that if he were one of my race I should think him a coward, but he is anything but that; he has a ready bravery I have never seen the like of."

Not all portraits of men by women are so forgiving. Joanna Russ in The Female Man, for example, gleefully imagines clawed women castrating men ("I don't give a damn whether it was necessary or not....I liked it") Susan Brownmiller, in Against Our Will, less hyperbolically settles for an ode to the joys of kicking men in the balls.

But why should aggression against men put off a male audience? As that insightful female writer Susie Bright says, "Most men are disgusted with other men." Male competitiveness with other males, not to mention male contempt for other males, powers a huge amount of narratives by and for men, from Hamlet to Superman's clashes with Lex Luthor to The Great Gatsby. Men love misandry in their art—and who better to provide it to them than female writers?

For men, then, books by women provide a pleasurable familiarity, a window onto other perspectives, and a chance to see both their strengths and their weaknesses through others eyes. None of which sounds all that different from what any book provides to anyone.

And yet, acknowledging that female writers have something particular to offer to male readers seems like it's worth doing for several reasons. In the first place, as Bloom writes, the belief that men won't read women tends to close down opportunities for those female writers, and to marginalize their work. Moreover, that same belief can also close down opportunities for male readers. Women are allowed, and even encouraged, to identify with James Bond, but men who identify with Bella or with Susan Brownmiller open themselves up to ridicule. To assert that women authors have something to offer men, then, is not just to say that a man can read Jane Austen and still be a man. It's to say that to read Jane Austen is one way that a man can be a man.

from: The Atlantic

Are children's books reinforcing materialism?

2013-05-02T17:00:00.000-04:00

Research into acclaimed titles for very young children finds messages encouraging 'consumer involvement' and 'attachment to objects'. Should we buy into the thesis?

by: Alison Flood

Veruca Salt, the ultimate consumer, might have been given her comeuppance by Roald Dahl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory back in 1964, but many of the children's books of today are continually reinforcing materialistic behaviour, according to new research.

Cultivating Little Consumers: How Picture Books Influence Materialism in Children, the 196-page thesis of University of Vermont student Rachel Franz, analysed the content of 30 picture books written between 1998 and 2012, a mix of New York Times bestsellers, librarian-recommended books and Caldecott Medal Winners. Franz found that a number of picture books "featured excessive amounts of toys, sending pro-consumer messages to children ages zero to six" – but also that this message was often countered by more outdoor-related themes.

"Some scholars have vaguely pointed to children's books as both sources of consumer socialisation and sources for countering consumerism, but investigations of these ideas were limited as far as I could tell," says Franz, who will present her research at a conference on Tuesday. "As a babysitter, I noticed that one consistent element in the lives of all of the little ones I have looked after is reading books at bedtime. I was reading three to four books per night, and some of them were filled with these consumer messages. So, the topic needed more insight. I asked the question, 'How do picture books potentially deter or reinforce materialism and consumer involvement in young children?'"

She used 50 indicators across 10 categories to analyse the books, from "emphasis on looks" to "desire for more 'stuff'", looking at the different ways in which stories can promote and discourage the "consumer socialisation" of their readers. One of the worst example she found was in Pinkalicious by Victoria and Elizabeth Kann, in which the main character, Pinkalicious, "lives in a home with a crystal chandelier in her bedroom, is surrounded by a plethora of toys, desires instant gratification, and exhibits unmistakable vanity".

"The book's dialogue illustrates how relationships are centred around products in many of the picture books," says Franz. "For example, Pinkalicious constantly begs her parents for more pink cupcakes, even after they have caused her skin and hair to turn pink. She reflects, 'After dinner, I ate more cupcakes. Then I refused to go to bed. 'Just one more pink cupcake, and I'll go to sleep,' I promised.' Scholars argue that marketers encourage children to nag their parents, and this sort of pressure from kids is an equivalent reason to price for why parents actually purchase things. If this is reiterated in picture books, it provides just one more avenue by which children might become irresponsible consumers."

Her research also highlighted the "attachment to objects for happiness" in Chris Raschka's A Ball for Daisy, a wordless picture book in which Daisy the dog loves her ball, only to have it broken by another dog. Daisy plunges into sadness, but is given a new ball the next day and her happiness returns. "Her happiness is completely dependent on her ball," writes Franz.

Franz says she went into the study expecting to find "overwhelmingly consumer-driven messages" in all the books she looked at, but actually discovered that many titles simultaneously reinforced and deterred materialism. "In Square Cat by Elizabeth Schoonmaker, Eula the Square Cat hates her appearance so much that she stops purring. She compares herself to her round friends, she moans about how specific clothes don't fit her, she tries to become round with different clothing and make-up options, and, as she learns to love herself, realises that she can do so through specific fashion choices that fit her square shape. The end message of the book is self-acceptance, which should combat consumerism," she says. "However, the messages of vanity, social comparison, and articulating one's self-concept through material goods are also embedded in the story. Further research is necessary to determine exactly what messages children take from these books. But, these simultaneous occurrences do mimic the reality of our world. And they call for the development of critical thinking skills in order for children to know what's wrong and what's right anymore."

She wants authors to realise that "the power of picture books is to not only reflect childhood, but to influence it". "If our children are reading books where the characters are surrounded by heaps of toys, then those readers without excessive amounts of toys around them might feel as if they are not normal. Creating and promoting more interpretive children's books that challenge damaging norms while helping children develop critical thinking skills is going to be an essential task for authors, publishers, and other book-related industries in the future," she says.

Rebecca Cobb, who won the Waterstones children's book prize for her picture book Lunchtime, about a girl who doesn't want to eat her lunch, largely agrees with Franz. "I think that authors and illustrators do have a responsibility to be aware of the effect of their work on young children and should be careful about the attitudes they convey regarding materialism and also a wide range of other issues; however, a book can, for example, be illustrated with lots and lots of toys, as part of a visual celebration of the excitement and wonder of things without being pro-consumerist," she says. "I believe picture books can inspire children to become questioning, imaginative and thoughtful people with the ability to form their own values and opinions about what is really important in life."

But Jon Klassen, a Caldecott medal-winning author and illustrator, says it "gets tricky when you begin to see these books primarily as tools to promote certain kinds of behaviour, in any direction".

Klassen's New York Times bestseller I Want My Hat Back is part of Franz's research. The story of a bear who has lost his hat, is lied to by a rabbit about having the hat, and subsequently eats the rabbit, the book contains, found Franz, themes of "lying/manipulation as a means for acquisitions" as well as "emphasis on love of products", but also "reciprocity/altruism", and "outdoor engagement".

"If you're in the position of making these things, I think you mostly have to worry about whether the story is working the best it can, and just hope that your politics and attitudes that might be coming across are lining up with what's good for them," Klassen says. "I think it would be difficult to put together a good story if your main objective when you start is to promote an abstract point. The story has to find those things on its own."

Australian illustrator Freya Blackwood won the UK's most prestigious prize for a children's illustrator, the Kate Greenaway award, for her book Harry & Hopper, about a boy whose dog dies. Pointing out that "children are subjected to much more persuasive pro-consumer messages than picture books", Blackwood says it was nonetheless "eye-opening having an issue like this brought to the attention of those who create material for children", and that she "certainly had to quickly justify my work to myself".

"I came to the conclusion that there is a fine line between creating a realistic representation that children might relate to and creating something they desire," she says. "But surely it is the parents' responsibility to choose books to read to their children that represent their beliefs, or to discuss a book's content with the child."

Franz agrees, saying that parents can "use picture books to help children develop critical thinking skills around consumerism … Overall, I think this study reiterates that, in our pervasive consumer culture, children even at the youngest age need to develop critical thinking skills in all areas of their lives in order to preserve happiness and self-acceptance without the 'stuff'."

from: Guardian

At Toronto Public Library, Interactive Gaming with a Literary Twist

2013-05-01T17:00:00.000-04:00

The Hand Eye Society and Toronto Public Library have teamed up to create an interactive gaming experience based on Farenheit 451.
by: Natalie Zina Walschots

Despite threats to funding and other obstacles, Toronto Public Library has, especially in recent years, been making a concerted effort to host more exciting and dynamic events, such as its Make Some Noise concert series. Now the library system is branching out even further, partnering up with Jim Munroe, the sci-fi author and Hand Eye Society executive director, to create an interactive gaming experience.

The game, called KTR 451, is an alternate reality game based on this year’s selection for the library’s annual One Book program, Ray Bradbury’s classic science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Combining audio drama and scavenger-hunt elements, players join the game by calling a phone number (647-931-1585) and receiving “missions”—in other words, real-world tasks—that they have to complete. KTR 451 uses characters and themes from Bradbury’s novel. Players find themselves cast in the role of resistance fighters in the future, fighting for literary freedom.

Launched on April 2, the game features a new mission every week until April 22nd, when it culminates with a live event at the Toronto Reference Library: the Keep Toronto Reading Book Exchange, moderated by author Misha Glouberman and featuring Ryan Kamstra, Emily Pohl-Weary, and Munroe. Participants are being asked to bring a book that they love and are willing to swap. Those who participated in the alternate reality game in the weeks leading up to the event will be hailed as “heroes of the literary resistance.”

This won’t be the last time the Toronto Public Library and Munroe partner up. Both are already planning to work together for another gaming event around November 16, to celebrate International Games In Libraries Day.

CORRECTION: April 22, 2013, 1:00 PM Because of an editing error, this post originally said, incorrectly, that Jim Munroe was involved in making Sword and Sworcery, an iPhone video game. In fact, Munroe has no association with that game. This post also incorrectly called KTR 451 a production of the Hand Eye Society. In fact, while Munroe is the Hand Eye Society’s executive director, he’s handling KTR 451 as an independent side project. The post has been changed to reflect these things.

from: Torontoist

Do classic children's books give us too rosy a view of childhood?

2013-04-30T17:00:00.000-04:00

Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome may portray cosier times for children, but more recent reads are redressing the balance

by: Julia Eccleshare

"At a recent discussion of childhood during the past 50 years one speaker said he thought everyone remembered their childhood as being like something out of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons. Do you think how childhood is portrayed in classic children's books has affected how we think childhood used to be? If so, has it given us too rosy a view of it?"

It is interesting how most people think that childhood is so different from one generation to another and how universally it is thought that children are always getting worse!

Memories of childhood are probably pretty partial. Individually, they are based often based on the best bits, such as special outings or treats. Holidays usually feature and these are reinforced by family photos which seem to confirm that the sun shine a remarkable amount during childhood. Collectively, they are influenced by known facts of the time such as how schools were organised, what shopping or transport was like and the headlines of "average" family dynamics.

Beyond the individual and collective facts, stories about childhood in books are handed down as blueprints of collective behaviour. Enid Blyton's huge-selling family adventures, including The Famous Five and The Secret Seven series, both of which ran into many titles, offered children the chance to identify with adventures in the countryside which were probably just as out of reach in reality as a term at Hogwarts is to today's children. Richmal Crompton's Just William and its sequels also showed children "playing out", inventing activities around their daily lives and well out of sight of their parents.

These tales came to epitomise childhood of the time. When asked about their childhood many think they spent a lot of time outdoors and without adult supervision. But did they really? It may be that they just identified too much with the children they read about.

The rosy, cosy vision of the 1950s and 1960s - often thought of as a golden age of children's fiction - was challenged from the 1970s onwards by an increasing emphasis on books showing different kinds of childhood. These included titles such Jean MacGibbon's Hal, one of the first multi-cultural children's books which featured an Afro-Caribbean girl living in a tower block, and Gene Kemp's award-winning The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler set in a village school and with a girl as its sparky heroine – a far cry from the boy-dominated, private school settings which lay behind Arthur Ransome's children, for example.

The huge success of Jacqueline Wilson's The Story of Tracy Beaker and her very many other bestselling titles frequently showed contemporary children living in challenging circumstances - bed-and breakfast accommodation, with step-families, in dysfunctional families with ineffective parents. These stories gave more children the chance to find a life like their own in a story. They have often been attacked for being too miserable in their portrayal of childhood but the reality is that they probably reflected a far broader range of experiences more truthfully.

When set against the rosy glow of Ransome and Blyton, will historians and sociologists using children's stories as source material see childhood at the turn of the 20th century as grim? Quite possibly, as children's books certainly reflect the society they come from. However, I would hope that they will be also be viewed as the fictional representations they have been created to be.

from: Guardian

Ebook anxieties increase as publishing revolution rolls on

2013-04-29T17:00:00.000-04:00

Amazon's bid for rights to sell secondhand ebooks adds another layer of complexity to a world where the certainties of print culture are dissolving

by: Alison Flood

"My brain," as one reader put it rather dramatically, "fell over at the thought of selling 'used' ebooks". He wasn't the only one. The reaction to the news earlier this year that Amazon had a patent to sell secondhand ebooks was almost universally strong: it could ruin authors' livelihoods, said some commenters. It was dangerous for publishers, said others. It's just boggling my mind, said most.

These are the details we have: the patent is for an "electronic marketplace for used digital objects", where "when the user no longer desires to retain the right to access the now-used digital content, the user may move the used digital content to another user's personalised data store when permissible and the used digital content is deleted from the originating user's personalised data store". Amazon has not commented publicly about it, and it's possible that the book retailer may not be planning to do anything at all with the patent – that it was a defensive move.

But add it to the news last year that a Kindle user had her entire library wiped by Amazon without warning and the fact that, a few years ago, readers woke up to find that their digital copies of various books by George Orwell had vanished from their Kindles, and the possibility that ebooks could be sold as secondhand goods becomes another reminder of the sheer slipperiness – the intangibility – of the mushrooming digital product.

It used to be that a book was published, and that was it. Permanent, physical, tangible, it could be referred to for as long as the copy survived. That's not the case any more. We live in a world where page numbers – if they exist at all – don't correlate from device to device, where digital text can be updated at the touch of a button, where the ebooks we own can vanish without our say-so. It's something which is becoming a real issue, particularly for academics.

"I think it is a very grave problem," says Robert Darnton, scholar, author and Harvard University librarian. "If you're citing a digital version of a book, often you can't cite the pages." He adds that that documents have always been slippery – "there's no definitive text of King Lear" – but the ease with which it is now possible to make changes to published ebooks means "you take a problem like that, multiply it by 1,000, and that is the world we are in."

The issue is compounded, he says, "by the fact a lot of digital texts suffer from faulty editing, not to mention the hands of the scanners [appearing on pages]". He promises that the Digital Public Library of America, which launched last week, will "redo a lot of digitisation and make it right", as well as build in the capacity to make precise references.

"It is a mess, this world of digital texts," says Darnton. "We are living in a very fluid moment. Everything's changing. Nothing seems stable."

Angus Phillips, director of the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies at Oxford Brookes, agrees. "They are starting to put page numbers in some ebooks, and you can do percentages, but it is a bit irritating when you want to reference the pages," he says. "When you're reading and you want to look back, yes, ebooks have got a great search function, but with a physical book, I can flick back. Put [a term] into a search function, you might get 30 different references."

He also worries about what the possibility to update ebooks will mean for quality. "For authors, the printed book means you've finished and that's the final format – you can't keep revisiting it," he says. "You want the author to know this is the final version. If authors have 10 bites of the cherry, will they concentrate as hard as if they think it's the final version? There's a feeling with the web that you can put something up there, and people can change it. One of the advantages of books is that they're permanent."

The ability to update ebooks is there, however. "Publishers can make changes to their books and send us updated files any time," says an Amazon spokesperson.

But "we don't want to be in a situation where someone's book changes without them knowing – that would be bad practice," adds Michael Tamblyn, Kobo's chief content officer. "We do have it in our ability to provide alternative editions of material but it doesn't happen that often – it's a fairly rare thing. Most publishers are very conscious of the integrity of a published book – certainly as a consumer you wouldn't want your book to get shorter, for example."

Amazon says that at present, "if a new version of a book becomes available, the customer is notified and gets to choose if they would like an update, and they can do this in an automated way. They also get to keep their place in the book as well as their notes and highlights."

Textual slipperiness aside, there's also the gnarly issue of who, exactly, owns an ebook. John Scalzi, bestselling novelist and president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, is up in arms over Amazon's secondhand ebooks patent (it was on his blog where the reader's mind fell over).

"We don't know exactly what Amazon's planning to do with this. Every tech company out there files patents for things, but they don't necessarily have a plan to use them," he says. "On the other hand … there is likely to be interest in a secondhand market for electronic books, and the question then becomes how we balance the consumers' rights with the simple fact that pristine electronic copies of books are likely to undercut the incomes of the creators."

Scalzi can understand why consumers might be interested in selling on their ebooks – but "is an electronic file exactly the same as a physical object?" he ponders. "Some say absolutely, no matter what, if you buy it, you've bought it. Others say, if I have a book and take it to a used book store, when I give them the book, it's gone, whereas with an electronic book, it's possible I can make a copy for my archive, and resell the pristine-looking copy."

The issue, it seems, boils down to two things – does a reader own an ebook, or the licence to read an ebook? (Amazon's Kindle terms state that "Kindle content is licensed, not sold, to you by the content provider".) And is it possible to trust readers who wish to sell on their used ebooks not to have secretly made a copy, or two copies, or hundreds of copies, which they're handing out to all and sundry?

"If a large company like Amazon begins selling used works, are people who conscientiously go out of their way to buy books rather than pirate going to see a difference between a new file and an old one, one of which goes to pay me, and the other doesn't?" wonders Scalzi. "It's a very real concern for writers and other creators."

But he isn't panicking quite yet, because he believes that if Amazon, or another online book retailer, begins to sell used ebooks, there's likely to be a whole lot of legal action. "The legal ramifications are fascinating. If Amazon or whoever start selling these electronic files, and it could be proved that someone had made a copy, then we're looking at a really interesting class action suit. It could take years to go through court, and the legal right to sell could get halted while it went through the courts. That would do two things – give writers and publishers some time to figure out the ramifications, and have an effect on consumer behaviour. Regardless of what happens, nothing about this is going to come easy or simply or without a huge amount of legal litigation and ramifications," says Scalzi.

The novelist doesn't think the changes are all bad. "It is part of the overall conversation of what happens when an industry shifts. And in every shift in technology there will be some positives and some negatives."

Darnton, too – despite all his worries – is feeling positive. "As things change new possibilities open up, but we need to reach a point where we can stabilise at least the textual element. That's part of the mission of the Digital Public Library of America."

from: Guardian

Author sightings create new literary experiences

2013-04-26T17:00:00.000-04:00

by: Carrie Ruth Moore

Somehow, it’s not quite the same as running into George Clooney.

As native Angelenos know, casually bumping into movie stars is a likely possibility. A chance meeting can occur while waiting for a table at L.A. Live, standing in the luggage queue at LAX or even just walking the streets of Beverly Hills. And when it happens, many of us are reduced to starstruck admirers, unapologetically speechless as we confront the people who embody our favorite film characters.

With authors, however, the interaction is a bit different. Sure, some of our favorite novelists might be just as attractive and charismatic as Hollywood icons, but when their written creations are laid out on the blank page before us, we feel a certain closeness that we don’t necessarily get with stars of the screen.

Perhaps this feeling of intimacy comes with navigating the relationship between “creator” and “created.” Musicians, for example, usually gain respect when listeners learn that they have written their own lyrics or composed their own songs.

Artists simply feel more “authentic” if they’ve taken the time to put their own feelings — whether imaginary or not — on paper.

Imagine, for example, if Eminem didn’t write his own songs. Even for an artist who’s been criticized for his masochistic lyrical tendencies, the Grammy-winning rapper has earned respect for his unflinching ability to talk about his experiences with bullying and fatherhood in songs such as “Brain Damage” and “Hailie’s Song.”

And say what you like about Taylor Swift, but no one can deny that she’s not afraid to share her emotions when she’s discussing her friend Abigail in “Fifteen” or telling Drew “he’s the reason for the teardrops on her guitar.”

For authors, however, negotiating the territory between “creator” and “created” is a little ickier. As creative writers know, it’s extremely difficult to isolate yourself from the characters and worlds you create. Personal experiences creep in through the nouns and adjectives. Inner hopes and fears weave their way into character descriptions and plot development. Even though a story might not be true, per se, it is still an inseparable part of the one who created it.

Perhaps that’s why events like the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books draw so much attention. This weekend, the festival celebrates its 18th year of existence and its third year on USC’s campus. Last year, the Festival of Books drew more than 100,000 attendees, all lovers of literature who were eagerly anticipating a chance to get their hands on some rare books or interact with their favorite writers. Eric Jerome Dickey, Anne Rice and Julie Andrews all made appearances, dazzling crowds with their insightful takes on literature and the writing process.

This year, the so-called literary “headliners” feature everyone from Joyce Carol Oates to Lemony Snicket to Jamaica Kincaid, and fans of their works can easily spend more than an hour simply waiting in line for a three-second encounter with the admired authors.

But why is meeting an author in person accompanied by so much enthusiasm? Perhaps it’s because readers realize that by enjoying a particular novel, they are, in essence, enjoying a writer’s mental space. Unlike movie stars, who fit themselves into the predetermined molds of their characters, writers create the space being filled, starting from scratch as they ingrain themselves in each persona and detail.

When talking about the beloved characters in Harry Potter, for example, meeting Daniel Radcliffe or Emma Watson has a different connotation than meeting J.K. Rowling. Radcliffe might be charming as the loyal Harry, but Rowling, as the author, is Harry. She’s inhabited his mind, formed his history and mannerisms. And, yes, she might be lacking a lightning-shaped scar on her forehead, but Harry’s psychology has been wrought out of Rowling’s own reality and imagination.

This week, attendees at the Festival of Books will get the chance to interact with A Series of Unfortunate Events’ Count Olaf just by attending Snicket’s Saturday reading. And Offred of A Handmaid’s Tale will make an appearance in Bovard Auditorium as author Margaret Atwood engages in a conversation with KCRW’s Michael Silverblatt.

I exaggerate to make a point, but when we meet our favorite writers, it’s undeniable that we are meeting the psychologies and ideologies of the people who have touched us with their stories.

When reading the likes of Dana Johnson’s Elsewhere, California, for example, readers are essentially engaging with California and Los Angeles the way the author sees it.

And perhaps the author of Inkheart, Cornela Funke, never found herself physically trapped inside the world of a book, but underneath it all, there’s a startling metaphor about the joys of good literature. Fans of Inkheart certainly won’t have experiences battling the evil Capricorn, but they will understand that a story can capture your attention and feel just as tangible as their everyday realities — just as Funke intends them to.

It is the philosophy of these authors and the chance to recognize our own fears and hopes in other people that gets our blood pumping at the prospects of meeting them.

Sure, we might joke that authors are playing God as they create a world and characters that capture our hearts. But more importantly, we can realize that they are also playing themselves.

from: Daily Trojan

So Hot Right Now: Has Climate Change Created A New Literary Genre?

2013-04-25T17:00:00.000-04:00

by: Angela Evancie

When Superstorm Sandy hit New York City last fall, the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, like most everything else, totally shut down. It was a week before power returned to FSG, according to Brian Gittis, a senior publicist. When he got back to his office, he began sorting through galleys — advance copies of books. And one of them caught him off guard.

Its cover had an illustration of the Manhattan skyline half-submerged in water.

"It was definitely sort of a Twilight Zone moment," Gittis recalls.

The book was Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich. Its protagonist is a boy genius who spins out worst-case scenarios and sells his elaborate calculations to corporations. Given what happens next — a disastrous hurricane floods New York City — it's tempting to say that Rich himself predicted Sandy. He didn't, of course. He was as surprised as anyone else.

"I had the very strange experience of editing the final proof of my novel one night, going to sleep, and waking up and essentially seeing it adapted on cable television the next morning," Rich says. "It was eerie. But I think this is the time that we live in now. We live in this time where our worst fears are being realized regularly."

Odds is the latest in what seems to be an emerging literary genre. Over the past decade, more and more writers have begun to set their novels and short stories in worlds, not unlike our own, where the Earth's systems are noticeably off-kilter. The genre has come to be called climate fiction — "cli-fi," for short.

"I think we need a new type of novel to address a new type of reality," says Rich, "which is that we're headed toward something terrifying and large and transformative. And it's the novelist's job to try to understand, what is that doing to us?"

Of course, science fiction with an environmental bent has been around since the 1960s (think J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World). But while sci-fi usually takes place in a dystopian future, cli-fi happens in a dystopian present.

According to Judith Curry, professor and chair of Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, when novelists tackle climate change in their writing, they reach people in a way that scientists can't.

"You know, scientists and other people are trying to get their message across about various aspects of the climate change issue," says Curry. "And it seems like fiction is an untapped way of doing this — a way of smuggling some serious topics into the consciousness" of readers who may not be following the science.

Curry, who began assembling a list of cli-fi stories a few months ago, says she first saw a renewed interest in climate change fiction with Michael Crichton's 2004 novel, State of Fear, which is about ecoterrorists. Then came such books as Solar by Ian McEwan and Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. When Kingsolver spoke with NPR in November, she said her writing was driven by a simple question: "Why do we believe or disbelieve the evidence we see for climate change?"

"I really wanted to look into how we make those choices and how it's possible to begin a conversation across some of these divides," Kingsolver said, "between scientists and nonscientists, between rural and urban, between progressive and conservative — that when it comes to understanding the scientific truths about the world, there must be another way to bring information to people ... that's beyond simply condescending and saying, 'Well, if only you had the facts. If only you knew what I did, then you would be a smart person.' That gets you nowhere."

Writers can be sneaky in this way. Read all 300 pages of Odds Against Tomorrow, and you won't see the phrase "climate change" once. Rich says that was intentional: "I think the language around climate change is horribly bankrupt and, for the most part, are examples of bad writing, really. And cliche — 'climate change,' as a phrase, is cliche. 'Global warming' is a cliche."

As far as Rich is concerned, climate change itself is a foregone conclusion. The story — the suspense, the romance — is in how we deal with it.

"I don't think that the novelist necessarily has the responsibility to write about global warming or geopolitics or economic despair," he says. "But I do feel that novelists should write about what these things do to the human heart — write about the modern condition, essentially."

Other writers are a little more explicit. Daniel Kramb's 2012 novel From Here is about climate change activists — and Kramb says he wanted it to be overtly political.

"Some people are using climate change as a kind of wider setting," says Kramb, "whereas other people — I, certainly, in my novel — put it at the very heart of the novel."

Kramb says climate fiction is still kind of a niche. But it will make its mark on the world of literature.

"In fact," Kramb says, "I think when [people] look back at this 21st century ... they will definitely see climate change as one of the major themes in literature, if not the major theme."

War and peace ... and climate change?

**********************************************

Books Mentioned In This Story

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
From Here by Daniel Kramb
Solar by Ian McEwan
State of Fear by Michael Crichton
The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard

from: NPR

25 Most Popular Apps Used By Librarians

2013-04-24T17:00:00.000-04:00

Libraries have and will likelyemain one of the biggest and most important sources of knowledge in the world. While the internet has diminished the overall level of use that libraries see today, they are still important and are relied on by the public, by students, and by academics around the world. Technology has made it even easier to get the most from libraries, and today there are numerous apps for your mobile device that can help librarians get the most from their days.

Reading

1.Kindle – This is the most popular eReader app on the market and offers a huge selection of downloadable books to choose from, including numerous free ones.

2.iBooks – This is the Apple iOS eReader app and functions similarly to Kindle, though with a somewhat smaller selection.

3.Nook – Barnes and Noble’s official answer to the Kindle, this app also features many free books as well as the latest e-releases.

4.Free Books – Just like its name sounds, Free Books offers access to plenty of great free classic books.

5.Audiobooks – When you don’t have time to read, you can still listen to audiobooks. This app lets you access nearly 3,000 different classics in audio form.

6.GoodReader – GoodReader lets you access and read scholarly documents and literature on your mobile device. It also lets you store them on your mobile device and then access them later.

Organization, Productivity, And Work

7.Outliner – Outliner makes it easy to plan out projects and maintain good organization when you’re at the library.

8.Box Net – This is a cloud storage system that lets you back up your data and access it from other computers or mobile devices through the internet.

9.Pages – This app makes it easy to create documents and is often used for handouts and newsletters, including those that a library would issue.

10.iNapkin – This iOS app lets you make quick and easy notes, categorize them, and access them easily.

11.Evernote – Another app devoted to making notes, Evernote lets you jot down ideas and information or even use the audio feature to speak aloud and let the iPad take the notes for you.

12.Dictionary – No librarian can afford to be without a dictionary, and the Dictionary app lets you look up any word in an instant.

13.Wikipanion – While some librarians hate Wikipedia, the fact is that it’s one of the world’s largest sources for information. The Wikipanion app is basically Wikipedia for mobile devices. You can look up information and answer the questions of your guests quickly and easily with this app.

14.Osfoora HD – Libraries have begun sending Tweets as a way to attract patrons and to let employees stay in touch with what’s going on in the library. Osfoora HD lets you utilize multiple Twitter accounts when you need to Tweet for work.

15.Dropbox – Another Cloud storage server, Dropbox offers 2 gigs of storage for free and then additional storage at affordable rates.

16.Quickoffice – No mobile device would be complete without office functionality, and Quickoffice provides you with the ability to edit Word and Excel documents on the go. It’s only ten bucks, and well worth the price.

17.Adobe Reader – A huge number of documents out there today exist as .pdf files, and this app lets you read them without hassle.

18.World Book This Day In History – Give yourself something to talk to patrons about or to post on a library bulletin board with this app, which gives you interesting bits of history that occurred on the respective day.

19.Offline Pages – This app lets you actually store entire web pages on your mobile device. You can then read the web page later even when you don’t have access to the internet. It’s great for librarians on the go.

20.iAnnotate – This app also lets you read .pdf files as well as editing them. It’s a great tool for librarians who need to have the power to modify documents on the go.

News

21.Newsrack – Newsrack lets you access news from around the world in mobile form. Librarians have to be up on current events, and this is an excellent way to go about staying up on what’s going on around the world.

22.The Guardian Witness – Basically, this is the mobile version of the world famous “The Guardian”. It lets you keep up with European news that may be ignored by American media.

From The Library Of Congress

23.Virtual Tour – This is a virtual tour of the Library of Congress and offers a digital experience of the famous library.

24.The Congressional Record – This app provides you with access to the Congressional Record on a daily basis.

25.Aesop for Children – This reading app is offered by the Library of Congress and is a free book containing more than 140 of the most beloved fables in history. from: Library Science List

Next-generation ebooks introduced at London Book Fair

2013-04-23T17:00:00.001-04:00

Faber trails 'fully immersive' version of The Thirty-Nine Steps, and a bespoke ebook using digital format to rethink conventional narrative

by: Claire Armistead

Fiction edged its way closer to a digital incarnation with the publication this week of an interactive visual version of John Buchan's classic thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Publisher Faber&Faber announced that it had up with two software publishers and a developer, The Story Mechanics, to create a "fully playable, fully immersive product" which it believes breask new ground in digital reading.

It said the app includes classic stop-frame animation and original silent film music. It would allow readers to "unlock dozens of achievements and items to collect on their reading journey, and explore hundreds of hand-painted digital environments and context from 1910s Britain."

Published originally as a serial in Blackwoods magazine in 1915, The Thirty-Nine Steps was the first of five novels to feature the 20th century's earliest and most famous action hero, Richard Hannay, a man constantly on the run.

Buchan described the novel as a "shocker" – an adventure so unlikely that the reader is only just able to believe that it could really have happened. A number of film and TV adaptations, beginning with Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 version, have taken the book beyond the printed page, but Faber promises another step beyond Buchan's original storytelling.

Henry Volans, head of Faber Digital, said: "The Story Mechanics have come up with something completely new in the landscape of fiction ebooks. It's a new way of reading with John Buchan's story at its heart, presented afresh through a TV and gaming-inspired lens." The Thirty-nine Steps will be available for iPad, Mac, and Android tablets.

Faber also took advantage of this week's London Book Fair to introduce another innovative piece of fiction, Arcadia, by Iain Pears – which will be published in digital form in the autumn, with a book following next year.

Demonstrating the structure to publishers, Pears explained that the novel was inspired by quantum physics, and written in "nodes" which had been mapped on to a graph constructed after consultation with an Oxford mathematics professor.

The aim was to create an infinite number of ways in which the story could be read – though Pears emphasised that Arcadia was not an interactive novel. "I'm still in charge of the story because I'm arrogant enough to feel that I'm a better story-teller," he said.

One result of its format, he said, was to get the story beyond the constraints of time. "It also gets rid of causality. I use the analogy of dropping a cup and causing it to break. It's also possible that the cup breaking causes you to drop it."

The novel is being constructed in partnership with a software developer and a digital designer and will be rewritten for the print version, which will be "like the director's cut", said Pears.

Volans said: "Too often publishers ask themselves how they can bolt something on to a finished novel, like retro-fitting a car. This is posing a much more profound challenge: it's a novel in conceived form written on bespoke software."

from: Guardian

Oil, Chavez And Telenovelas: The Rise Of The Venezuelan Novel

2013-04-22T17:00:00.000-04:00

by: Marcela Valdes

For more than 40 years, the most important book prize in South America has been bankrolled by the region's most famous petro-nation: Venezuela. Yet Venezuelan novelists themselves rank among the least read and translated writers in the entire continent. Over and over again as I worked on this article, I stumped editors and translators with a simple question: Who are Venezuela's best novelists?

"If you were to ask me about Mexico or Nicaragua ..." one translator hedged. A second tried guessing that "there can't be a lot happening in a country that basically represses." A third editor was more frank. "I know zip about the country's literature," she confessed. "How embarrassing."

Yet since 1967, a Venezuelan award, the International Novel Prize Rómulo Gallegos, has been the kingmaker of Spanish-language book prizes. Among the crowned: Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, Roberto Bolaño, Javier Marías, Enrique Vila-Matas and Ricardo Piglia. Gerald Martin, whose biography of García Márquez covers more than 70 years of literary history, judges it "the only Latin American prize which does the same for Latin America as the Nobel does for the world."

Rómulo Gallegos himself wrote Venezuela's most influential novel, Doña Barbara. Published in 1929, Doña Barbara is at once a political tract, a national icon, a precursor to magical realism and a pop culture sensation. It has spawned two movies, an opera, three telenovelas and hundreds of YouTube mash-ups.

"Doña Barbara is exactly Gone With the Wind for Latin America," says Brown University professor Julio Ortega. Its action — the power struggle between a sexy, barbaric woman and a young, idealistic technocrat — mirrors the clash between feudalism and modernity that consumed South America in the early 20th century.

It also makes for a great, cleavage-baring script. Here's an early description of the villain: "She's a woman who has pocketed heaps of men, and she never misses when she begins sweet-talking. She gives a man a love potion and ties him to her apron-strings, and then does what she likes with him, because she knows witchcraft." Who could resist filming a soap opera from lines like that?

Gallegos was a politician, and Doña Barbara is, in part, his shot against Gen. Juan Vicente Gómez, the dictator who ruled Venezuela for 27 years. In 1947, Gallegos himself was elected president by a landslide, becoming the country's first civilian leader. Nine months after he took office, he was tossed out by a military coup.

In exile Gallegos asserted that U.S. oil companies had backed his ouster because he'd hit them with a 50 percent tax on profits. Yet if oil subverted his presidency, it also financed the prize that bears his name. Oil profits allowed Venezuela to create three major literary institutions: the Rómulo Gallegos Center for Latin American Studies, the Ayacucho Library Foundation and the publishing house Monte Ávila.

These institutions published, promoted and salaried Venezuelan writers for decades. Because of them, Venezuelan cultural critic Michelle Roche explains, Venezuelan novelists never looked to multinationals like Anagrama or Alfaguara to sell their books. Nor did they emigrate to seek better fortunes abroad. The government of Venezuela was the only patron they needed. So much so, Roche says, that "writing for the reader was considered superficial."

Everything changed when Caracas erupted in riots and looting in February 1989. After the so-called Caracazo, University of Connecticut professor Miguel Gomes explains, "Everyone opened their eyes. They didn't think they belonged to that kind of Latin American country. And then Chavismo came."

Chávez upended the old state system that fiction writers depended on for income, firing staff and importing intellectuals from Cuba. His monetary policies also made it expensive to import books, which forced booksellers to look for novels closer to home. The upshot: Venezuelan fiction boomed with major new works by authors like Federico Vegas, Francisco Suniaga, Ana Teresa Torres and Slavko Zupcic. These days, says critic and journalist Boris Muñoz, Venezuelan fiction has "opened up to find a bigger audience, through noir novels, historical novels, without renouncing its own Venezuelan idiosyncrasies."

Among the most important writers of this new wave is Alberto Barrera Tyszka. His first novel, The Sickness, is a swift, piercing story about a doctor who must decide whether to tell his own father that he's dying of cancer. In 2006, it became the first Venezuelan work to win Anagrama's coveted Herralde Award for the Novel. Since then, it has been translated into six languages. In England, it was a finalist for The Independent's foreign fiction prize.

Chávez may have indirectly spurred the resurgence of Venezuelan fiction, but his officials have also kneecapped Venezuelan novelists abroad. Translator David Unger told me that at the La Paz International Book Fair in 2006, he was stunned to hear Venezuelan officials announce that they would not sell books at the event because they opposed the commercialization of literature. Venezuela was the fair's featured country; it had brought authors to Bolivia to participate in the fair's panels as well as some 25,000 books. Yet rather than sell those copies to the editors, critics and translators who could help bring attention to Venezuelan authors, officials hauled the books to the streets of La Paz and to the impoverished town of El Alto, where they gave them out for free. Many were snagged by book pirates.

"It just seemed like this typically absurd moment in Chavazean reality," Unger says, "where you think you're giving books away to 'the people' who are mostly native Bolivians who can't read Spanish, and all these sharks went up there and sold them and made a lot of money."

That may be why in the past several years two separate delegations have traveled from Venezuela to Guadalajara, Mexico, where Latin America's most important book fair is held every fall. One delegation is organized by the government of Venezuela. The other is assembled by Venezuela's new clutch of independent publishers. "We finally have a strong literature," Roche says. "This market is very slow, but I'm positive that [the translations] will come." Until then, as Venezuelan critic Antonio Lopez Ortega says, Venezuela's fiction will remain "the Caribbean's best kept secret."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

10 Venezuelan Novelists To Know:

In the course of reporting this story, I was told about more than 30 Venezuelan writers who deserve to be better known in the United States. Only a handful of them have been translated into English. Below you find a list of ones who are making their way into my personal library because their novels sound too good to pass up.

1.Romulo Gallegos (1884-1969) The former president of Venezuela published nine novels, but Doña Barbara (1929) is the most delicious. Steamy with witchcraft and intrigue, it's also a serious attack on rural despotism.

2.Teresa de la Parra (1889-1936) According to Professor Julio Ortega, there's a movement afoot to grant de la Parra her rightful place in Venezuelan letters. Her first book, Iphigenia (1924), ruffled feathers with its fierce portrait of Caracas high society. Her second novel, Mama Blanca's Memoirs (1929), made nice with sweet descriptions of a childhood spent on a sugar plantation.

3.José Balza (1939-) An avant-garde stylist, Balza has published eight novels and even more collections of short stories. His dense, poetic novel Percussion (1982) is widely considered his best. In it, an old man's return to his birthplace provokes a hallucinatory trip down memory lane. None of his books has been translated into English.

4.Victoria de Stefano (1940-) The Clarice Lispector of Venezuela, de Stefano writes beautiful, difficult fiction. Her novel Histories of the Foot March (1997) was a finalist for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize the same year that Roberto Bolaño won for The Savage Detectives. None of her books has been translated into English.

5.Ana Teresa Torres (1945-) "Ana Teresa Torres revolutionized Venezuelan fiction with her work Doña Ines vs. Oblivion," says Caracas bookseller Katyna Henríquez Consalvi. Based on a real Venezuelan court case, this novel traces 300 years of Venezuelan history through one woman's beyond-the-grave quest to recover a lost piece of jungle property.

6.Federico Vegas (1950-) Vegas' historical novel Falke (2005) caused a sensation in Caracas with its account of a band of revolutionaries who attempted to overthrow the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez in 1929. Since then, Vegas, who trained as an architect, has published four more novels and several collections of stories. None of his books has been translated into English.

7.Francisco Suniaga (1954-) A lawyer, Suniaga once worked for the United Nations in East Timor. His books include a noir novel (The Other Island) and a political thriller (Truman's Passenger). What raises him above genre-writing, says critic Boris Muñoz, is "his acute perception of the pathos that characterizes Venezuelan identity." None of his books has been translated into English.

8.Alberto Barrera Tyszka (1960-) Co-author of an influential biography of Hugo Chavez, Barrera Tyszka is also Venezuela's best-known contemporary novelist. "Immediately," says editor Jorge Herralde, "The Sickness seduced me with the elegance and concision of its prose, its depth and fluidity, with its unaffected approach to the subject of a father's death." One critic in Spain compared it to Philip Roth's Patrimony.

9.Slavko Zupcic (1970-) One of two Venezuelans to make the prestigious Bogota 39 list — which named 39 exceptional Latin American writers under the age of 39 — Zupic has published three novels: Barbie, Croatian Circle and My Deepest Sympathies, as well as several short-story collections. None of his books has been translated into English.

10.Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles (1977-) Named after a pricey brand of Johnnie Walker whisky, Sánchez Rugeles' best-known novel, Blue Label/Etiqueta Azul, is an acidic take on middle-class Venezuelan society. Its protagonist is a young woman whose highest ambition is to become French. Sánchez Rugeles now lives in Spain. None of his books has been translated into English.

Marcela Valdes is the books editor of The Washington Examiner and a specialist in Latin American literature and culture.

from: NPR

The Tebow Problem: The Hot and Cold Nature of the Biography Section

2013-04-19T17:00:00.000-04:00

by: Travis Jonker

Biography section – why are you so vexing?

I think my frustration can be nicely summed up in one image:

I like to call it “The Tebow Problem”. Has there ever been a biography subject that has gone from must-purchase to weeding candidate more quickly? Unless someone did a bio on Michael Phelp’s Mom, I’d hazard to say no. If your situation is similar to mine, you were just getting a Tim Tebow book on the shelves as the demand was vanishing. And now it sits¹. My Tebow problem hints at a bigger biography section issue – I want to stock the section with research staples of course, but also want students to visit without being sent there by a teacher.

Ay, there’s the rub.

Kids are interested in reading about famous figures today, but many of the in-demand titles are about pop stars, actors, and actresses who quickly fall in and out of favor – much more quickly than your standard fiction or nonfiction title.

What I’m saying is, it’s difficult to invest in books about people when popularity heats up and cools off at the drop of a hat. So do I ignore the trends and focus on the past? That seems like a path to biography section cricketsville.

My current approach is this: selectively purchase current bios that are in high demand, keep an eye out for standout stuff on historical figures, and supplement it all with a subscription to an online encyclopedia. We’ve been happy with Worldbook, but there are others that do a fine job. This way information on historical figures and current stars is easy to find.

I don’t know if I’ll ever truly figure you out, bio section, but I’ll keep trying. Do you have a secret recipe for bio section happiness?

¹As for Tim Tebow books, I envision them suffering the same fate as the infamous E.T. game for the Atari.

There are millions of the suckers lying in a New Mexico landfill as we speak.

(Image: E.T.: 2600 by nickstone333 http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickstone333/3550990059/)

from: School Library Journal

Ten ways self-publishing has changed the books world

2013-04-18T17:00:00.000-04:00

As the DIY approach gains more and more writers and readers, traditional publishers must reinvent themselves
by: Alison Baverstock

After a boom year in self-publishing the headlines are getting a little predictable. Most feature a doughty author who quickly builds demand for her work and is rewarded with a large contract from the traditional industry. But in our rush to admire, there's a risk we overlook the wider cultural significance of what is going on. As publishers from all over the world prepare for next week's London book fair, here are 10 changes that they ignore at their peril:
1. There is now a wider understanding of what publishing is – and that it is more difficult than it looks. The industry has long suffered the irony that effective publishing is most evident when invisible; it is only when standards are less than felicitous that we realise how well what we read is managed most of the time. Now that school cookbooks, or fundraising brochures for sports teams, can be effectively self-published, people are learning the process and what is involved. In the past, the industry has tended to recruit heavily from those in the know (the offspring of former publishers and authors being particularly well-represented); wider awareness of publishing is now promoting wider diversity.

2. Gone is our confidence that publishers and agents know exactly what everyone wants to (or should) read, and can spot all the material worth our attention. Soft porn and fantasy have emerged as particularly under-represented in the industry's official output.

3. The copy editor, a traditionally marginalised figure, is now in strong demand. If you are well-connected through social media, can isolate what your writing has to offer and get the message noticed by a reading public, you can probably manage the marketing of your work. The one thing it's really hard to do is self-edit. Long ago publishers outsourced copy editing, relying on the freelance labour market – and freelancers are now being actively sought by self-publishing authors too. The price for services for which there is both high demand and scarce supply tends to rise.

4. The re-emergence of the book as precious object. Some publishers are marketing luxury books; limited editions available only from them. Similarly, it's becoming relatively common for people to self-publish their holiday photographs in book form; to produce a unique photograph/memory book for special birthdays or to mark a retirement. If these are being presented to those who are not big readers, or regular frequenters of bookshops, the social significance of self-publishing may be particularly strong.

5. The role of the author is changing. With the fragmentation of the media in recent years, publishers were already relying on authors to help with the marketing – and learning how to do so is empowering. Now, as authors meet their readers at literary festivals, run blogs or tweet, they know their readers well and are no longer solely reliant on their publishers to mediate relationships. Looking ahead, authors who understand how publishing works are likely to be vastly less compliant than their forbears.

6. The role of the agent is also changing. Literary agents used to introduce ingenue authors to those who might invest, and then work with them to build longer-term careers. Now that so many self-publishing authors are finding the market themselves, agents need to find new ways to make their work pay. If agencies are multi-faceted (film, television, after-dinner speaking) they may be protected, but smaller agencies will struggle. Selling manuscript development services to those in whom they might not otherwise invest their time is an unsatisfactory way to make a living.

7. New business models and opportunities are springing up, mostly offering "publishing services": advice on how to get published or self-publish; guidance on developing a plot or a whole manuscript; lifestyle support and writing holidays; editorial services and marketing assistance. New writing patterns are developing too: team writing; ghost writing; software to assist the crafting. Publishing is emerging as a process – accessible as a variety of different services to whoever needs them – rather than just being an industry.

8. It's not all about making money. If, as I believe, self-publishing means taking personal responsibility for the management and production of your content, this can be achieved as effectively via a single copy to be kept at home as the sale of thousands online. Self-publishing means recognising, and preserving, content that has value for someone – but the process does not have to yield an income to be worthwhile.

9. An end to the "vanity publishing" put-down. No longer the last resort of the talentless, these days self-publishing is seen as a homing ground of the instinctively proactive: identify your market; meet their needs; deliver direct. It's also a flexible solution; a process not a single product, for which the rationale can be very varied – from book as business card to ebook novel; from hard copy of a work-in-progress, to a team compilation for a local history group.

10. Self-publishing brings happiness. Publishers have long assumed that only if nearing professional standards could a self-published product bring any satisfaction. My research has revealed the opposite. It seems self-publishers approach the process confidently, are well-informed, and aware of how much the process will cost and how long it is likely to take. They emerge both keen to do it again and likely to recommend it to others. Finalising a project you have long planned feels good, and the process builds in the possibility of future discoverability – whether that is in an attic (whenever the family decides they are mature enough to want to know), or by ISBN from within the British Library. Self-publishing as a legacy – should we really be so surprised at its growing popularity?

• A former publisher, Alison Baverstock is Course Leader for the Publishing MA at Kingston University. The Naked Author, her guide to self-publishing, is published by Bloomsbury. The full results of her more recent research will be published in the journal Learned Publishing in July.

from: Guardian