Thursday, December 23, 2010
Holiday Hiatus
Librarians' Group blog is going on hiatus for the holidays. Have safe and happy holidays and we'll be back in the new year.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
A New Way to Manage Collections
We are all dealing with the sad truth that we must do more with less. A key component for libraries is to figure out how to most effectively spend materials budgets and make use of existing collections.
Many librarians have spent hours gathering information from their ILS, with the goal of analyzing their collections. Unfortunately, this can take so much effort that precious little time is left for the actual analysis. Rather than an ongoing process, it becomes a once-a-year chore.
Last year at MidWinter, I learned about a collection development toolkit developed by a Scottish librarian and now used by 50% of public libraries in the UK and being introduced into the North American market.
I was impressed. In a few minutes, the product puts together information from a library’s ILS, showing what subject areas and genres (using BISAC codes) are circulating well, which ones are dated, which ones are declining, which books are likely to be worn out, based on age and number of circs (called a “grubby report”). It even shows which specific authors are rising and which declining in popularity so libraries can adjust their standing orders accordingly. Furthermore, by aggregating collection usage data, users can see what is working well for other public libraries and make more informed decisions about what to buy based on the experience of other public libraries. Sold as an annual subscription service, it requires no hardware and can be used by any authorized user from a PC.
Along with June Garcia and Susan Kent, who were also impressed with the product, I’ve been helping introduce collectionHQ to North American libraries through demos at PLA, ALA and BEA. Already some 40 libraries have signed up.
In these times, libraries can use all the help they can get to maximize their dollars. More information on collectionHQ is available here and through free live webcasts (schedule here) as well as individual Web demos.
from: Early Word
Many librarians have spent hours gathering information from their ILS, with the goal of analyzing their collections. Unfortunately, this can take so much effort that precious little time is left for the actual analysis. Rather than an ongoing process, it becomes a once-a-year chore.
Last year at MidWinter, I learned about a collection development toolkit developed by a Scottish librarian and now used by 50% of public libraries in the UK and being introduced into the North American market.
I was impressed. In a few minutes, the product puts together information from a library’s ILS, showing what subject areas and genres (using BISAC codes) are circulating well, which ones are dated, which ones are declining, which books are likely to be worn out, based on age and number of circs (called a “grubby report”). It even shows which specific authors are rising and which declining in popularity so libraries can adjust their standing orders accordingly. Furthermore, by aggregating collection usage data, users can see what is working well for other public libraries and make more informed decisions about what to buy based on the experience of other public libraries. Sold as an annual subscription service, it requires no hardware and can be used by any authorized user from a PC.
Along with June Garcia and Susan Kent, who were also impressed with the product, I’ve been helping introduce collectionHQ to North American libraries through demos at PLA, ALA and BEA. Already some 40 libraries have signed up.
In these times, libraries can use all the help they can get to maximize their dollars. More information on collectionHQ is available here and through free live webcasts (schedule here) as well as individual Web demos.
from: Early Word
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Grassroots Libraries Promote Love of Reading
After living in the US, Professor Rana Dajani went home to create dozens of libraries in neighborhoods across Jordan
by: Faiza Elmasty
During the five years Jordanian Rana Dajani and her family lived in the United States, the local public library was a big part of the family's life.
"When I was doing my PhD in the United States, on a Fulbright scholarship, I used to spend all my evenings with my mice in the lab and my children - I have four children - they spent all their time in the public library," she says. "It's full of not just books, but activities, volunteerism, read-aloud [sessions], puppet shows and so on."
No libraries
She says that's why, when the family moved back to Jordan, the public library was what they all missed the most.
"We realized there were no libraries and if they were, they were very few," she says. "Most importantly, they didn't have any activities. We looked at the statistics and it turned out that the number of pages read in the Middle East per year is half a page, compared to the U.S. where it is 11 books per year. When I say reading, I mean reading for pleasure, not reading of education because the education level in Jordan is pretty high. We're talking about reading that creates imagination, thinking outside the box, that there is more to life than my immediate environment, that there are other solutions out there."
Dajani, a biology professor at the Hashemite University in Jordan, looked closely at the problem to figure out why children in Jordan do not read.
"The reason they don't read was not for lack of books, but most important it's for lack of experience," she explains. "Nobody reads to them. In order to plant the love of reading, you have to read to your children at an early age. Nobody does that. It's not a habit in Jordan."
We Love Reading
So, with the encouragement and help of her children, Dajani took it upon herself to create a public library in their neighborhood. In 2006, she began holding story-telling sessions for 8 to 10-year olds in a nearby mosque.
"We announced through the Friday prayers that there was going to be a read-aloud on Saturday morning," she says. "So the parents dragged their children, but after that, the children were coming by themselves. They would wake up really early in the morning and say, 'We want to go to the story telling, we want to listen to the stories.'"
After each story-telling session, the children are allowed to check out a copy of the book, take it home and read it with their parents. Dajani says that's how We Love Reading was born. The project has created a cadre of young readers in the neighborhood.
"The proof of this is that, when they line up to take the books home, they know the name of the authors," she says. "They recommend books to each other."
Reading, Dajani says, has had a positive impact on many aspects of the children's lives.
"First, they are off the street. It saves some lives," she says. "On the educational level, these children will be doing better in school. Reading will provide them with a greater vocabulary. So they will hopefully be writers in the future because it is a circle - the more readers you have, the more writers you have. And parents are so happy that the children are spending more time doing useful things and learning the enjoyment of reading because nothing can substitute for that, not TV, not the Internet, just to enjoy the written word."
Furthering the dream
Dajani's dream - to see the We Love Reading project expand beyond her neighborhood - became a reality a few years later.
"In 2008, I won an award from Synergos, which is a New York-based organization that fights poverty and injustice in the world. They have started a program called 'The Arab World Social innovators,'" she says. "So I won the award and that provided me with enough funding to be able to start a training program for ladies in their local neighborhood. We would train them how to read aloud. The fund also gave me the ability to buy them books. I would buy 20 books for every lady. We've trained 380 ladies. This training for the ladies hasn't just given them the ability to read aloud, it has empowered them to be civically and socially responsible outside their home."
Eighty local libraries have been established in communities throughout Jordan, serving more than 4,000 children.
Expanded opportunity
Dajani joined other activists, academics and private citizens from around the world at the 2010 Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York. Each year the organization - which was founded in 2005 by President Bill Clinton - brings together dozens of innovators who work to solve community problems in sustainable and effective ways.
Dajani says her participation in the 2010 Clinton Global Initiative conference gave her the opportunity to further expand the program, and gain valuable insights into social activism.
"I met women from different areas of the world: from Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia," she says. "And we've actually set up partnerships with these different women, like they're planning to copy our model in Indonesia, Peru and, hopefully, in other Middle Eastern countries. On the other hand, I've also learned about how people are facing other problems, how people are working in teams to solve problems such as women's economic independence, such as environmental awareness. So it's been an eye-opener on how everybody plays a role in trying to make this world a better place for everyone."
During the conference, We Love Reading made a commitment to establish 100 more libraries throughout Jordan over the next five years. Visitors to Rana Dajani's website can learn how to create a library in their neighborhood.
from: Voice of America News
by: Faiza Elmasty
 |
| Rana Dajani began her library program by reading to children in a neighborhoodl mosque in her native Jordan. |
"When I was doing my PhD in the United States, on a Fulbright scholarship, I used to spend all my evenings with my mice in the lab and my children - I have four children - they spent all their time in the public library," she says. "It's full of not just books, but activities, volunteerism, read-aloud [sessions], puppet shows and so on."
No libraries
She says that's why, when the family moved back to Jordan, the public library was what they all missed the most.
"We realized there were no libraries and if they were, they were very few," she says. "Most importantly, they didn't have any activities. We looked at the statistics and it turned out that the number of pages read in the Middle East per year is half a page, compared to the U.S. where it is 11 books per year. When I say reading, I mean reading for pleasure, not reading of education because the education level in Jordan is pretty high. We're talking about reading that creates imagination, thinking outside the box, that there is more to life than my immediate environment, that there are other solutions out there."
Dajani, a biology professor at the Hashemite University in Jordan, looked closely at the problem to figure out why children in Jordan do not read.
"The reason they don't read was not for lack of books, but most important it's for lack of experience," she explains. "Nobody reads to them. In order to plant the love of reading, you have to read to your children at an early age. Nobody does that. It's not a habit in Jordan."
We Love Reading
So, with the encouragement and help of her children, Dajani took it upon herself to create a public library in their neighborhood. In 2006, she began holding story-telling sessions for 8 to 10-year olds in a nearby mosque.
"We announced through the Friday prayers that there was going to be a read-aloud on Saturday morning," she says. "So the parents dragged their children, but after that, the children were coming by themselves. They would wake up really early in the morning and say, 'We want to go to the story telling, we want to listen to the stories.'"
After each story-telling session, the children are allowed to check out a copy of the book, take it home and read it with their parents. Dajani says that's how We Love Reading was born. The project has created a cadre of young readers in the neighborhood.
"The proof of this is that, when they line up to take the books home, they know the name of the authors," she says. "They recommend books to each other."
Reading, Dajani says, has had a positive impact on many aspects of the children's lives.
"First, they are off the street. It saves some lives," she says. "On the educational level, these children will be doing better in school. Reading will provide them with a greater vocabulary. So they will hopefully be writers in the future because it is a circle - the more readers you have, the more writers you have. And parents are so happy that the children are spending more time doing useful things and learning the enjoyment of reading because nothing can substitute for that, not TV, not the Internet, just to enjoy the written word."
Furthering the dream
Dajani's dream - to see the We Love Reading project expand beyond her neighborhood - became a reality a few years later.
"In 2008, I won an award from Synergos, which is a New York-based organization that fights poverty and injustice in the world. They have started a program called 'The Arab World Social innovators,'" she says. "So I won the award and that provided me with enough funding to be able to start a training program for ladies in their local neighborhood. We would train them how to read aloud. The fund also gave me the ability to buy them books. I would buy 20 books for every lady. We've trained 380 ladies. This training for the ladies hasn't just given them the ability to read aloud, it has empowered them to be civically and socially responsible outside their home."
Eighty local libraries have been established in communities throughout Jordan, serving more than 4,000 children.
Expanded opportunity
Dajani joined other activists, academics and private citizens from around the world at the 2010 Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York. Each year the organization - which was founded in 2005 by President Bill Clinton - brings together dozens of innovators who work to solve community problems in sustainable and effective ways.
Dajani says her participation in the 2010 Clinton Global Initiative conference gave her the opportunity to further expand the program, and gain valuable insights into social activism.
"I met women from different areas of the world: from Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia," she says. "And we've actually set up partnerships with these different women, like they're planning to copy our model in Indonesia, Peru and, hopefully, in other Middle Eastern countries. On the other hand, I've also learned about how people are facing other problems, how people are working in teams to solve problems such as women's economic independence, such as environmental awareness. So it's been an eye-opener on how everybody plays a role in trying to make this world a better place for everyone."
During the conference, We Love Reading made a commitment to establish 100 more libraries throughout Jordan over the next five years. Visitors to Rana Dajani's website can learn how to create a library in their neighborhood.
from: Voice of America News
Monday, December 20, 2010
Stars Rock New York's Public Library
Libraries try a different approach to reach that new generation of readers
by: Pia Salmre
A lecture series at the New York Public Library has become so popular that it often sells out in minutes. The crowds range from a few hundred to over a thousand - rock star numbers for a library program - and that's exactly the draw.
Along with Noble Laureates such as author Toni Morrison, the series includes appearances by musicians like Patti Smith, Keith Richards and Jay-Z. Movie producer John Waters has also participated. Combining music icons and Hollywood notables with celebrated authors reflects the library's new approach.
Attracting a new generation
"If libraries want to survive, it will have to find new ways to communicate with the new generation," says Paul Holdengräber, director of the popular lectures series, which is called Live from the New York Public Library. "Because of the onslaught of new modes of communication, we need more and more meeting places. I want to give people an appetite for learning. It shows people that libraries are different things. One has to create new ways of welcoming people into the library. I feel like I'm running a rock concert series to inspire people to read."
Traditionally, people use libraries for a variety of reasons. Alison Leonard, a library science student at San Jose State University, lists her uses.
"I like them because they provide a whole lot of services I want in terms of an entertainment center. I can go there for books and CDs. I can go there for inexpensive movies to rent. I can go there to look at magazines. I can rent a room and sit and write a paper and a group project. I can go there on a Saturday afternoon to read. I can get access to local newspapers."
How people use the library can also be impacted by the economy.
"Many people are going to the libraries to use computers. We are seeing a very heavy increase in usage of computers," says Audra Caplan, president of the Public Library Association. "Library uses increase during economic downturns. That was true during the Great Depression and it is true now. People are flocking to libraries to do research, find jobs, make resumes, anything that has to do with finding a job. Many times now the only way you can apply for a job is online. There are a number of unemployed people coming to fill out their forms online."
Looking ahead
Holdengräber organizes his lecture series at the New York Public Library with an eye toward the future and his success has drawn praise from his colleagues across the United States.
"I think the NYPL has done a fantastic job. One of the things they have done is they have gone after demographics that aren't traditional library users, so they are seeing the 20-to-40 age range coming in at much larger numbers than they did in the past," says Caplan. "I think a lot of it can be attributed to the larger lecture series that they have."
Leonard, the library science student, is also a librarian at East Los Angeles College. She expects the institutions to continue redefining themselves.
"It is not set in stone as to what the library will be. Our job is to respond to the user. It is not just a place for books. It is where people come together for learning. There is no subject, including rock and roll, that shouldn't be included," she says. "It can be anything from an art space, podcast studio. It can be a video filming and editing studio. It can be a blogger station. It can become a community playhouse, a gaming station for teens or for adults, anyone who enjoys games."
While libraries face challenges in engaging new generations of patrons, the experts expect them not only to survive but to thrive.
The trick, says Holdengräber, is to, "Find out what the people are interested in and give them much more."
Leonard agrees. "Libraries are forever changing. The library has been around for over 4,000 years. Whenever you do polling, people love the libraries. The library is going to respond to what the user wants and having events in the library is a great way to use the space."
Holdengräber plans to continue creating programs that surprise people. And sometimes, they surprise him in return. "We had guitar icon Keith Richards speak at the library and when he was a child, wanted to be a librarian."
from: Voice of America
by: Pia Salmre
 |
| Entrepreneur and rapper Jay-Z signs a copy of his book, 'Decoded,' for a young fan at the New York Public Library. |
Along with Noble Laureates such as author Toni Morrison, the series includes appearances by musicians like Patti Smith, Keith Richards and Jay-Z. Movie producer John Waters has also participated. Combining music icons and Hollywood notables with celebrated authors reflects the library's new approach.
 |
| Rapper JAY-Z at the New York Public Library with Cornel West (left) and lecture series director, Paul Holdengräber. |
"If libraries want to survive, it will have to find new ways to communicate with the new generation," says Paul Holdengräber, director of the popular lectures series, which is called Live from the New York Public Library. "Because of the onslaught of new modes of communication, we need more and more meeting places. I want to give people an appetite for learning. It shows people that libraries are different things. One has to create new ways of welcoming people into the library. I feel like I'm running a rock concert series to inspire people to read."
Traditionally, people use libraries for a variety of reasons. Alison Leonard, a library science student at San Jose State University, lists her uses.
"I like them because they provide a whole lot of services I want in terms of an entertainment center. I can go there for books and CDs. I can go there for inexpensive movies to rent. I can go there to look at magazines. I can rent a room and sit and write a paper and a group project. I can go there on a Saturday afternoon to read. I can get access to local newspapers."
 |
| Musician Patti Smith discusses her new book 'Just Kids' with Paul Holdengraber at the New York Public Library on April 29, 2010. |
"Many people are going to the libraries to use computers. We are seeing a very heavy increase in usage of computers," says Audra Caplan, president of the Public Library Association. "Library uses increase during economic downturns. That was true during the Great Depression and it is true now. People are flocking to libraries to do research, find jobs, make resumes, anything that has to do with finding a job. Many times now the only way you can apply for a job is online. There are a number of unemployed people coming to fill out their forms online."
Looking ahead
Holdengräber organizes his lecture series at the New York Public Library with an eye toward the future and his success has drawn praise from his colleagues across the United States.
"I think the NYPL has done a fantastic job. One of the things they have done is they have gone after demographics that aren't traditional library users, so they are seeing the 20-to-40 age range coming in at much larger numbers than they did in the past," says Caplan. "I think a lot of it can be attributed to the larger lecture series that they have."
Leonard, the library science student, is also a librarian at East Los Angeles College. She expects the institutions to continue redefining themselves.
"It is not set in stone as to what the library will be. Our job is to respond to the user. It is not just a place for books. It is where people come together for learning. There is no subject, including rock and roll, that shouldn't be included," she says. "It can be anything from an art space, podcast studio. It can be a video filming and editing studio. It can be a blogger station. It can become a community playhouse, a gaming station for teens or for adults, anyone who enjoys games."
While libraries face challenges in engaging new generations of patrons, the experts expect them not only to survive but to thrive.
The trick, says Holdengräber, is to, "Find out what the people are interested in and give them much more."
Leonard agrees. "Libraries are forever changing. The library has been around for over 4,000 years. Whenever you do polling, people love the libraries. The library is going to respond to what the user wants and having events in the library is a great way to use the space."
Holdengräber plans to continue creating programs that surprise people. And sometimes, they surprise him in return. "We had guitar icon Keith Richards speak at the library and when he was a child, wanted to be a librarian."
from: Voice of America
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Mom's the word: 'Laundromat Literacy' cleans up idle minds
by: Anissa V. Rivera
Here is the next chapter in laundromat lore.
For about four years, a devoted group of women have been trekking to local laundromats lugging not detergent bottles and boxes of softener, but baskets of books.
Members of the local Delta Nu Chapter of Delta Kappa Gamma Society International, the women handpick children's book titles from all interests and reading levels, leave them at the laundromats and later return to clean the books and replenish the selections.
"It's our goal to make reading a part of the everyday experience of all children and we hope that our Laundromat Literacy program helps local families enjoy time together with books while their clothes spin clean," said Mary Ellen Carhill of San Dimas.
The project involves volunteers from Delta Kappa Gamma, a group that promotes professional and personal growth among women educators and excellence in education.
The local chapter has 48 members who live and work all over the San Gabriel Valley.
The ladies collect baby board books to middle school chapter books and places book baskets in three or more laundromats in Glendora and Azusa every two weeks, according to Susan Hamilton, a retired Glendora teacher and committee chairwoman.
This project is one of many homegrown programs supported by the DKG Chi State LIFE (Learning Is For Everyone) Foundation which supports special projects related to learning and literacy within California.
The campaign has also found support from The Book Bin in Glendora (now closed), Friends of the Glendora Library, service clubs, and, of course, its teacher-members and their families.
"Children who come to the laundromat with their parents are there for two hours or more," said member Carol Harmon. "We hope they will spend their time with some of our books to develop a love of reading. The ideal is that the parents will read to them if they cannot read themselves. However, children also like to look at the pictures, find words they know, or pretend to read by telling about the pictures. Hopefully it also keeps some overly active children a little calmer."
The women would like to expand to more laundromats, although they have had to give up on ones where their baskets and books regularly go missing.
"We're `secretly' delighted when we come up a few books short each delivery, because we know someone has loved a book so much they had to take it home to read again," Hamilton said.
Some of the book titles in their baskets today include Curious George, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Babysitting Club series, bug books, baseball books, and seasonal books such as snowmen stories.
The happiest ending, of course, is keeping the books at the laundromat, and seeing children and caregivers bond while sudsing their clothes.
"Reading for enjoyment encourages more reading," Hamilton said. "All that waiting time can be a special one-on-one time for parents and children to read together."
Hamilton, who herself confesses to being an inveterate reader since childhood, said it's never a wash to combine reading with free time.
"I often got into trouble for reading my Nancy Drew mystery books under the covers after bedtime or when I was supposed to be helping set the table," she said.
So, with a bow to the ladies of Delta Nu, here's to the lucky ones in local laundromats who find themselves gifted with a literary bounty when all they came in for was clean clothes.
from: Pasadena Star News
Here is the next chapter in laundromat lore.
For about four years, a devoted group of women have been trekking to local laundromats lugging not detergent bottles and boxes of softener, but baskets of books.
Members of the local Delta Nu Chapter of Delta Kappa Gamma Society International, the women handpick children's book titles from all interests and reading levels, leave them at the laundromats and later return to clean the books and replenish the selections.
"It's our goal to make reading a part of the everyday experience of all children and we hope that our Laundromat Literacy program helps local families enjoy time together with books while their clothes spin clean," said Mary Ellen Carhill of San Dimas.
The project involves volunteers from Delta Kappa Gamma, a group that promotes professional and personal growth among women educators and excellence in education.
The local chapter has 48 members who live and work all over the San Gabriel Valley.
The ladies collect baby board books to middle school chapter books and places book baskets in three or more laundromats in Glendora and Azusa every two weeks, according to Susan Hamilton, a retired Glendora teacher and committee chairwoman.
This project is one of many homegrown programs supported by the DKG Chi State LIFE (Learning Is For Everyone) Foundation which supports special projects related to learning and literacy within California.
The campaign has also found support from The Book Bin in Glendora (now closed), Friends of the Glendora Library, service clubs, and, of course, its teacher-members and their families.
"Children who come to the laundromat with their parents are there for two hours or more," said member Carol Harmon. "We hope they will spend their time with some of our books to develop a love of reading. The ideal is that the parents will read to them if they cannot read themselves. However, children also like to look at the pictures, find words they know, or pretend to read by telling about the pictures. Hopefully it also keeps some overly active children a little calmer."
The women would like to expand to more laundromats, although they have had to give up on ones where their baskets and books regularly go missing.
"We're `secretly' delighted when we come up a few books short each delivery, because we know someone has loved a book so much they had to take it home to read again," Hamilton said.
Some of the book titles in their baskets today include Curious George, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Babysitting Club series, bug books, baseball books, and seasonal books such as snowmen stories.
The happiest ending, of course, is keeping the books at the laundromat, and seeing children and caregivers bond while sudsing their clothes.
"Reading for enjoyment encourages more reading," Hamilton said. "All that waiting time can be a special one-on-one time for parents and children to read together."
Hamilton, who herself confesses to being an inveterate reader since childhood, said it's never a wash to combine reading with free time.
"I often got into trouble for reading my Nancy Drew mystery books under the covers after bedtime or when I was supposed to be helping set the table," she said.
So, with a bow to the ladies of Delta Nu, here's to the lucky ones in local laundromats who find themselves gifted with a literary bounty when all they came in for was clean clothes.
from: Pasadena Star News
Friday, December 17, 2010
CBC and McArthur & Company team-up for enhanced ebook of The Mistress of Nothing
by: Mark Medley
It seems as if Canada’s national broadcaster is getting into the e-book business. Toronto-based publisher McArthur & Company announced on Wednesday that they will team-up with CBC Books to released an enhanced e-book edition of Kate Pullinger’s novel, The Mistress of Nothing, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2009.
According to a press release, the enhanced e-book will feature:
• An abridged audio in 25 parts, read by actress Barbara Barnes.
• A slide show featuring photographs, prints and paintings from the era (1860s Egypt), as well as the house where Lady Duff Gordon and her maid Sally Naldrett stayed.
• Further reading suggestions.
• A book club reading guide.
• Six exclusive videos of the author Kate Pullinger discussing the writing and researching of the book and reading the final chapter aloud.
from: Afterword
It seems as if Canada’s national broadcaster is getting into the e-book business. Toronto-based publisher McArthur & Company announced on Wednesday that they will team-up with CBC Books to released an enhanced e-book edition of Kate Pullinger’s novel, The Mistress of Nothing, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2009.
According to a press release, the enhanced e-book will feature:
• An abridged audio in 25 parts, read by actress Barbara Barnes.
• A slide show featuring photographs, prints and paintings from the era (1860s Egypt), as well as the house where Lady Duff Gordon and her maid Sally Naldrett stayed.
• Further reading suggestions.
• A book club reading guide.
• Six exclusive videos of the author Kate Pullinger discussing the writing and researching of the book and reading the final chapter aloud.
from: Afterword
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Is Your E-Book Reading Up on You?
by: Martin Kaste
E-books are quickly going mainstream: They represent nearly one out of 10 trade books sold.
It's easy to imagine a near future in which paper books are the exception, not the norm. But are book lovers ready to have their reading tracked?
Most e-readers, like Amazon's Kindle, have an antenna that lets users instantly download new books. But the technology also makes it possible for the device to transmit information back to the manufacturer.
"They know how fast you read because you have to click to turn the page," says Cindy Cohn, legal director at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It knows if you skip to the end to read how it turns out."
Checking Someone's Alibi, Tracking A Device
Cohn says this kind of page-view tracking may seem innocuous, but if the company keeps the data long-term, the information could be subpoenaed to check someone's alibi, or as evidence in a lawsuit.
And it's not just what pages you read; it may also monitor where you read them. Kindles, iPads and other e-readers have geo-location abilities; using GPS or data from Wi-Fi and cell phone towers, it wouldn't be difficult for the devices to track their own locations in the physical world.
But it's hard to find out what kind of data the e-readers are sending. Most e-book companies refer all questions about this to their posted privacy policies. The policies can be hard to interpret, so Cohn and the EFF created a side-by-side comparison. It's just been updated to include Apple's iPad.
The privacy policies also leave important questions unanswered. For instance, how long do the companies store page-view data?
E-Reader Data Collection
Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony declined NPR's request for an interview about e-reader data. But some other companies, including Google and Apple, agreed to take a few questions by e-mail.
Here are some of the responses NPR received regarding data that's being collected by e-readers:
— Google Books: Google recently started selling e-books that can be read on computers and third-party handheld devices. The company's system appears to save only the last five pages viewed to help the reader keep his place. But Google actually stores more pages than that behind the scenes for what it calls "security monitoring" — to prevent the "abusive sharing" of books. A Google representative says these page views may be stored with a user's account for "several weeks" before being erased.
— Apple's iBooks: The system used on iPads and iPhones sends information back to the company. But an Apple representative calls it "functional data." The spokesman says the data is "unidentifiable," and is used only to help Apple "understand customers and customer behavior."
—The FBReader: This free reader from Russia works on a variety of computers and also any handheld device running the Android operating system. It never captures any user data. The open-source programming code means "this fact is easy to check — anybody can inspect [it]," says Nikolay Pultsin, one of its creators.
Amazon's Dominant Role
Amazon now dominates the e-book market, thanks to its popular Kindle e-readers. And many in the publishing business believe the company has built a vast database about the reading public, using information from the online store and reading data from the Kindle.
"[The Kindle] is just one more string in their bow," says author Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild. "They could tell you with precision the age, the zip codes, gender and other interests of the people who bought my books. Now you can throw on top of that the fact that a certain number of them quit reading at Page 45."
Turow believes Amazon is guarding the database closely and not selling or sharing it with other companies. Publishing consultant Brian O'Leary, the founder of Magellan Media, says that's a lost opportunity. He wishes Amazon were more open about its reading data, which could benefit the rest of the publishing industry.
"If people are buying books but not reading them, or they're quitting after a relatively short period of time reading the book, that ultimately tells you that the customer in this case is dissatisfied," O'Leary says. "Better understanding when people stop reading or stop engaging with your content would help you create better products."
A Future Of 'Social Reading'
Some in the publishing industry look forward to a new age of "social reading," in which devices allow readers to share their reactions with each other. And the author might be interested in seeing a graph of the page-turns of thousands of people as they read his latest novel.
"I wouldn't have a problem with looking, but I would probably ignore what I saw," says author Stephen King. "There's a thing about certain pitchers who all of a sudden can't find the strike zone and are walking a lot of hitters and giving up a lot of hits, and you'll hear the announcer say, 'He's steering the ball.' And writers can do that, too."
But King expects the data will continue to be collected, as book-lovers switch to networked devices.
"Ultimately, this sort of thing scares the hell out of me," King
from: NPR
E-books are quickly going mainstream: They represent nearly one out of 10 trade books sold.
It's easy to imagine a near future in which paper books are the exception, not the norm. But are book lovers ready to have their reading tracked?
Most e-readers, like Amazon's Kindle, have an antenna that lets users instantly download new books. But the technology also makes it possible for the device to transmit information back to the manufacturer.
"They know how fast you read because you have to click to turn the page," says Cindy Cohn, legal director at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It knows if you skip to the end to read how it turns out."
Checking Someone's Alibi, Tracking A Device
Cohn says this kind of page-view tracking may seem innocuous, but if the company keeps the data long-term, the information could be subpoenaed to check someone's alibi, or as evidence in a lawsuit.
And it's not just what pages you read; it may also monitor where you read them. Kindles, iPads and other e-readers have geo-location abilities; using GPS or data from Wi-Fi and cell phone towers, it wouldn't be difficult for the devices to track their own locations in the physical world.
But it's hard to find out what kind of data the e-readers are sending. Most e-book companies refer all questions about this to their posted privacy policies. The policies can be hard to interpret, so Cohn and the EFF created a side-by-side comparison. It's just been updated to include Apple's iPad.
The privacy policies also leave important questions unanswered. For instance, how long do the companies store page-view data?
E-Reader Data Collection
Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony declined NPR's request for an interview about e-reader data. But some other companies, including Google and Apple, agreed to take a few questions by e-mail.
Here are some of the responses NPR received regarding data that's being collected by e-readers:
— Google Books: Google recently started selling e-books that can be read on computers and third-party handheld devices. The company's system appears to save only the last five pages viewed to help the reader keep his place. But Google actually stores more pages than that behind the scenes for what it calls "security monitoring" — to prevent the "abusive sharing" of books. A Google representative says these page views may be stored with a user's account for "several weeks" before being erased.
— Apple's iBooks: The system used on iPads and iPhones sends information back to the company. But an Apple representative calls it "functional data." The spokesman says the data is "unidentifiable," and is used only to help Apple "understand customers and customer behavior."
—The FBReader: This free reader from Russia works on a variety of computers and also any handheld device running the Android operating system. It never captures any user data. The open-source programming code means "this fact is easy to check — anybody can inspect [it]," says Nikolay Pultsin, one of its creators.
Amazon's Dominant Role
Amazon now dominates the e-book market, thanks to its popular Kindle e-readers. And many in the publishing business believe the company has built a vast database about the reading public, using information from the online store and reading data from the Kindle.
"[The Kindle] is just one more string in their bow," says author Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild. "They could tell you with precision the age, the zip codes, gender and other interests of the people who bought my books. Now you can throw on top of that the fact that a certain number of them quit reading at Page 45."
Turow believes Amazon is guarding the database closely and not selling or sharing it with other companies. Publishing consultant Brian O'Leary, the founder of Magellan Media, says that's a lost opportunity. He wishes Amazon were more open about its reading data, which could benefit the rest of the publishing industry.
"If people are buying books but not reading them, or they're quitting after a relatively short period of time reading the book, that ultimately tells you that the customer in this case is dissatisfied," O'Leary says. "Better understanding when people stop reading or stop engaging with your content would help you create better products."
A Future Of 'Social Reading'
Some in the publishing industry look forward to a new age of "social reading," in which devices allow readers to share their reactions with each other. And the author might be interested in seeing a graph of the page-turns of thousands of people as they read his latest novel.
"I wouldn't have a problem with looking, but I would probably ignore what I saw," says author Stephen King. "There's a thing about certain pitchers who all of a sudden can't find the strike zone and are walking a lot of hitters and giving up a lot of hits, and you'll hear the announcer say, 'He's steering the ball.' And writers can do that, too."
But King expects the data will continue to be collected, as book-lovers switch to networked devices.
"Ultimately, this sort of thing scares the hell out of me," King
from: NPR
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Best Books of 2010
To make life easier on you, The Early Word has compiled a list of all the Best Books of 2010 being put out. Handily, they've divided them into adult and children's lists. You can check them out here.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Libraries welcome homeless to 'community living rooms'
by: Judy Keen
Public libraries are becoming more hospitable to the homeless by hosting social-service agencies, organizing events such as book clubs and movie matinees and redesigning their facilities.
Instead of trying to deter the homeless from congregating, libraries welcome them and rely on codes of conduct that address issues such as hygiene and behavior to prevent their presence from intimidating other patrons, says Audra Caplan, president of the Public Library Association.
The homeless "go to libraries because they don't have anywhere else to go, and that's a shame," she says.
A federal court ruled in 1992 that the First Amendment gives everyone the right of access to information, but libraries can enforce reasonable rules, says Mary Minow, a library law consultant.
Accommodating the homeless is a key part of a $29.5 million redevelopment of the Central Library in Madison, Wis., that begins next year, Library Board President Tripp Widder says.
Architect Jeffrey Scherer, who devised the Madison renovation plan, says incorporating the needs of the homeless is a recent trend. In Madison, seating will be rearranged to suit varying preferences of homeless patrons and restrooms will be moved within staff sightlines.
Elsewhere:
•At Charlotte Mecklenburg Library in North Carolina, Angela Craig helped start a book club for the homeless, organized tours that include explanations of library rules by security staff and recruited tutors to teach the homeless to use computers.
•In Florida, the Alachua County Library District hosts Monday movies — sometimes with popcorn — for the homeless, keeps a book collection at a shelter and opened a social-service center at a branch, library director Sol Hirsch says.
•In San Francisco, social worker Leah Esguerra works full-time at the downtown library to handle referrals of homeless patrons to social-service agencies. "Libraries are becoming our community living rooms," City Librarian Luis Herrera says.
Lubbock, Texas, meanwhile, is debating ways to discourage the homeless from gathering outside city buildings, including Mahon Public Library.
Trash outside the library prompted some vendors to warn they might stop deliveries. A proposed rule would bar people from the grounds overnight.
from: USA Today
Public libraries are becoming more hospitable to the homeless by hosting social-service agencies, organizing events such as book clubs and movie matinees and redesigning their facilities.
Instead of trying to deter the homeless from congregating, libraries welcome them and rely on codes of conduct that address issues such as hygiene and behavior to prevent their presence from intimidating other patrons, says Audra Caplan, president of the Public Library Association.
The homeless "go to libraries because they don't have anywhere else to go, and that's a shame," she says.
A federal court ruled in 1992 that the First Amendment gives everyone the right of access to information, but libraries can enforce reasonable rules, says Mary Minow, a library law consultant.
Accommodating the homeless is a key part of a $29.5 million redevelopment of the Central Library in Madison, Wis., that begins next year, Library Board President Tripp Widder says.
Architect Jeffrey Scherer, who devised the Madison renovation plan, says incorporating the needs of the homeless is a recent trend. In Madison, seating will be rearranged to suit varying preferences of homeless patrons and restrooms will be moved within staff sightlines.
Elsewhere:
•At Charlotte Mecklenburg Library in North Carolina, Angela Craig helped start a book club for the homeless, organized tours that include explanations of library rules by security staff and recruited tutors to teach the homeless to use computers.
•In Florida, the Alachua County Library District hosts Monday movies — sometimes with popcorn — for the homeless, keeps a book collection at a shelter and opened a social-service center at a branch, library director Sol Hirsch says.
•In San Francisco, social worker Leah Esguerra works full-time at the downtown library to handle referrals of homeless patrons to social-service agencies. "Libraries are becoming our community living rooms," City Librarian Luis Herrera says.
Lubbock, Texas, meanwhile, is debating ways to discourage the homeless from gathering outside city buildings, including Mahon Public Library.
Trash outside the library prompted some vendors to warn they might stop deliveries. A proposed rule would bar people from the grounds overnight.
from: USA Today
Monday, December 13, 2010
Translation as Literary Ambassador
by: Larry Rohter
The runaway success of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy suggests that when it comes to contemporary literature in translation, Americans are at least willing to read Scandinavian detective fiction. But for work from other regions, in other genres, winning the interest of big publishing houses and readers in the United States remains a steep uphill struggle.
Among foreign cultural institutes and publishers, the traditional American aversion to literature in translation is known as “the 3 percent problem.” But now, hoping to increase their minuscule share of the American book market — about 3 percent — foreign governments and foundations, especially those on the margins of Europe, are taking matters into their own hands and plunging into the publishing fray in the United States.
Increasingly, that campaign is no longer limited to widely spoken languages like French and German. From Romania to Catalonia to Iceland, cultural institutes and agencies are subsidizing publication of books in English, underwriting the training of translators, encouraging their writers to tour in the United States, submitting to American marketing and promotional techniques they may have previously shunned and exploiting existing niches in the publishing industry.
“We have established this as a strategic objective, a long-term commitment to break through the American market,” said Corina Suteu, who leads the New York branch of the European Union National Institutes for Culture and directs the Romanian Cultural Institute. “For nations in Europe, be they small or large, literature will always be one of the keys of their cultural existence, and we recognize that this is the only way we are going to be able to make that literature present in the United States.”
For instance, the Dalkey Archive Press, a small publishing house in Champaign, Ill., that for more than 25 years has specialized in translated works, this year began a Slovenian Literature Series, underwritten by official groups in Slovenia, once part of Yugoslavia. The series’s first book, “Necropolis,” by Boris Pahor, is a powerful World War II concentration-camp memoir that has been compared to the best of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, and has been followed by Andrej Blatnik’s “You Do Understand,” a rather absurdist but still touching collection of sketches and parables about love and intimacy.
Dalkey has also begun or is about to begin similar series in Hebrew and Catalan, and with Switzerland and Mexico, the last of which will consist of four books yearly for six years. In each case a financing agency in the host country is subsidizing publication and participating in promotion and marketing in the United States, an effort that can easily require $10,000 or more a book.
“I can see the day coming soon when the only books we are going to be able to do are books that are parts of series,” said John O’Brien, Dalkey’s publisher, acknowledging the growth of the trend. “You’re not just doing it as a book publisher, you are doing it in conjunction with consulates, embassies and book institutes of other countries. That creates a considerable level of interest and a feeling that something much bigger is going on than ‘here is a book by someone I’ve never heard of before.’ ”
With limited budgets and even more limited access to mainstream media, foreign cultural agencies have also come to look upon the Web as an ally in promoting their products. They spread the word not only through sites of their own, Catalonia and Romania being typical examples, but also by using American sites established specifically to champion literature in translation.
One such site, with the tongue-in-cheek name Three Percent, was founded by Open Letter, the University of Rochester’s literary publishing house, and specializes in literature in translation. It has become a lively forum to discuss and review not just that subject but also the craft of translation. Another site, Words Without Borders, founded in 2003, publishes books in translation online and also provides an outlet where translators can offer samples of their work in hopes of interesting commercial publishers.
“Part of what we do is to give younger translators a place to debut their work that is not so high pressure, a place where they can try out being a translator and develop a little confidence before they tackle a big project,” said Alane Salierno Mason, the site’s founder. Words Without Borders began as a “tool for the publishing industry,” she said, but now also considers itself an online literary magazine specializing in translation. It has also begun “sending a newsletter to people in publishing, recommending particular works we have published online for book publication,” Ms. Mason said.
Words Without Borders has also commissioned projects, the most recent being “Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes From the Modern Middle East,” an anthology of short stories, essays, poems and memoirs translated from Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Urdu. Edited by Reza Aslan, the book was picked up by W. W. Norton, which published it last month to strongly positive reviews; Publishers Weekly called it “an impressive success that spans vast regions of time and territory,” continuing, “this is that rare anthology: cohesive, affecting and informing.”
Even the online bookselling behemoth Amazon.com has entered the field, with a new imprint for literature in translation called AmazonCrossing, which is sold online and in bookstores. The first AmazonCrossing offering, “The King of Kahel,” a novel originally in French by Tierno Monénembo, who was born in Guinea, was published in November. Five more titles, all but one fiction, have been announced.
The Amazon executive overseeing the imprint, Jeff Belle, said the company created AmazonCrossing because it saw “an opportunity in an area of the publishing world that is underserved.” He declined to provide specifics about how Amazon determines what books to publish, who selects them and how translators are assigned.
“We are lucky as a global company to have a lot of analytics at our disposal, across our global Web sites,” Mr. Belle said. “That has been very helpful in confirming our original theory that a lot of quality authors and voices have just not had an opportunity to reach U.S. audiences.” Beyond that, he added, “I’m afraid I can’t share exact sources with you.”
While some independent publishers welcome Amazon’s increased involvement in, and support for, literature in translation, others regard it with suspicion. In a kerfuffle in October, Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House attacked what he called the “predatory and thuggish practices” of Amazon, saying that it was “clear to us that Amazon’s interests, and those of a healthy book culture, whether electronic or not, are antithetical.”
Amazon is more open about the grants it has made to entities like Open Letter and Words Without Borders. Government cultural institutes like the Institut Ramon Llull, which is dedicated to propagating the language and culture of Catalonia, in northeastern Spain, and the Korean Literature Translation Institute have also helped underwrite conferences and books on translation, and others are sponsoring trips to take American translators to their countries to acquaint them better with their culture and people.
“It is evident to these people that there is very little support here for this kind of work, and that support is going to have to come from outside” the publishing industry, said Esther Allen, a literature professor at Baruch College and former director of the PEN Translation Fund. “There is still a very entrenched attitude on the part of mainstream commercial houses that the U.S. consumer of books does not want to read translations.”
from: NY Times
The runaway success of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy suggests that when it comes to contemporary literature in translation, Americans are at least willing to read Scandinavian detective fiction. But for work from other regions, in other genres, winning the interest of big publishing houses and readers in the United States remains a steep uphill struggle.
Among foreign cultural institutes and publishers, the traditional American aversion to literature in translation is known as “the 3 percent problem.” But now, hoping to increase their minuscule share of the American book market — about 3 percent — foreign governments and foundations, especially those on the margins of Europe, are taking matters into their own hands and plunging into the publishing fray in the United States.
Increasingly, that campaign is no longer limited to widely spoken languages like French and German. From Romania to Catalonia to Iceland, cultural institutes and agencies are subsidizing publication of books in English, underwriting the training of translators, encouraging their writers to tour in the United States, submitting to American marketing and promotional techniques they may have previously shunned and exploiting existing niches in the publishing industry.
“We have established this as a strategic objective, a long-term commitment to break through the American market,” said Corina Suteu, who leads the New York branch of the European Union National Institutes for Culture and directs the Romanian Cultural Institute. “For nations in Europe, be they small or large, literature will always be one of the keys of their cultural existence, and we recognize that this is the only way we are going to be able to make that literature present in the United States.”
For instance, the Dalkey Archive Press, a small publishing house in Champaign, Ill., that for more than 25 years has specialized in translated works, this year began a Slovenian Literature Series, underwritten by official groups in Slovenia, once part of Yugoslavia. The series’s first book, “Necropolis,” by Boris Pahor, is a powerful World War II concentration-camp memoir that has been compared to the best of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, and has been followed by Andrej Blatnik’s “You Do Understand,” a rather absurdist but still touching collection of sketches and parables about love and intimacy.
Dalkey has also begun or is about to begin similar series in Hebrew and Catalan, and with Switzerland and Mexico, the last of which will consist of four books yearly for six years. In each case a financing agency in the host country is subsidizing publication and participating in promotion and marketing in the United States, an effort that can easily require $10,000 or more a book.
“I can see the day coming soon when the only books we are going to be able to do are books that are parts of series,” said John O’Brien, Dalkey’s publisher, acknowledging the growth of the trend. “You’re not just doing it as a book publisher, you are doing it in conjunction with consulates, embassies and book institutes of other countries. That creates a considerable level of interest and a feeling that something much bigger is going on than ‘here is a book by someone I’ve never heard of before.’ ”
With limited budgets and even more limited access to mainstream media, foreign cultural agencies have also come to look upon the Web as an ally in promoting their products. They spread the word not only through sites of their own, Catalonia and Romania being typical examples, but also by using American sites established specifically to champion literature in translation.
One such site, with the tongue-in-cheek name Three Percent, was founded by Open Letter, the University of Rochester’s literary publishing house, and specializes in literature in translation. It has become a lively forum to discuss and review not just that subject but also the craft of translation. Another site, Words Without Borders, founded in 2003, publishes books in translation online and also provides an outlet where translators can offer samples of their work in hopes of interesting commercial publishers.
“Part of what we do is to give younger translators a place to debut their work that is not so high pressure, a place where they can try out being a translator and develop a little confidence before they tackle a big project,” said Alane Salierno Mason, the site’s founder. Words Without Borders began as a “tool for the publishing industry,” she said, but now also considers itself an online literary magazine specializing in translation. It has also begun “sending a newsletter to people in publishing, recommending particular works we have published online for book publication,” Ms. Mason said.
Words Without Borders has also commissioned projects, the most recent being “Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes From the Modern Middle East,” an anthology of short stories, essays, poems and memoirs translated from Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Urdu. Edited by Reza Aslan, the book was picked up by W. W. Norton, which published it last month to strongly positive reviews; Publishers Weekly called it “an impressive success that spans vast regions of time and territory,” continuing, “this is that rare anthology: cohesive, affecting and informing.”
Even the online bookselling behemoth Amazon.com has entered the field, with a new imprint for literature in translation called AmazonCrossing, which is sold online and in bookstores. The first AmazonCrossing offering, “The King of Kahel,” a novel originally in French by Tierno Monénembo, who was born in Guinea, was published in November. Five more titles, all but one fiction, have been announced.
The Amazon executive overseeing the imprint, Jeff Belle, said the company created AmazonCrossing because it saw “an opportunity in an area of the publishing world that is underserved.” He declined to provide specifics about how Amazon determines what books to publish, who selects them and how translators are assigned.
“We are lucky as a global company to have a lot of analytics at our disposal, across our global Web sites,” Mr. Belle said. “That has been very helpful in confirming our original theory that a lot of quality authors and voices have just not had an opportunity to reach U.S. audiences.” Beyond that, he added, “I’m afraid I can’t share exact sources with you.”
While some independent publishers welcome Amazon’s increased involvement in, and support for, literature in translation, others regard it with suspicion. In a kerfuffle in October, Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House attacked what he called the “predatory and thuggish practices” of Amazon, saying that it was “clear to us that Amazon’s interests, and those of a healthy book culture, whether electronic or not, are antithetical.”
Amazon is more open about the grants it has made to entities like Open Letter and Words Without Borders. Government cultural institutes like the Institut Ramon Llull, which is dedicated to propagating the language and culture of Catalonia, in northeastern Spain, and the Korean Literature Translation Institute have also helped underwrite conferences and books on translation, and others are sponsoring trips to take American translators to their countries to acquaint them better with their culture and people.
“It is evident to these people that there is very little support here for this kind of work, and that support is going to have to come from outside” the publishing industry, said Esther Allen, a literature professor at Baruch College and former director of the PEN Translation Fund. “There is still a very entrenched attitude on the part of mainstream commercial houses that the U.S. consumer of books does not want to read translations.”
from: NY Times
Saturday, December 11, 2010
You may never read alone; Social media invades book world
The great British novelist C.S. Lewis once said, “We read to know we are not alone,” but even the man who dreamed up the fantastic realms of Narnia could never have imagined the brave new social world Kobo Inc. is about to usher in for book lovers.
For many, reading is the last untouched bastion of personal media consumption, perhaps the purest of all individual intellectual pursuits. One which has been associated with quiet, solitude and individual reflection.
Sure, people talk to their friends about what books they’re reading, but not usually during the actual reading Thanks to Kobo, that could all be about to change.
On Thursday, the Toronto-based e-publishing startup will launch Reading Life, a new e-reading iPad application that integrates with the company’s digital bookstore designed to bring social-networking capabilities to the world of electronic books, in a sort of Book Club 2.0.
Through the opt-in service, Kobo users will be able to directly share with their friends what books they're reading and share favourite passages through Facebook, keep tabs on their reading history through a comprehensive statistics tracker and earn badges and rewards for reading in a manner reminiscent of social check in services like Foursquare and Gowalla.
But Reading Life is about more than simply enabling readers to tell their friends when they've encountered Alice for the first time in a Lewis Carroll book or letting them earn a badge for checking into Wonderland.
Kobo sees Reading Life as the beginning of a new era for the company and for e-reading, one where adding elements of community to the reading experience not only helps Kobo differentiate itself from rival e-book offerings from Amazon.com Inc., Google Inc. and Apple Inc., but potentially opens the door to new partnerships and marketing opportunities to entice book lovers and create fresh revenue streams. "This is the beginning of a major thrust for us, where we're making e-reading social," Kobo chief executive Michael Serbinis said in an interview.
"The most important part that we believe customers are looking for in the overall experience is the cultural part of reading. The cultural part of reading is social, it's fun and it's what makes content meaningful."
Kobo plans to roll the Reading Life application out to iPad users first, with versions designed for tablets -- including Research In Motion Ltd.'s forthcoming PlayBook -- and all manner of smartphones coming next year.
With Reading Life, users can tell their friends what books they're reading and share that information through Facebook. Mr. Serbinis said the company plans to add other social-networking services, such as Twitter, in future releases.
As well, Reading Life tracks not only what a user is reading, but what time of day they're reading and, using the location-based technology of the iPad, can even tell where in the world the user is when they're reading.
Like the popular location-based service Foursquare, Mr. Serbinis said Kobo's strategy involves offering users badges and rewards for checking in and reading from certain locations. A reader who checks in from a location in Prince Edward Island, for example, could be offered a discount on Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery.
Mr. Serbinis said the company plans to launch its rewards program over the holiday season with Kobospecific offers, such as discounted books, but said he hopes to encourage other companies -- for example, coffee chains -- to partner with Kobo on the rewards program in the future.
While some readers still get their book recommendations from newspaper reviews or Oprah's Book Club, increasingly book lovers are turning to their friends and social media contacts for recommendations, said Sidney Matrix, a media professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont.
"It's a logical extension of some of these earlier trends, such as social reading," she said. "What's new about it is the e-commerce is being socialized , so this is going to be the next generation of social shopping for e-books."
Adding elements of video games, such as badges and rewards, is one way to help encourage people to read more and talk about what they're reading, she said.
"Books were always mobile technology," she said.
For Kobo, Reading Life comes at a critical time for the company with the holidays on the horizon and its competitors ramping up efforts to grab a greater share of the exploding market for electronic books -- earlier this week, Google announced the launch of its own digital bookstore -- an industry that some analysts believe could account for as much as 50% of publishing revenue in the United States by 2014.
from: Financial Post
Friday, December 10, 2010
Tintin and the figure of mysterious inspiration
Hergé's comic-book hero is about to enthral a new generation in a Spielberg film. But who was he modelled on? Tony Paterson reports
by: Tony Paterson
Pictured standing gingerly in a doorway at the office of the Danish newspaper Politiken over 80 years ago, Palle Huld looks more like a timid and very junior character in a Bertie Wooster novel than the adventurous youth who is said to have inspired Hergé's legendary comic-book character Tintin.
Yet a closer look at the black and white photograph taken in 1928 provides a clue to excite students of the tufty-haired boy reporter. Fifteen-year old Huld, it emerges, is wearing the neatly pressed plus fours that have been Tintin's sartorial hallmark for decades. Had colour photography been invented at the time, it would also have been apparent that like Hergé's character, Huld has red hair.
Albums about Tintin's adventures have sold more than 200 million copies world wide since they first started appearing as comic strips 81 years ago. As testimony to his enduring popularity, a feature film produced by Steven Spielberg entitled The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn will hit cinema screens world wide before Christmas.
Tintin remains a global best-seller. Yet the identity of the person who inspired the great comic-book author's central character has remained elusive.
Tintinologists have spent the past 27 years since George Remi's (alias Hergé's) death in 1983 trying to find a definitive answer. There are scores of theories. Huld certainly helped to generate the character of Tintin. He may even have been his true inspiration.
Danish newspapers reported Huld's death at the weekend aged 98. He spent most of his life as an actor, but his real claim to fame as the man who inspired Tintin occurred years earlier in 1928. Having left school at 15, Huld was doing a humdrum job as a junior clerk in a Copenhagen car company when one day he decided to answer a newspaper advertisement.
The Danish daily Politiken was holding a contest to honour the centennial of Jules Verne. Its aim was to re-enact Phileas Fogg's famous voyage of Around The World in Eighty Days, described in Verne's celebrated 1873 novel. Yet this time around the contest was open only to teenage boys and the winner, who had to circle the globe unaccompanied, had to complete the journey in 46 days using every form of travel barring aeroplanes.
Huld, who had shown his adventurous spirit as a Boy Scout, was selected from several hundred teenagers who had applied to Politiken. He left Denmark on 1 March 1928 and circled the globe, travelling by steam train and steamship through England, Scotland, Canada, Japan, the Soviet Union, Poland and Germany. "Something in me had to try it," Huld wrote in his 1992 autobiography.
The world's press covered Huld's voyage throughout. His train pulled out of Copenhagen station at the start of his trip and all the way across Denmark crowds stood by the track and at railway stations waving flags and offering small gifts for the voyage.
The journey passed off without incident until Huld reached Canada. Wanting to impress a young girl he had met on the boat crossing the Atlantic, he took an unscheduled tour of St John's and missed his train connection. To make up lost time, he had to board a special trains used by emigrants.
After crossing to Japan, Huld faced the challenge of crossing the then war-torn region of Manchuria in what is now north-east China. In 1928 Manchuria was at the centre of a dispute between the Soviet Union and Japan, which was trying to gain a foothold in the region. Huld managed to get through Manchuria without problems.
He was given his biggest fright in Moscow where he arrived to find that no one was there to meet him. At a time when foreigners in Moscow were arrested simply for going out without an escort, he toured the city in a horse-drawn cab for hours searching for the Danish consulate. He finally stopped off at the Hotel Europa where he asked staff to telephone the consulate and send someone to meet him.
When Huld finally returned to Copenhagen after 44 days, there were 20,000 people there to welcome him home. His journey ended on the shoulders of two burly policemen who waded through the crowds and carried him to his waiting family. His mother had been prescribed sleeping pills for the whole of his trip.
The young Huld wrote an account of his adventures which was published in several languages including English, in which it appeared in 1929 as A Boy Scout Around The World. It is known that Hergé read Huld's account. It was perhaps no coincidence that the character of Tintin surfaced for the first time the same year in Le Petit Vingtieme, the children's section of a Belgian newspaper. Palle Huld was happy to encourage the notion that he was Hergé's inspiration for Tintin. But Hergé, who delighted in utterly baffling Tintinologists by using the phrase "Tintin c'est moi," liked to keep the source of his world-renowned character shrouded in mystery.
The issue has kept Tintinologists guessing ever since Hergé's death. More than a decade ago, Huld's claims to be Tintin's inspiration were at least partially undermined by the writer and researcher Jean-Paul Schulz who concluded that Tintin was based on the real life French journalist Robert Sexe.
Sexe was a Great War correspondent and like Tintin, a motorcycle fan, who never stopped exploring. He not only looked and dressed like Tintin, but his best friend was called Milhoux, which is the phonetic translation of Tintin's faithful dog, Milou – called Snowy in English.
Moscow was Sexe's first foreign reporting destination in 1926. Three years later Hergé published his first Tintin book, Tintin Au Pays des Soviets. The chronology of Sexe's subsequent foreign trips to the Congo in 1930 and America in 1931 corresponds exactly with the chronology of the first three Tintin volumes.
Even the Hergé foundation in Brussels has admitted that the similarities are striking and that some of the drawings in the Hergé books appear to have been inspired by photographs taken by Sexe during his travels. There is no evidence that Hergé ever met Sexe. However Tintinologists have concluded that Hergé almost certainly closely followed the accounts of Sexe's adventures because they were published extensively in Belgian newspapers.
Yet there are many other possible sources of inspiration for Tintin. They include Hergé's younger brother, Paul Remi, a career soldier who shaved his hair and grew Tintin-style "hair spikes", and a fellow student of Hergé's called Charles who wore plus fours and Argyle socks. The choice is enough to keep Tintinologists active for decades to come.
It is both possible and plausible that all these influences, including the globe-girdling adventures of Palle Huld, helped in the making of the famous boy reporter with a red quiff, plus fours and a faithful companion called Snowy. Hergé used to refer to his character as his "personal expression." He once complained: "If he is to go on living, it will be by a sort of artificial respiration." Steven Spielberg would no doubt conclude that Hergé was wrong on that one.
Their lives in fiction: real people in novels
Robinson Crusoe
First published in 1719, Daniel Defoe's novel about the fictional castaway Robinson Crusoe is said to have been inspired by the memoirs of Scottish privateer Andrew Selkirk. Tired of his tyrannical captain, Selkirk (unlike Crusoe) asked to be marooned on an island 400 miles from Chile. Both read the Bible to pass time, though Selkirk didn't encounter cannibals or find a companion named Friday. After four years he was rescued by a passing ship in 1709.
Christopher Robin
Born in 1920, Christopher Robin Milne was the real-life son of Winnie the Pooh creator AA Milne. Christopher's relationship with his teddy bear, Edward, became the inspiration for the characters in the book first published in 1926. It is said that as a child, Christopher hated being his father's muse, and once said: "One day I'll write verses about him and see how he likes it."
Alice in Wonderland
Born in 1852, Alice Liddell was the inspiration for the child heroine in Lewis Carroll's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865. Carroll, a keen photographer, was a colleague of Alice's father at Oxford University. Dodgson often took pictures of Alice in fairytale costumes, and the story is thought to be a product of one such game. However, according to Dodgson's diary, his time with Alice ended abruptly when she was 12, sparking a number of controversial theories about the nature of their relationship.
from: Independent
 |
| Palle Huld, left, travelled the world in 44 days by ship, train and car after winning a competition in a newspaper. His book about his journey was said to have inspired Hergé to create Tintin, right. |
by: Tony Paterson
Pictured standing gingerly in a doorway at the office of the Danish newspaper Politiken over 80 years ago, Palle Huld looks more like a timid and very junior character in a Bertie Wooster novel than the adventurous youth who is said to have inspired Hergé's legendary comic-book character Tintin.
Yet a closer look at the black and white photograph taken in 1928 provides a clue to excite students of the tufty-haired boy reporter. Fifteen-year old Huld, it emerges, is wearing the neatly pressed plus fours that have been Tintin's sartorial hallmark for decades. Had colour photography been invented at the time, it would also have been apparent that like Hergé's character, Huld has red hair.
Albums about Tintin's adventures have sold more than 200 million copies world wide since they first started appearing as comic strips 81 years ago. As testimony to his enduring popularity, a feature film produced by Steven Spielberg entitled The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn will hit cinema screens world wide before Christmas.
Tintin remains a global best-seller. Yet the identity of the person who inspired the great comic-book author's central character has remained elusive.
Tintinologists have spent the past 27 years since George Remi's (alias Hergé's) death in 1983 trying to find a definitive answer. There are scores of theories. Huld certainly helped to generate the character of Tintin. He may even have been his true inspiration.
Danish newspapers reported Huld's death at the weekend aged 98. He spent most of his life as an actor, but his real claim to fame as the man who inspired Tintin occurred years earlier in 1928. Having left school at 15, Huld was doing a humdrum job as a junior clerk in a Copenhagen car company when one day he decided to answer a newspaper advertisement.
The Danish daily Politiken was holding a contest to honour the centennial of Jules Verne. Its aim was to re-enact Phileas Fogg's famous voyage of Around The World in Eighty Days, described in Verne's celebrated 1873 novel. Yet this time around the contest was open only to teenage boys and the winner, who had to circle the globe unaccompanied, had to complete the journey in 46 days using every form of travel barring aeroplanes.
Huld, who had shown his adventurous spirit as a Boy Scout, was selected from several hundred teenagers who had applied to Politiken. He left Denmark on 1 March 1928 and circled the globe, travelling by steam train and steamship through England, Scotland, Canada, Japan, the Soviet Union, Poland and Germany. "Something in me had to try it," Huld wrote in his 1992 autobiography.
The world's press covered Huld's voyage throughout. His train pulled out of Copenhagen station at the start of his trip and all the way across Denmark crowds stood by the track and at railway stations waving flags and offering small gifts for the voyage.
The journey passed off without incident until Huld reached Canada. Wanting to impress a young girl he had met on the boat crossing the Atlantic, he took an unscheduled tour of St John's and missed his train connection. To make up lost time, he had to board a special trains used by emigrants.
After crossing to Japan, Huld faced the challenge of crossing the then war-torn region of Manchuria in what is now north-east China. In 1928 Manchuria was at the centre of a dispute between the Soviet Union and Japan, which was trying to gain a foothold in the region. Huld managed to get through Manchuria without problems.
He was given his biggest fright in Moscow where he arrived to find that no one was there to meet him. At a time when foreigners in Moscow were arrested simply for going out without an escort, he toured the city in a horse-drawn cab for hours searching for the Danish consulate. He finally stopped off at the Hotel Europa where he asked staff to telephone the consulate and send someone to meet him.
When Huld finally returned to Copenhagen after 44 days, there were 20,000 people there to welcome him home. His journey ended on the shoulders of two burly policemen who waded through the crowds and carried him to his waiting family. His mother had been prescribed sleeping pills for the whole of his trip.
The young Huld wrote an account of his adventures which was published in several languages including English, in which it appeared in 1929 as A Boy Scout Around The World. It is known that Hergé read Huld's account. It was perhaps no coincidence that the character of Tintin surfaced for the first time the same year in Le Petit Vingtieme, the children's section of a Belgian newspaper. Palle Huld was happy to encourage the notion that he was Hergé's inspiration for Tintin. But Hergé, who delighted in utterly baffling Tintinologists by using the phrase "Tintin c'est moi," liked to keep the source of his world-renowned character shrouded in mystery.
The issue has kept Tintinologists guessing ever since Hergé's death. More than a decade ago, Huld's claims to be Tintin's inspiration were at least partially undermined by the writer and researcher Jean-Paul Schulz who concluded that Tintin was based on the real life French journalist Robert Sexe.
Sexe was a Great War correspondent and like Tintin, a motorcycle fan, who never stopped exploring. He not only looked and dressed like Tintin, but his best friend was called Milhoux, which is the phonetic translation of Tintin's faithful dog, Milou – called Snowy in English.
Moscow was Sexe's first foreign reporting destination in 1926. Three years later Hergé published his first Tintin book, Tintin Au Pays des Soviets. The chronology of Sexe's subsequent foreign trips to the Congo in 1930 and America in 1931 corresponds exactly with the chronology of the first three Tintin volumes.
Even the Hergé foundation in Brussels has admitted that the similarities are striking and that some of the drawings in the Hergé books appear to have been inspired by photographs taken by Sexe during his travels. There is no evidence that Hergé ever met Sexe. However Tintinologists have concluded that Hergé almost certainly closely followed the accounts of Sexe's adventures because they were published extensively in Belgian newspapers.
Yet there are many other possible sources of inspiration for Tintin. They include Hergé's younger brother, Paul Remi, a career soldier who shaved his hair and grew Tintin-style "hair spikes", and a fellow student of Hergé's called Charles who wore plus fours and Argyle socks. The choice is enough to keep Tintinologists active for decades to come.
It is both possible and plausible that all these influences, including the globe-girdling adventures of Palle Huld, helped in the making of the famous boy reporter with a red quiff, plus fours and a faithful companion called Snowy. Hergé used to refer to his character as his "personal expression." He once complained: "If he is to go on living, it will be by a sort of artificial respiration." Steven Spielberg would no doubt conclude that Hergé was wrong on that one.
Their lives in fiction: real people in novels
Robinson Crusoe
First published in 1719, Daniel Defoe's novel about the fictional castaway Robinson Crusoe is said to have been inspired by the memoirs of Scottish privateer Andrew Selkirk. Tired of his tyrannical captain, Selkirk (unlike Crusoe) asked to be marooned on an island 400 miles from Chile. Both read the Bible to pass time, though Selkirk didn't encounter cannibals or find a companion named Friday. After four years he was rescued by a passing ship in 1709.
Christopher Robin
Born in 1920, Christopher Robin Milne was the real-life son of Winnie the Pooh creator AA Milne. Christopher's relationship with his teddy bear, Edward, became the inspiration for the characters in the book first published in 1926. It is said that as a child, Christopher hated being his father's muse, and once said: "One day I'll write verses about him and see how he likes it."
Alice in Wonderland
Born in 1852, Alice Liddell was the inspiration for the child heroine in Lewis Carroll's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865. Carroll, a keen photographer, was a colleague of Alice's father at Oxford University. Dodgson often took pictures of Alice in fairytale costumes, and the story is thought to be a product of one such game. However, according to Dodgson's diary, his time with Alice ended abruptly when she was 12, sparking a number of controversial theories about the nature of their relationship.
from: Independent
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Web Site for Teenagers With Literary Leanings
by: Julie Bosman
When Jacob Lewis helped create the beta version of the Web site Figment with Dana Goodyear, a staff writer at The New Yorker, Mr. Lewis envisioned it as a sort of literary Facebook for the teenage set.
“I really went into it and thought, ‘We’ll be the social network for young-adult fiction,’ ” said Mr. Lewis, a former managing editor of The New Yorker. “But it became clear early on that people didn’t want a new Facebook.”
The young people on the site weren’t much interested in “friending” one another. What they did want, he said, “was to read and write and discover new content, but around the content itself.”
Figment.com will be unveiled on Monday as an experiment in online literature, a free platform for young people to read and write fiction, both on their computers and on their cellphones. Users are invited to write novels, short stories and poems, collaborate with other writers and give and receive feedback on the work posted on the site.
The idea for Figment emerged from a very 21st-century invention, the cellphone novel, which arrived in the United States around 2008. That December, Ms. Goodyear wrote a 6,000-word article for The New Yorker about young Japanese women who had been busy composing fiction on their mobile phones. In the article she declared it “the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age.”
Figment is an attempt to import that idea to the United States and expand on it. Mr. Lewis, who was out of a job after Portfolio, the Condé Nast magazine, was shuttered last year, teamed up with Ms. Goodyear, and the two worked with schools, libraries and literary organizations across the country to recruit several hundred teenagers who were willing to participate in a prototype, which went online in a test version in June.
“We wanted people to be able to write whatever they wanted in whatever form they wanted,” Mr. Lewis said. “We give them a piece of paper and say, ‘Go.’ ” He added that so far contributions had included fantasy, science fiction, biographical work and long serial novels. “There’s a very earnest and exacting quality to what they’re doing.”
Teenagers and their reading habits have been the subject of much fascination in the publishing industry lately. They were a huge driving force behind best-selling books like the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer and the crop of paranormal-romance books that followed. Publishers are eager to learn more about their reading habits and introduce books to them.
Mr. Lewis said he hoped Figment would eventually attract more than a million users and serve as an opportunity for publishers to roam the Web site looking for fresh young talent, or promote their own authors by running book excerpts. “For publishers this is an amazing opportunity to not only reach your consumers but to find out really valuable information about how they are reading,” he said.
Several publishers have already signed on. Running Press Kids, a member of the Perseus Books Group, will provide an excerpt from “Purple Daze,” a historical novel for teenagers written by Sherry Shahan. (Figment charges a small fee to publishers for the privilege.)
David Steinberger, the chief executive of Perseus, said he saw Figment as an opportunity to get the company’s content in front of teenagers.
“The teen culture is a constantly moving target,” Mr. Steinberger said. “We’re looking for partners who are deeply embedded in the way teens interact.”
from: NY Times
When Jacob Lewis helped create the beta version of the Web site Figment with Dana Goodyear, a staff writer at The New Yorker, Mr. Lewis envisioned it as a sort of literary Facebook for the teenage set.
“I really went into it and thought, ‘We’ll be the social network for young-adult fiction,’ ” said Mr. Lewis, a former managing editor of The New Yorker. “But it became clear early on that people didn’t want a new Facebook.”
The young people on the site weren’t much interested in “friending” one another. What they did want, he said, “was to read and write and discover new content, but around the content itself.”
Figment.com will be unveiled on Monday as an experiment in online literature, a free platform for young people to read and write fiction, both on their computers and on their cellphones. Users are invited to write novels, short stories and poems, collaborate with other writers and give and receive feedback on the work posted on the site.
The idea for Figment emerged from a very 21st-century invention, the cellphone novel, which arrived in the United States around 2008. That December, Ms. Goodyear wrote a 6,000-word article for The New Yorker about young Japanese women who had been busy composing fiction on their mobile phones. In the article she declared it “the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age.”
Figment is an attempt to import that idea to the United States and expand on it. Mr. Lewis, who was out of a job after Portfolio, the Condé Nast magazine, was shuttered last year, teamed up with Ms. Goodyear, and the two worked with schools, libraries and literary organizations across the country to recruit several hundred teenagers who were willing to participate in a prototype, which went online in a test version in June.
“We wanted people to be able to write whatever they wanted in whatever form they wanted,” Mr. Lewis said. “We give them a piece of paper and say, ‘Go.’ ” He added that so far contributions had included fantasy, science fiction, biographical work and long serial novels. “There’s a very earnest and exacting quality to what they’re doing.”
Teenagers and their reading habits have been the subject of much fascination in the publishing industry lately. They were a huge driving force behind best-selling books like the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer and the crop of paranormal-romance books that followed. Publishers are eager to learn more about their reading habits and introduce books to them.
Mr. Lewis said he hoped Figment would eventually attract more than a million users and serve as an opportunity for publishers to roam the Web site looking for fresh young talent, or promote their own authors by running book excerpts. “For publishers this is an amazing opportunity to not only reach your consumers but to find out really valuable information about how they are reading,” he said.
Several publishers have already signed on. Running Press Kids, a member of the Perseus Books Group, will provide an excerpt from “Purple Daze,” a historical novel for teenagers written by Sherry Shahan. (Figment charges a small fee to publishers for the privilege.)
David Steinberger, the chief executive of Perseus, said he saw Figment as an opportunity to get the company’s content in front of teenagers.
“The teen culture is a constantly moving target,” Mr. Steinberger said. “We’re looking for partners who are deeply embedded in the way teens interact.”
from: NY Times
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
The Small-Town Books-A-Million Miracle
Given the more-or-less constant barrage of sad news about bookstores closing their doors, it’s easy to imagine a sort of anti-intellectual Grinch gleefully rubbing his hands together in anticipation of a bookless Christmas this year. (“I must stop children from reading!” he exclaims, smashing a Kindle and dumping stack after forlorn stack of paperbacks into his sack.)
But, as the season’s first snow flurries fell in New York yesterday morning, we awoke to news of a Christmas miracle in a faraway land. Could it be? Charlie McClurg, a third-grader in Dalton, Georgia, wished for a bookstore. But instead of sending his request to Santa Claus, he launched a letter-writing campaign begging Books-A-Million to open a branch in his hometown. On Friday, the Dalton Daily Citizen reports, Clyde B. Anderson, the Books-A-Million chairman and C.E.O, came to Westwood Elementary School to deliver the good news: a new bookstore will indeed open at the nearby Walnut Square Mall, perhaps even in time for Christmas.
It seems that Charlie had been commuting to two other Books-A-Million branches—one in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the other near his grandparents’ house in Florence, Alabama—when he decided that enough was enough. He got the idea to write to the company, told his teacher about it, and soon several neighboring schools were involved. “Y’all really wore me down,” Anderson said to the students when he arrived on Friday, carrying all five hundred letters under his arm.
In addition to that brilliantly placed “y’all,” there are several things that I like about this story. First, this little Charlie reminds me of—well, myself. My second grade teacher had a book listing addresses for the customer service departments for hundreds of companies and government agencies, and she encouraged us to practice our letter-writing skills by sending as many accolades, questions, or complaints as we liked. After my first letter, I was hooked. (Once, after I wrote to a pencil company to say that their erasers were no good, they sent me a new-and-improved batch along with a letter thanking me for pointing out the flaw.) Second, I love that Charlie’s teacher’s name is Debbie Reynolds. I can’t help picturing her as the actress, circa 1955; in my mind’s eye, the whole scene has the shimmering veneer of a heartwarming movie-musical.
Finally, and most sappily, I’m pleased to hear that Charlie and friends still like to visit bookstores, and that they’ve now learned something about the power of the written word. Those letters got someone’s attention. They made a bookstore appear out of thin air. It’s a bit of magic that I suspect the children will remember for years to come. Maybe some of them will go on to become writers. At the very least, let’s hope that they all keep reading. As we grumble and wring our hands over the future of book publishing, we must remember to celebrate the small victories.
Charlie, for his part, is thrilled. (“It makes me feel super...it’s amazing...I’m so excited!”) Debbie Reynolds plans to take her class on a field trip to the new store. (I expect tap-dancing.)
Better luck next year, Mr. Grinch.
from: New Yorker
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Da Vinci script unearthed in French town library
 |
| ''An autograph'' attributed to Italian High Renaissance Painter and Inventor Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), is presented to the media in Nantes December 6, 2010. Credit: Reuters/Stephane Mahe |
The text, written from right to left in Da Vinci's trademark mirror-writing, was among 5,000 documents donated to the city of Nantes in 1872 by wealthy collector Pierre-Antoine Labouchere, and then left to languish in local archives.
It was only when a local journalist came across a reference to the document's location in a biography of the Italian master that the manuscript was finally tracked down.
"He was most probably writing in 15th-century Italian, and possibly in other languages, so it's now got to be deciphered," said Agnes Marcetteau, head of the Nantes library where the manuscript was found.
For the time being, however, the contents of the Da Vinci script -- a few lines on a yellowed scrap of paper -- remained a mystery and experts had yet to decipher the artist's brown scrawl, she said.
This is the second rare item uncovered in Labouchere's collection, after the discovery in 2008 of a never-before-seen score by composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) was one of the major painters, scientists and thinkers of the Renaissance, and is best known in France for the Mona Lisa which attracts thousands of visitors each day to the Louvre museum in Paris.
In 1486, he designed a prototype for a flying machine with a rotating wing not unlike today's helicopters.
(Reporting by Guillaume Frouin; Writing by Vicky Buffery, editing by Paul Casciato)
from: Reuters
Sunday, December 5, 2010
2011's 11 Crucial Trends
by: Sean Fitzpatrick
This time of year, media outlets are looking back on the big news from the previous 12 months while marketers and consultants are predicting what’ll be big in the year to come. Early this morning, an e-newsletter from http://www.trendwatching.com/ hit my inbox, touting the “11 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2011.” These are clearly “consumer” trends, but as I scanned through them, I quickly realized that nearly every one of them is either a perfect fit for libraries or a great opportunity to pursue something new for 2011.
Trendwatching’s full list is worth a read, but here I’m excerpting a handful of them (not all were relevant so my list has some gaps) with some thoughts on how libraries could get in on some of the action.
1. Random Acts of Kindness
As we generally become more and more comfortable sharing everything about our lives online, brands are realizing that it’s less and less Big Brother-ish to jump in and engage with Random Acts of Kindness in response to what’s going on in consumers’ personal lives. For brands in the marketplace, it seems a lot like Random Acts of Free Stuff. For libraries, this could translate to Random Acts of Reference.
Trendwatching says:
Maybe someone expresses interest in a historic landmark in your city? Hit them back with some info about it. Or maybe someone complains about some spotty wifi at Starbucks? That’s a perfect opportunity to remind them about your awesome free wifi.
3. Pricing Pandemonium
With all these real-time, group-based, ad hoc offers for great deals on products we never thought we wanted in the first place (I haven’t owned serious home audio equipment in years, but I randomly bought a fancy set of speakers on Black Friday just because it was an amazing deal), it’s easy for Joe Consumer to forget that libraries offer products and services freely.
Trendwatching says:
Libraries can ride on this trend by bootsrapping their “push” marketing tactics to make possible agile, ad hoc, single-subject e-blasts on a regular basis. I love getting daily emails from, say, Newegg.com. It’s not noise as long as it’s easy to scan. If Trendwatching is right about this one, your monthly e-newsletter digest will get lost among all the constant flow crazy discount offers in the consumer marketplace.
5. Online Status Symbols
I have to admit, I’m still a bit slow in getting in on the growing number of check-in, location-based social media applications. I’ve been witness to several mayorial oustings and have been in awe of the tenacious effort my friends put forth to achieve the coups, but I’ve just never embraced that much myself. For those who do play the game, though, the online status symbols are a big deal.
Trendwatching says:
Libraries can get in on this action by rewarding their online power users with real or virtual status symbols.
7. Social-lites and Twinsumers
For years, brands have been looking at ways to leverage data about their customers into increased conversion rate, and as this trend evolves, it’s becoming more and more driven toward social data and turning consumers into marketers. Keeping apace with trends in the consumer marketplace in 2011 will mean give your patrons as many chances to “like” you and talk about you as possible, and rewarding them when they do. This
Trendwatching says:
And Trendwatching’s real-world example from Amazon is a perfect opportunity for libraries to copy:
9. Planned Spontaneity
When communication is always on and always real-time, we don’t to plan structure—we plan spontaneity.
Hearing about a library program a month in advance might just not work with spontaneous patrons’ schedules. On the other hand, location-aware, real-time communication tools open up opportunities to attract a spontaneous crowd of visitors to your locations for events. It all starts with libraries actively participating in those social media outposts in real time.
10. Eco Superior
Libraries are definitely rocking the “green” angle, but in 2011, that may not be enough: we have to highlight our superiority in other ways too if we want to get keep our edge.
Trendwatching says:
Additional benefits of using the library, beyond that it’s “green,” are obvious. Now it’s time to start mashing up our marketing tactics to include benefits that take our offerings beyond the eco-friendly angle.
11. Owner-less
According to Trendwatching, access is more important than ownership in 2011. This one is a natural opportunity for libraries. Most of the materials libraries lend and services they offer are far too expensive for most consumers to afford. From books and DVDs to databases, videogame platforms, and even ad hoc office or meeting spaces, libraries can offer serious benefits in an ownerless society.
Trendwatching says:
As consumers open up to opportunities to rent, borrow, and share, the library will see an ever-growing population more interested in what it offers.
This time of year, media outlets are looking back on the big news from the previous 12 months while marketers and consultants are predicting what’ll be big in the year to come. Early this morning, an e-newsletter from http://www.trendwatching.com/ hit my inbox, touting the “11 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2011.” These are clearly “consumer” trends, but as I scanned through them, I quickly realized that nearly every one of them is either a perfect fit for libraries or a great opportunity to pursue something new for 2011.
Trendwatching’s full list is worth a read, but here I’m excerpting a handful of them (not all were relevant so my list has some gaps) with some thoughts on how libraries could get in on some of the action.
1. Random Acts of Kindness
As we generally become more and more comfortable sharing everything about our lives online, brands are realizing that it’s less and less Big Brother-ish to jump in and engage with Random Acts of Kindness in response to what’s going on in consumers’ personal lives. For brands in the marketplace, it seems a lot like Random Acts of Free Stuff. For libraries, this could translate to Random Acts of Reference.
Trendwatching says:
Fueling the R.A.K. trend is brands’ ability to actually know
what’s happening in consumers’ lives (good or bad!), as
people publicly and knowingly disclose (from Facebook to
Twitter) more and more about their daily lives, their moods or
their whereabouts.
Maybe someone expresses interest in a historic landmark in your city? Hit them back with some info about it. Or maybe someone complains about some spotty wifi at Starbucks? That’s a perfect opportunity to remind them about your awesome free wifi.
3. Pricing Pandemonium
With all these real-time, group-based, ad hoc offers for great deals on products we never thought we wanted in the first place (I haven’t owned serious home audio equipment in years, but I randomly bought a fancy set of speakers on Black Friday just because it was an amazing deal), it’s easy for Joe Consumer to forget that libraries offer products and services freely.
Trendwatching says:
Always-on connectivity is changing consumer spending habits in myriad ways.
For example, coupon clipping required planning and dedication, hence wasn’t
that popular with consumers more interested in the here and now
(see NOWISM), but now is a near-effortless online activity.
Libraries can ride on this trend by bootsrapping their “push” marketing tactics to make possible agile, ad hoc, single-subject e-blasts on a regular basis. I love getting daily emails from, say, Newegg.com. It’s not noise as long as it’s easy to scan. If Trendwatching is right about this one, your monthly e-newsletter digest will get lost among all the constant flow crazy discount offers in the consumer marketplace.
5. Online Status Symbols
I have to admit, I’m still a bit slow in getting in on the growing number of check-in, location-based social media applications. I’ve been witness to several mayorial oustings and have been in awe of the tenacious effort my friends put forth to achieve the coups, but I’ve just never embraced that much myself. For those who do play the game, though, the online status symbols are a big deal.
Trendwatching says:
In 2011, you can’t go wrong supplying your (online-loving)
customers with any kind of symbol, virtual or ‘real world’ that
helps them display to peers their online contributions,
interestingness, creations or popularity.
Libraries can get in on this action by rewarding their online power users with real or virtual status symbols.
7. Social-lites and Twinsumers
For years, brands have been looking at ways to leverage data about their customers into increased conversion rate, and as this trend evolves, it’s becoming more and more driven toward social data and turning consumers into marketers. Keeping apace with trends in the consumer marketplace in 2011 will mean give your patrons as many chances to “like” you and talk about you as possible, and rewarding them when they do. This
Trendwatching says:
Consumers will talk more about brands in 2011 than ever before,
and opportunities for brands that create engaging content that
consumers want to share, or that have personalities that actually
engage consumers will also be bigger than ever. Making it easy
for SOCIAL-LITES to retweet or ‘like’ this content is of course
requirement number one.
And Trendwatching’s real-world example from Amazon is a perfect opportunity for libraries to copy:
Amazon now enables users to integrate their Facebook and
Amazon accounts. The feature allows Amazon to connect through
to a user’s social network, then base recommendations (think books,
DVDs and musicians) upon the information found in his/her
Facebook profile.
9. Planned Spontaneity
When communication is always on and always real-time, we don’t to plan structure—we plan spontaneity.
Trendwatching says:
Expect to see consumers in 2011 rushing to sign up to
services (the PLANNED part) that allow for endless and
almost effortless MASS MINGLING with friends, family, colleagues
or strangers-who-may-become-friends-or-dates (the SPONTANEITY
part ;-)
Hearing about a library program a month in advance might just not work with spontaneous patrons’ schedules. On the other hand, location-aware, real-time communication tools open up opportunities to attract a spontaneous crowd of visitors to your locations for events. It all starts with libraries actively participating in those social media outposts in real time.
10. Eco Superior
Libraries are definitely rocking the “green” angle, but in 2011, that may not be enough: we have to highlight our superiority in other ways too if we want to get keep our edge.
Trendwatching says:
Expect to see a number of leading brands in 2011 switch from
purely marketing their products’ sustainability and eco-friendliness
(with its niche reach) and taking aim right at the heart of traditional
alternatives: stressing the superior quality and design, increased
durability and/or lower running costs of products in ways that will appeal
to even the most eco-skeptic, self-centered or financially-challenged
consumer.
Additional benefits of using the library, beyond that it’s “green,” are obvious. Now it’s time to start mashing up our marketing tactics to include benefits that take our offerings beyond the eco-friendly angle.
11. Owner-less
According to Trendwatching, access is more important than ownership in 2011. This one is a natural opportunity for libraries. Most of the materials libraries lend and services they offer are far too expensive for most consumers to afford. From books and DVDs to databases, videogame platforms, and even ad hoc office or meeting spaces, libraries can offer serious benefits in an ownerless society.
Trendwatching says:
For many consumers, access is better than ownership. Indeed,
over the past few years, there have been few industries that
haven’t got the ‘Netflix treatment’, from textbooks to jewelry to
educational video games to calculators.
As consumers open up to opportunities to rent, borrow, and share, the library will see an ever-growing population more interested in what it offers.
from: American Libraries
Saturday, December 4, 2010
World Book Night to give away 1m free books
Readers in the UK and Ireland can choose books to give away to people they think will enjoy them.
by: Benedicte Page
Night follows day with the launch of World Book Night, as publishers look to inspire adults to read by giving away 1m free books. Inspired by the success of World Book Day, which last year saw schoolchildren cash in tokens for more than 600,000 specially-published titles, this new initiative aims to put "an accessible work of enduring quality" in the hands of adult readers in the UK and Ireland on the evening of 5 March 2011.
Participating authors Margaret Atwood and John le Carré welcomed World Book Night with great enthusiasm, with Atwood saying she was "amazed by its magnitude" and Le Carré calling it "beyond his most ambitious dreams".
Key to the event is the concept of enthusiastic readers giving away their favourite book to people they think might love it too. Anyone can apply to be one of the 20,000 givers, choosing the title they most want to give away from a list selected by a panel including booksellers, authors and librarians, including novels by Sarah Waters and David Mitchell, poetry from Carol Ann Duffy, and memoirs from Alan Bennett and Nigel Slater. The 20,000 chosen to give will be able to donate 48 copies of their much-loved book.
An eclectic roster of high-profile patrons have stepped forward to back the event, including writers JK Rowling, Dave Eggers and Seamus Heaney, musicians Damon Albarn and David Gilmour, actors Colin Firth and Tilda Swinton, cookery queen Nigella Lawson and sculptor Anthony Gormley. BBC creative director Alan Yentob is also a supporter, and the event will be covered on BBC2. Stephen Fry, Lemn Sissay, DBC Pierre, Kamila Shamsie and Bidisha are also on the editorial committee, chaired by broadcaster James Naughtie.
Atwood, whose novel The Blind Assassin is among those on offer for donation, said that when she first heard of the event she was "amazed not only by its magnitude but by its simplicity. The love of writing, the love of reading – these are huge gifts. To be able to give someone else a book you treasure widens the gift circle."
Le Carré, whose The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is another book that will be given away on World Book Night, said: "No writer can ask more than this: that his book should be handed in thousands to people who might otherwise never get to read it, and who will in turn hand it to thousands more. That his book should also pass from one generation to another as a story to challenge and excite each reader in his time -that is beyond his most ambitious dreams."
Artist Antony Gormley, who is a patron of the event, also offered a cheer, saying: "Hooray for World Book Night, a truly wonderful celebration of reading, writing, and sharing! When the joy of giving and receiving is added to the fruit of the imagination, something big, lovely and generous can happen: for a book allows us to hold the experience of another in our hands and absorb it in our minds."
Jamie Byng, chief of publisher Canongate and the chairman of World Book Night, predicted that the event would have "an enormously positive impact on books and reading" because of the sheer power of personal recommendation. "Having 1m books given to one million different people on one night in this way is both unprecedented and hugely exciting," he said.
While the vast majority of the books will be given away by individual members of the public, 40,000 will be distributed by WBN itself to people who might not otherwise be able to participate.
Organisers hope to extend the promotion to meet the global reach of its title in future, but for the moment it is limited to the UK and Ireland
The selected books are:
Kate Atkinson - Case Histories
Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin
Alan Bennett - A Life Like Other People's
John le Carré - The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
Lee Child - Killing Floor
Carol Ann Duffy - The World's Wife
Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Seamus Heaney - Selected Poems
Marian Keyes - Rachel's Holiday
Mohsin Hamid - The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Ben Macintyre - Agent Zigzag
Gabriel García Márquez - Love in the Time of Cholera
Yann Martel - Life of Pi
Alexander Masters - Stuart: A Life Backwards
Rohinton Mistry - A Fine Balance
David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
Toni Morrison - Beloved
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun
David Nicholls - One Day
Philip Pullman - Northern Lights
Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front
CJ Sansom - Dissolution
Nigel Slater - Toast
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Sarah Waters - Fingersmith
from: Guardian
by: Benedicte Page
Night follows day with the launch of World Book Night, as publishers look to inspire adults to read by giving away 1m free books. Inspired by the success of World Book Day, which last year saw schoolchildren cash in tokens for more than 600,000 specially-published titles, this new initiative aims to put "an accessible work of enduring quality" in the hands of adult readers in the UK and Ireland on the evening of 5 March 2011.
Participating authors Margaret Atwood and John le Carré welcomed World Book Night with great enthusiasm, with Atwood saying she was "amazed by its magnitude" and Le Carré calling it "beyond his most ambitious dreams".
Key to the event is the concept of enthusiastic readers giving away their favourite book to people they think might love it too. Anyone can apply to be one of the 20,000 givers, choosing the title they most want to give away from a list selected by a panel including booksellers, authors and librarians, including novels by Sarah Waters and David Mitchell, poetry from Carol Ann Duffy, and memoirs from Alan Bennett and Nigel Slater. The 20,000 chosen to give will be able to donate 48 copies of their much-loved book.
An eclectic roster of high-profile patrons have stepped forward to back the event, including writers JK Rowling, Dave Eggers and Seamus Heaney, musicians Damon Albarn and David Gilmour, actors Colin Firth and Tilda Swinton, cookery queen Nigella Lawson and sculptor Anthony Gormley. BBC creative director Alan Yentob is also a supporter, and the event will be covered on BBC2. Stephen Fry, Lemn Sissay, DBC Pierre, Kamila Shamsie and Bidisha are also on the editorial committee, chaired by broadcaster James Naughtie.
Atwood, whose novel The Blind Assassin is among those on offer for donation, said that when she first heard of the event she was "amazed not only by its magnitude but by its simplicity. The love of writing, the love of reading – these are huge gifts. To be able to give someone else a book you treasure widens the gift circle."
Le Carré, whose The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is another book that will be given away on World Book Night, said: "No writer can ask more than this: that his book should be handed in thousands to people who might otherwise never get to read it, and who will in turn hand it to thousands more. That his book should also pass from one generation to another as a story to challenge and excite each reader in his time -that is beyond his most ambitious dreams."
Artist Antony Gormley, who is a patron of the event, also offered a cheer, saying: "Hooray for World Book Night, a truly wonderful celebration of reading, writing, and sharing! When the joy of giving and receiving is added to the fruit of the imagination, something big, lovely and generous can happen: for a book allows us to hold the experience of another in our hands and absorb it in our minds."
Jamie Byng, chief of publisher Canongate and the chairman of World Book Night, predicted that the event would have "an enormously positive impact on books and reading" because of the sheer power of personal recommendation. "Having 1m books given to one million different people on one night in this way is both unprecedented and hugely exciting," he said.
While the vast majority of the books will be given away by individual members of the public, 40,000 will be distributed by WBN itself to people who might not otherwise be able to participate.
Organisers hope to extend the promotion to meet the global reach of its title in future, but for the moment it is limited to the UK and Ireland
The selected books are:
Kate Atkinson - Case Histories
Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin
Alan Bennett - A Life Like Other People's
John le Carré - The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
Lee Child - Killing Floor
Carol Ann Duffy - The World's Wife
Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Seamus Heaney - Selected Poems
Marian Keyes - Rachel's Holiday
Mohsin Hamid - The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Ben Macintyre - Agent Zigzag
Gabriel García Márquez - Love in the Time of Cholera
Yann Martel - Life of Pi
Alexander Masters - Stuart: A Life Backwards
Rohinton Mistry - A Fine Balance
David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
Toni Morrison - Beloved
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun
David Nicholls - One Day
Philip Pullman - Northern Lights
Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front
CJ Sansom - Dissolution
Nigel Slater - Toast
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Sarah Waters - Fingersmith
from: Guardian
Friday, December 3, 2010
Information overload, the early years
Five centuries years ago, a new technology swamped the world with data. What we can learn from the aftermath.
by: Ann Blair
Worry about information overload has become one of the drumbeats of our time. The world’s books are being digitized, online magazines and newspapers and academic papers are steadily augmented by an endless stream of blog posts and Twitter feeds; and the gadgets to keep us participating in the digital deluge are more numerous and sophisticated. The total amount of information created on the world’s electronic devices is expected to surpass the zettabyte mark this year (a barely conceivable 1 with 21 zeroes after it).
Many feel the situation has reached crisis proportions. In the academic world, critics have begun to argue that universities are producing and distributing more knowledge than we can actually use. In the recent best-selling book “The Shallows,” Nicholas Carr worries that the flood of digital information is changing not only our habits, but even our mental capacities: Forced to scan and skim to keep up, we are losing our abilities to pay sustained attention, reflect deeply, or remember what we’ve learned.
Beneath all this concern lies the sense that humanity is experiencing an unprecedented change — that modern technology is creating a problem that our culture and even our brains are ill equipped to handle. We stand on the brink of a future that no one can ever have experienced before.
But is it really so novel? Human history is a long process of accumulating information, especially once writing made it possible to record texts and preserve them beyond the capacity of our memories. And if we look closely, we can find a striking parallel to our own time: what Western Europe experienced in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention of printing in the 15th century, when thousands upon thousands of books began flooding the market, generating millions of copies for sale. The literate classes experienced exactly the kind of overload we feel today — suddenly, there were far more books than any single person could master, and no end in sight. Scholars, at first delighted with the new access to information, began to despair. “Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?” asked Erasmus, the great humanist of the early 16th century.
But amid the concern, that crisis began to generate something else: a raft of innovative new methods for dealing with the accumulation of information. These included early plans for public libraries, the first universal bibliographies that tried to list all books ever written, the first advice books on how to take notes, and encyclopedic compilations larger and more broadly diffused than ever before. Detailed outlines and alphabetical indexes let readers consult books without reading them through, and the makers of large books experimented with slips of paper for cutting and pasting information from manuscripts and printed matter — a technique that, centuries later, would become essential to modern word processing.
To understand how these earlier generations coped with this flood of information is to help us appreciate the power of human ingenuity to take an inhuman-seeming problem and turn it to productive use — and even, sometimes, to exploit the aspects that seem most overwhelming at the time.
Complaints about information overload, usually couched in terms of the overabundance of books, have a long history — reaching back to Ecclesiastes 12:12 (“of making books there is no end,” probably from the 4th or 3d century BC). The ancient moralist Seneca complained that “the abundance of books is distraction” in the 1st century AD, and there have been other info-booms from time to time — the building of the Library of Alexandria in the 3d century BC, or the development of newspapers starting in the 18th century.
But what happened in the Renaissance was, like digital technology in our own time, transformative. It took overload to an entirely new order of magnitude. Up to this point, every existing book had been copied by hand — a task that could easily take one copyist a year or more. Books were expensive commodities, most often produced on commission and paid for in advance. The great medieval libraries accumulated manuscripts by the hundreds, but few people ever had access to that many books.
The printing press changed that. First developed around 1453, the new technology invented by Gutenberg had moved beyond the experimental phase by 1480 and spread to some two dozen major urban centers, with many other short-lived presses in operation. Contemporaries at first raved about the great speed with which books could be printed, and also about the drop in price — by 80 percent on one contemporary’s estimate in 1468.
But around 1500, humanist scholars began to bemoan new problems: Printers in search of profit, they complained, rushed to print manuscripts without attention to the quality of the text, and the sheer mass of new books was distracting readers from the focus on the ancient authors most worthy of attention. Printers “fill the world with pamphlets and books that are foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious and subversive; and such is the flood that even things that might have done some good lose all their goodness,” wrote Erasmus in the early 16th century, in the kind of tirade that might seem familiar to anyone exhausted by what they find online today.
More pragmatically, a contemporary jurist complained that the “multitude of volumes” also made it hard to find the books one needed at the bookstore. Happy the illiterate, exclaimed one Italian editor (in the preface to one of his many publications), to be spared the malediction of books!
To confront this new challenge, printers, scholars, and compilers began to develop novel ways to manage all these texts — tools that listed, sorted under subject headings, summarized, and selected from all those books that no one person could master. Note-taking was one solution, which the humanist pedagogues advocated alongside their teaching of ancient rhetoric. But not everyone followed their advice to take notes from everything they read throughout their lives, and for those who didn’t, new kinds of reference books offered a ready-made version — collections of best bits that could be consulted using sophisticated indexes and tables of contents.
In the Middle Ages, theologians and jurists had developed biblical concordances and alphabetized subject headings to manage their canonical texts, and with the explosion of printed books these tools were adapted to books for more general audiences. They were intended not just for specialists, but for busy rulers and merchants, preachers, teachers, and students. Printed reference books made a broad range of readers familiar with the use of alphabetical order and indexes. Printing also encouraged a trend toward ever larger reference books as each edition tried to lure more buyers by offering something of interest to everyone, or at least everyone who could read Latin.
One of these was the “florilegium,” a book gathering memorable quotations (or “flowers”) from respected authorities of many kinds — religious writers, philosophers, poets, and orators. These had existed before as slim handmade collections but now grew into large printed volumes, sorted under a wide range of subject headings so that readers could find and use quotations on any topic on which they were speaking or writing. One spectacularly large reference book, the “Theatrum humanae vitae” (the “Theater of Human Life”), published in 1565, gathered examples of human behavior both good and bad from all periods of history, providing instructive ethical models and supporting evidence for every imaginable argument. These books themselves are no longer familiar to us (though “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” is a florilegium by another name), but the basic notion of selecting, summarizing, and categorizing information from multiple sources has grown only more important, underlying everything from Reader’s Digest to the most sophisticated online aggregators.
The larger printed books became, the more they needed to offer guidance through their own texts. The tables of contents and alphabetical indexes developed by printers and authors to accompany them are still recognizable today. Other devices we would find bewildering: Some books came with diagrams of topics and subtopics in a hierarchical cascade of squiggly brackets that could sprawl over multiple pages. The charts in the “Theatrum humanae vitae” were so complex that they elicited a rare case of explicit feedback — a complaint from one early 17th century professor who found them useless and relied instead on the multiple alphabetical indexes also supplied in the work. More effective to modern eyes, though not as widespread, were tables of contents that outlined layers of subdivisions with successive indentations, as a PowerPoint slide might today (but without the bullet points).
Some of the most ingenious techniques for information management in early modern Europe were devised by the compilers who composed the largest reference books, like the “Theatrum humanae vitae” and its even larger sequel, the “Magnum theatrum” (“Great Theater,” 1631). Compilers cut and pasted, very literally, with scissors and glue, from manuscript notes they had already taken — or, even more efficiently, by exploiting a new, cheap source of printed information: older editions of books. These slips were cut from a full page and soon glued onto a new sheet, but in the mid-17th century for the first time one scholar advocated using the slips themselves as an information-storage system. Crucial to this method was a specially designed piece of furniture: a note closet comprising slats studded with hooks on which the slips could be stored and labeled. Probably only a handful of such closets were built, but the slip — and the idea of the filing system — had a long career ahead. In the 18th century the political theorist Montesquieu took notes on the backs of playing cards, which were blank in those days. His younger contemporary Carl Linnaeus made his own slips for recording the characteristics of plants, from which he created a taxonomic system that we still use today. The slips, ordered and sorted, would eventually inspire both the index card and the library card catalog.
The early modern experience of overload was different in many ways from today’s. For example, then only an educated elite and a few areas of life were affected. Today people in nearly every walk of life, at least in the developed world, rely on the Internet for much of their basic information.
What we share with our ancestors, though, is the sense of excess. Most Internet searches will turn up vastly more results than can be used. Too much of the bad stuff, not enough of the good, has been the subtext of complaints about overload from the beginning. But like the early modern compilers, we too are devising ways to cope. In many ways, our key methods of coping with overload haven’t changed since the 16th century: We still need to select, summarize, and sort, and ultimately need human judgment and attention to guide the process.
Some of our methods are similar, and others are completely new. Search engines like Google harness technology to do something that wasn’t possible earlier: using algorithms and data structures to respond to search queries that have never been posed before. Many of our tools will no doubt rapidly become obsolete, but a few of those may spawn useful offshoots, just as the note closet enabled the growth of sophisticated catalog systems.
A new technology does not act alone, after all, but in concert with our ambitions for it. Overload has long been fueled by our own enthusiasm — the enthusiasm for accumulating and sharing knowledge and information, and also for experimenting with new forms of organizing and presenting it.
Early modern compilers were driven by this enthusiasm, even beyond their hopes for acquiring reputation or financial gain. Today, we see the same impulse in the proliferation of cooperative information sharing on the Internet, such as the many designers and programmers sharing new ways to visualize and efficiently use huge quantities of data. In democratizing our ability to contribute to a universal encyclopedia of experience and information, the Internet has shown just how widespread that long-running ambition remains today.
Ann Blair is a professor of history at Harvard University and the author of ”Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age,” recently published by Yale University Press.
from: Boston Globe
by: Ann Blair
 |
| (Hulton Archive/Getty Images) |
Worry about information overload has become one of the drumbeats of our time. The world’s books are being digitized, online magazines and newspapers and academic papers are steadily augmented by an endless stream of blog posts and Twitter feeds; and the gadgets to keep us participating in the digital deluge are more numerous and sophisticated. The total amount of information created on the world’s electronic devices is expected to surpass the zettabyte mark this year (a barely conceivable 1 with 21 zeroes after it).
Many feel the situation has reached crisis proportions. In the academic world, critics have begun to argue that universities are producing and distributing more knowledge than we can actually use. In the recent best-selling book “The Shallows,” Nicholas Carr worries that the flood of digital information is changing not only our habits, but even our mental capacities: Forced to scan and skim to keep up, we are losing our abilities to pay sustained attention, reflect deeply, or remember what we’ve learned.
Beneath all this concern lies the sense that humanity is experiencing an unprecedented change — that modern technology is creating a problem that our culture and even our brains are ill equipped to handle. We stand on the brink of a future that no one can ever have experienced before.
But is it really so novel? Human history is a long process of accumulating information, especially once writing made it possible to record texts and preserve them beyond the capacity of our memories. And if we look closely, we can find a striking parallel to our own time: what Western Europe experienced in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention of printing in the 15th century, when thousands upon thousands of books began flooding the market, generating millions of copies for sale. The literate classes experienced exactly the kind of overload we feel today — suddenly, there were far more books than any single person could master, and no end in sight. Scholars, at first delighted with the new access to information, began to despair. “Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?” asked Erasmus, the great humanist of the early 16th century.
But amid the concern, that crisis began to generate something else: a raft of innovative new methods for dealing with the accumulation of information. These included early plans for public libraries, the first universal bibliographies that tried to list all books ever written, the first advice books on how to take notes, and encyclopedic compilations larger and more broadly diffused than ever before. Detailed outlines and alphabetical indexes let readers consult books without reading them through, and the makers of large books experimented with slips of paper for cutting and pasting information from manuscripts and printed matter — a technique that, centuries later, would become essential to modern word processing.
To understand how these earlier generations coped with this flood of information is to help us appreciate the power of human ingenuity to take an inhuman-seeming problem and turn it to productive use — and even, sometimes, to exploit the aspects that seem most overwhelming at the time.
Complaints about information overload, usually couched in terms of the overabundance of books, have a long history — reaching back to Ecclesiastes 12:12 (“of making books there is no end,” probably from the 4th or 3d century BC). The ancient moralist Seneca complained that “the abundance of books is distraction” in the 1st century AD, and there have been other info-booms from time to time — the building of the Library of Alexandria in the 3d century BC, or the development of newspapers starting in the 18th century.
But what happened in the Renaissance was, like digital technology in our own time, transformative. It took overload to an entirely new order of magnitude. Up to this point, every existing book had been copied by hand — a task that could easily take one copyist a year or more. Books were expensive commodities, most often produced on commission and paid for in advance. The great medieval libraries accumulated manuscripts by the hundreds, but few people ever had access to that many books.
The printing press changed that. First developed around 1453, the new technology invented by Gutenberg had moved beyond the experimental phase by 1480 and spread to some two dozen major urban centers, with many other short-lived presses in operation. Contemporaries at first raved about the great speed with which books could be printed, and also about the drop in price — by 80 percent on one contemporary’s estimate in 1468.
But around 1500, humanist scholars began to bemoan new problems: Printers in search of profit, they complained, rushed to print manuscripts without attention to the quality of the text, and the sheer mass of new books was distracting readers from the focus on the ancient authors most worthy of attention. Printers “fill the world with pamphlets and books that are foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious and subversive; and such is the flood that even things that might have done some good lose all their goodness,” wrote Erasmus in the early 16th century, in the kind of tirade that might seem familiar to anyone exhausted by what they find online today.
More pragmatically, a contemporary jurist complained that the “multitude of volumes” also made it hard to find the books one needed at the bookstore. Happy the illiterate, exclaimed one Italian editor (in the preface to one of his many publications), to be spared the malediction of books!
To confront this new challenge, printers, scholars, and compilers began to develop novel ways to manage all these texts — tools that listed, sorted under subject headings, summarized, and selected from all those books that no one person could master. Note-taking was one solution, which the humanist pedagogues advocated alongside their teaching of ancient rhetoric. But not everyone followed their advice to take notes from everything they read throughout their lives, and for those who didn’t, new kinds of reference books offered a ready-made version — collections of best bits that could be consulted using sophisticated indexes and tables of contents.
In the Middle Ages, theologians and jurists had developed biblical concordances and alphabetized subject headings to manage their canonical texts, and with the explosion of printed books these tools were adapted to books for more general audiences. They were intended not just for specialists, but for busy rulers and merchants, preachers, teachers, and students. Printed reference books made a broad range of readers familiar with the use of alphabetical order and indexes. Printing also encouraged a trend toward ever larger reference books as each edition tried to lure more buyers by offering something of interest to everyone, or at least everyone who could read Latin.
One of these was the “florilegium,” a book gathering memorable quotations (or “flowers”) from respected authorities of many kinds — religious writers, philosophers, poets, and orators. These had existed before as slim handmade collections but now grew into large printed volumes, sorted under a wide range of subject headings so that readers could find and use quotations on any topic on which they were speaking or writing. One spectacularly large reference book, the “Theatrum humanae vitae” (the “Theater of Human Life”), published in 1565, gathered examples of human behavior both good and bad from all periods of history, providing instructive ethical models and supporting evidence for every imaginable argument. These books themselves are no longer familiar to us (though “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” is a florilegium by another name), but the basic notion of selecting, summarizing, and categorizing information from multiple sources has grown only more important, underlying everything from Reader’s Digest to the most sophisticated online aggregators.
The larger printed books became, the more they needed to offer guidance through their own texts. The tables of contents and alphabetical indexes developed by printers and authors to accompany them are still recognizable today. Other devices we would find bewildering: Some books came with diagrams of topics and subtopics in a hierarchical cascade of squiggly brackets that could sprawl over multiple pages. The charts in the “Theatrum humanae vitae” were so complex that they elicited a rare case of explicit feedback — a complaint from one early 17th century professor who found them useless and relied instead on the multiple alphabetical indexes also supplied in the work. More effective to modern eyes, though not as widespread, were tables of contents that outlined layers of subdivisions with successive indentations, as a PowerPoint slide might today (but without the bullet points).
Some of the most ingenious techniques for information management in early modern Europe were devised by the compilers who composed the largest reference books, like the “Theatrum humanae vitae” and its even larger sequel, the “Magnum theatrum” (“Great Theater,” 1631). Compilers cut and pasted, very literally, with scissors and glue, from manuscript notes they had already taken — or, even more efficiently, by exploiting a new, cheap source of printed information: older editions of books. These slips were cut from a full page and soon glued onto a new sheet, but in the mid-17th century for the first time one scholar advocated using the slips themselves as an information-storage system. Crucial to this method was a specially designed piece of furniture: a note closet comprising slats studded with hooks on which the slips could be stored and labeled. Probably only a handful of such closets were built, but the slip — and the idea of the filing system — had a long career ahead. In the 18th century the political theorist Montesquieu took notes on the backs of playing cards, which were blank in those days. His younger contemporary Carl Linnaeus made his own slips for recording the characteristics of plants, from which he created a taxonomic system that we still use today. The slips, ordered and sorted, would eventually inspire both the index card and the library card catalog.
The early modern experience of overload was different in many ways from today’s. For example, then only an educated elite and a few areas of life were affected. Today people in nearly every walk of life, at least in the developed world, rely on the Internet for much of their basic information.
What we share with our ancestors, though, is the sense of excess. Most Internet searches will turn up vastly more results than can be used. Too much of the bad stuff, not enough of the good, has been the subtext of complaints about overload from the beginning. But like the early modern compilers, we too are devising ways to cope. In many ways, our key methods of coping with overload haven’t changed since the 16th century: We still need to select, summarize, and sort, and ultimately need human judgment and attention to guide the process.
Some of our methods are similar, and others are completely new. Search engines like Google harness technology to do something that wasn’t possible earlier: using algorithms and data structures to respond to search queries that have never been posed before. Many of our tools will no doubt rapidly become obsolete, but a few of those may spawn useful offshoots, just as the note closet enabled the growth of sophisticated catalog systems.
A new technology does not act alone, after all, but in concert with our ambitions for it. Overload has long been fueled by our own enthusiasm — the enthusiasm for accumulating and sharing knowledge and information, and also for experimenting with new forms of organizing and presenting it.
Early modern compilers were driven by this enthusiasm, even beyond their hopes for acquiring reputation or financial gain. Today, we see the same impulse in the proliferation of cooperative information sharing on the Internet, such as the many designers and programmers sharing new ways to visualize and efficiently use huge quantities of data. In democratizing our ability to contribute to a universal encyclopedia of experience and information, the Internet has shown just how widespread that long-running ambition remains today.
Ann Blair is a professor of history at Harvard University and the author of ”Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age,” recently published by Yale University Press.
from: Boston Globe
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