Suzanne Dean designed the cover for the Man Booker prize winner 'The Sense of an Ending' by Julian Barnes. She talks about creating some of the most striking book jackets of the past 20 years.
To judge a book by its cover is so patently unwise that it has long been a metaphor for other forms of misinterpretation. But only a very naive author would suppose that the cover of his or her book was irrelevant. It’s the first thing we see, and there’s no way to make it entirely objective: a book’s cover offers an interpretation of its contents – some inflection, if only by its typeface or colour. And yet its effect on the reader is mostly subliminal. Book designers are the ultimate hidden persuaders.
Earlier this year, in his acceptance speech for the Man Booker Prize, Julian Barnes effectively outed one of the women behind his throne: Suzanne Dean, the creative director of Random House, who has been designing the jackets of his books for years. And it seems about time that designers stepped forward and took more credit: with the rise of e-books, physical books have become even more covetable as objects. If you just want to read something, you can do that electronically; if you want to own it, the book should be as beautiful as possible.
Dean, who started designing for Penguin almost 20 years ago, then moved from there to Picador and Random House, now oversees all of Cornerstone and Vintage publishing; this week, she was the only designer included in The Bookseller’s list of “100 most influential people in the book trade”. Over the years, she has come up with a vast number of diverse and memorable covers: the silver first edition of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the hardback of Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, to name a few. Yet she has only started to put her name on them in the last four years or so.
She feels very strongly that e-books offer designers of physical books the opportunity to be more creative. “I absolutely think we should seize the initiative and make the best books we can,” she told me in her office earlier this week. “I can’t imagine a world that didn’t have books on shelves – it would be like having no paintings on walls or photographs in frames. All of these things are part of what makes you who you are.”
In the gamble of deciding how expensively to produce a book, Dean has found that making something extraordinary often pays off. With Barnes’s Arthur and George, for example, a Victorian green cloth cover, or Tom McCarthy’s C, which was wrapped in doodled acetate, word quickly spread that only early print runs would take that form. People rushed out to buy the collectors’-items-to-be, and Dean heard of fights breaking out in bookshops.
For this year’s Man Booker winner, Dean tried out, in her own estimation, about 20 different jackets. Working with the book’s themes of time and memory, she ordered vintage watches from eBay, and even smashed them up in her garden. She tried period photographs of schoolboys, and an image of a couple. Each version tilted one’s reading of the novel quite distinctly. Julian Barnes took about seven covers home and thought about them. Just as he was about to settle on one that featured old rulers and a watch, Dean had second thoughts. “I asked him to give me two more weeks.”
She spent those weeks gliding into abstraction, first asking a letterpress printer to blur wet ink, then realising she’d have to paint the letters herself. She printed out A3 sheets with the title and author in the faintest possible type, then went to work with a brush and Quink ink, which she felt the schoolboys in the book would have used. Still working the ideas of time and memory, she asked herself, of the type alone, “How far can I take the disintegration? How much can I take away?”
She spent almost two weeks just painting. (“I’m a little obsessive,” Dean says with a smirk.) Then she shunted the letters to the right, smudged them into darkness, and realised she needed to ask the production department to make the ends of the book’s pages black. “That’s when I got a little flutter,” she says. It was the closest thing to an “ending” that anyone could render graphically. She added, very delicately, a blown dandelion to the back, and showed it to Barnes and the book’s editor, Dan Franklin. “We all had that buzz from it,” she remembers, “that feeling that it was right.” The book has become the fastest-selling Man Booker Prize winner since records began.
By Gaby Wood, The Telegraph
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Friday, November 25, 2011
9 Reasons Publishers Should Stop Acting Like Libraries Are The Enemy and Start Thanking Them
1. Libraries let people read your books.
I know, I know, you think that if it weren’t for libraries more people would buy your books, I have bad news for you, if it weren’t for libraries people would read less not buy more books. There is no guarantee that the people who read a library copy could, or would, choose to buy your book. Let’s face it no one who is willing spend 4 months on the waiting list for their favorite author is going to buy that hardback copy and probably not the trade paperback or paperback either (have you seen the price of mass market paperbacks lately?). Instead of seeing that library book as money out of your pocket consider it another book sold that wouldn’t have been and more importantly consider it the gateway drug to your author. Millions of people discover their new favorite author through their local library.
2. Libraries introduce people to your books
For children we are a magical place where they can check out 20 or 50 books a week and take them home to read or for parents to read those books. We do story times and other educational and fun programs for children instilling a life long love of reading. This wouldn’t happen anywhere else. Without this introduction to books at an early age you would not have so many adult customers.
As adults its called Readers Advisory. It’s that thing we do when someone comes to us and says they’d like something to read. For the record we do it better than Amazon, because we’re real people who listen and read too, not some formula. Let’s face it you need readers advisory because people ( especially in this economy) aren’t willing to gamble money on a new author.
3. We celebrate books and authors everyday, all year long.
Book clubs, displays and more! We throw these huge parties celebrating your books and your authors at our libraries. We encourage others to read your books, buying multiple copies, and then we sit around talking about them for hours. We create displays to promote your books helping more people discover them. All of this leads to sales.
4. Archives
We keep copies of your older books that the bookstores have sold at discount prices or gotten rid of. We will buy additional copies when the ones we have get old or lost or stolen.
5. Publicity
Yes we’ve already covered readers advisory, book clubs and story times but what about, newsletters, new books, returned books. We also do huge city-wide read-a-longs in our communities, invite authors for readings and signings. With the predicted death of physical bookstores you’re really going to need a place to host those authors signings, especially in the smaller towns.
6. We WANT to buy your books.
In the day and age when you are so worried about piracy, we are offering to pay and we are offering a reasonable method for people to read your books without piracy. We’ve even agreed to your ridiculous anti-piracy methods that make the process cumbersome and frustrating for everyone.
7. We love books too.
Sure not for the same reasons you do, but we want there to be a future for books too.
8. Who else is going to pay those ridiculously high database and journal prices?
Not the general public or the students. The library can barely afford them, you’re raking us over the coals here guys.
9. Library users are your best customers.
Yep, its true. A recent study by Library Journal and Bowker PubTrack Consumer reports
Our data show that over 50% of all library users report purchasing books by an author they were introduced to in the library,” Miller noted. “This debunks the myth that when a library buys a book the publisher loses future sales. Instead, it confirms that the public library does not only incubate and support literacy, as is well understood in our culture, but it is an active partner with the publishing industry in building the book market, not to mention the burgeoning e-book market.
From, Librarian by Day
I know, I know, you think that if it weren’t for libraries more people would buy your books, I have bad news for you, if it weren’t for libraries people would read less not buy more books. There is no guarantee that the people who read a library copy could, or would, choose to buy your book. Let’s face it no one who is willing spend 4 months on the waiting list for their favorite author is going to buy that hardback copy and probably not the trade paperback or paperback either (have you seen the price of mass market paperbacks lately?). Instead of seeing that library book as money out of your pocket consider it another book sold that wouldn’t have been and more importantly consider it the gateway drug to your author. Millions of people discover their new favorite author through their local library.
2. Libraries introduce people to your books
For children we are a magical place where they can check out 20 or 50 books a week and take them home to read or for parents to read those books. We do story times and other educational and fun programs for children instilling a life long love of reading. This wouldn’t happen anywhere else. Without this introduction to books at an early age you would not have so many adult customers.
As adults its called Readers Advisory. It’s that thing we do when someone comes to us and says they’d like something to read. For the record we do it better than Amazon, because we’re real people who listen and read too, not some formula. Let’s face it you need readers advisory because people ( especially in this economy) aren’t willing to gamble money on a new author.
3. We celebrate books and authors everyday, all year long.
Book clubs, displays and more! We throw these huge parties celebrating your books and your authors at our libraries. We encourage others to read your books, buying multiple copies, and then we sit around talking about them for hours. We create displays to promote your books helping more people discover them. All of this leads to sales.
4. Archives
We keep copies of your older books that the bookstores have sold at discount prices or gotten rid of. We will buy additional copies when the ones we have get old or lost or stolen.
5. Publicity
Yes we’ve already covered readers advisory, book clubs and story times but what about, newsletters, new books, returned books. We also do huge city-wide read-a-longs in our communities, invite authors for readings and signings. With the predicted death of physical bookstores you’re really going to need a place to host those authors signings, especially in the smaller towns.
6. We WANT to buy your books.
In the day and age when you are so worried about piracy, we are offering to pay and we are offering a reasonable method for people to read your books without piracy. We’ve even agreed to your ridiculous anti-piracy methods that make the process cumbersome and frustrating for everyone.
7. We love books too.
Sure not for the same reasons you do, but we want there to be a future for books too.
8. Who else is going to pay those ridiculously high database and journal prices?
Not the general public or the students. The library can barely afford them, you’re raking us over the coals here guys.
9. Library users are your best customers.
Yep, its true. A recent study by Library Journal and Bowker PubTrack Consumer reports
Our data show that over 50% of all library users report purchasing books by an author they were introduced to in the library,” Miller noted. “This debunks the myth that when a library buys a book the publisher loses future sales. Instead, it confirms that the public library does not only incubate and support literacy, as is well understood in our culture, but it is an active partner with the publishing industry in building the book market, not to mention the burgeoning e-book market.
From, Librarian by Day
Penguin and Libraries; Common Ground on Kindle Lending
A new theory on why Penguin has pulled the plug on library lending of their ebooks came out in today’s Publishers’ Lunch. Surprisingly, it’s an issue that the two parties can agree upon.
According to the story, publishers are upset because OverDrive sends library users to Amazon’s site for Kindle downloading, essentially making Amazon the administrator of library lending and thus not “governed by publishers’ contracts with Amazon or OverDrive.”
Libraries, also, have expressed concern about sending users to Amazon. California librarian Sarah Houghton recorded a comment on the subject in October, in which she states, “when you check out a Kindle book from Overdrive, it dumps you out on the Amazon web site, and you conclude the transaction there. The transaction ends with a pitch for you to buy more books.” She also expresses concern about the data that Amazon gleans from library users. This subject was also explored by librarian Bobbi Newman on her blog post, Public Library eBooks on the Amazon Kindle – We Got Screwed.
From, EarlyWord: The Publisher
According to the story, publishers are upset because OverDrive sends library users to Amazon’s site for Kindle downloading, essentially making Amazon the administrator of library lending and thus not “governed by publishers’ contracts with Amazon or OverDrive.”
Libraries, also, have expressed concern about sending users to Amazon. California librarian Sarah Houghton recorded a comment on the subject in October, in which she states, “when you check out a Kindle book from Overdrive, it dumps you out on the Amazon web site, and you conclude the transaction there. The transaction ends with a pitch for you to buy more books.” She also expresses concern about the data that Amazon gleans from library users. This subject was also explored by librarian Bobbi Newman on her blog post, Public Library eBooks on the Amazon Kindle – We Got Screwed.
From, EarlyWord: The Publisher
Monday, November 14, 2011
Libraries face a digital future
Lessons from overseas suggest there is more to digital libraries than e-books
It's a time of radical change for libraries. During the summer they were told by the Museums, Libraries & Archives Council and the Local Government Group to exploit digital technologies to survive the spending cuts. In a report on the government's Future Libraries Programme the two bodies also argued that the latest IT developments present a huge opportunity for libraries to deliver more efficient and effective services.
Allen Weiner, Gartner's research vice president in the US, took a similar line when he shared his thoughts about the role of technology in libraries at the Re-Thinking Libraries event in London this November.
Weiner's boyhood library in north-east Philadelphia was a place to read books and to meet up, in effect a social centre. According to the Future Libraries report, the best libraries are showing they can provide a range of services, from helping people to find a job to being a meeting place for clubs and groups.
Weiner said technology can take this forward and transform libraries into "next generation resource centres" and major places for gathering knowledge. But he warned that they need to be abreast of IT developments: "People are going to bring their technologies to the library, they are not going to wait for you to have those technologies there. They are going to bring them and you need to be aware and take advantage of that."
His view was backed up by the chief executive of ePub Direct in Ireland, Gareth Cuddy, who told delegates: "If you do not provide e-books, then they will download them from somewhere else."
Cuddy appeared confident about the continued growth of e-books, however. He said that Europe is 12-18 months behind the US in the adoption of the technology and that in the US 82% of public libraries now offer e-books.
Anythink libraries in Adams County, Colorado provides one example. As reported by the Guardian's Public Leaders' Network, Anythink is moving toward providing downloadable books, films and music and continues to provide products to support staff, such as handheld devices that allow them to help users find items, take out loans and email them an acknowledgement of return dates.
According to Cuddy 70% of publishers expect that by 2014 more than half their publications will be electronic, and a key challenge for libraries and publishers is for books to be available across a wide range of platforms.
Weiner urged libraries to adopt open standards rather than cater for any one type of reader. "The iPad is the world according to Apple, it is not an open standard," he said. "If you think of the democracy a library represents, it should be built on open standards."
He maintained that cloud computing offers great opportunities for libraries. "For example, Amazon today offers Kindle clouds where the books are not in your Kindle, they are up the cloud… The library cloud could be the place where libraries store all kinds of content, not only books but videos, or content that is created in the library."
He claimed to be a big fan of "hyper-local journalism", which he defined as a group of people within a community getting together and writing about that area. Weiner believes that a library is a perfect place for them to meet, write or start their own blog.
"And could the library help them publish it? Absolutely!" he exclaimed. "If it goes into the cloud it gets fed into search engines and then your library cloud becomes the place that people can access the content in open standards across a whole variety of devices."
Gert Poulsen, deputy librarian at Copenhagen Business School, told the conference that take-up of e-services in Denmark's public libraries is low and academic libraries such as his are expected to have a "good effect". Four years ago the business school adopted a "strategic approach to e-publishing", which focused on creating more physical space by having fewer print materials and more electronic resources.
The library's use of e-journals dates back 10 years, when it subscribed to 4,000 electronic publications. This figure has climbed to 35,000 and last year students and staff carried out1.5m downloads of e-journals, according to Poulsen.
In 2010 Copenhagen Business School's budget for electronic books was €72,000, but this year that leapt to €130,000 and it now spends about 45% of its books budgets on digital publications. To encourage further take-up of e-books, the library has set up a €55,000 fund for students to make purchases.
The Future Libraries report makes the point that an effective service can only be achieved by understanding the needs of users. The Copenhagen library appears not to have tackled this fully, as its digital drive has not been particularly popular. "We know that if students get to choose between print and e-books, they actually prefer the print book," Poulsen admitted. "We are still discussing how to deal with the dilemma."
For example, text books at the business school remain unaffected by the electronic drive because students can't put notes in e-books from the library. "Students prefer to print certain chapters and make notes on the page," he said. "So we have to make e-books more relevant to students."
Other major considerations for the library are whether to purchase publications as an individual institution or as part of a consortium. At the business school, 50% of purchases are part of national agreements and the remainder, which includes most e-books, are purchased as an individual institution.
"Read the contract because some vendors limit the number of downloads… You have to decide which usage model you find acceptable. We have said that we will go for multiple users at one time, not just one," Poulsen said.
Another obstacle to the adoption of digital materials is that inter-library loans are almost impossible without violating copyright. "We have to consider inter-library loans very carefully when setting up deals," he said, adding: "We have a full time contracts manager and she is worth all her salary."
Students and staff at the Copenhagen library are sometimes "confused" about the different formats and models for e-books, but Poulsen and his colleagues are experimenting with different providers to find the best solution. "I hope that in the future the publishers will let the library decide which format they want," he said.
Like the conference speakers, the joint report on the Future Libraries Programme emphasises the importance of public libraries as community focal points, and in meeting the needs of a new generation of library users. The document recommends exploiting digital opportunities, but also admits that the programme does not have all the answers and "is still a work in progress". It concludes that change will only happen if political leadership and professional expertise are "harnessed in the same direction."
Gill Hitchcock, Guardian Professional
It's a time of radical change for libraries. During the summer they were told by the Museums, Libraries & Archives Council and the Local Government Group to exploit digital technologies to survive the spending cuts. In a report on the government's Future Libraries Programme the two bodies also argued that the latest IT developments present a huge opportunity for libraries to deliver more efficient and effective services.
Allen Weiner, Gartner's research vice president in the US, took a similar line when he shared his thoughts about the role of technology in libraries at the Re-Thinking Libraries event in London this November.
Weiner's boyhood library in north-east Philadelphia was a place to read books and to meet up, in effect a social centre. According to the Future Libraries report, the best libraries are showing they can provide a range of services, from helping people to find a job to being a meeting place for clubs and groups.
Weiner said technology can take this forward and transform libraries into "next generation resource centres" and major places for gathering knowledge. But he warned that they need to be abreast of IT developments: "People are going to bring their technologies to the library, they are not going to wait for you to have those technologies there. They are going to bring them and you need to be aware and take advantage of that."
His view was backed up by the chief executive of ePub Direct in Ireland, Gareth Cuddy, who told delegates: "If you do not provide e-books, then they will download them from somewhere else."
Cuddy appeared confident about the continued growth of e-books, however. He said that Europe is 12-18 months behind the US in the adoption of the technology and that in the US 82% of public libraries now offer e-books.
Anythink libraries in Adams County, Colorado provides one example. As reported by the Guardian's Public Leaders' Network, Anythink is moving toward providing downloadable books, films and music and continues to provide products to support staff, such as handheld devices that allow them to help users find items, take out loans and email them an acknowledgement of return dates.
According to Cuddy 70% of publishers expect that by 2014 more than half their publications will be electronic, and a key challenge for libraries and publishers is for books to be available across a wide range of platforms.
Weiner urged libraries to adopt open standards rather than cater for any one type of reader. "The iPad is the world according to Apple, it is not an open standard," he said. "If you think of the democracy a library represents, it should be built on open standards."
He maintained that cloud computing offers great opportunities for libraries. "For example, Amazon today offers Kindle clouds where the books are not in your Kindle, they are up the cloud… The library cloud could be the place where libraries store all kinds of content, not only books but videos, or content that is created in the library."
He claimed to be a big fan of "hyper-local journalism", which he defined as a group of people within a community getting together and writing about that area. Weiner believes that a library is a perfect place for them to meet, write or start their own blog.
"And could the library help them publish it? Absolutely!" he exclaimed. "If it goes into the cloud it gets fed into search engines and then your library cloud becomes the place that people can access the content in open standards across a whole variety of devices."
Gert Poulsen, deputy librarian at Copenhagen Business School, told the conference that take-up of e-services in Denmark's public libraries is low and academic libraries such as his are expected to have a "good effect". Four years ago the business school adopted a "strategic approach to e-publishing", which focused on creating more physical space by having fewer print materials and more electronic resources.
The library's use of e-journals dates back 10 years, when it subscribed to 4,000 electronic publications. This figure has climbed to 35,000 and last year students and staff carried out1.5m downloads of e-journals, according to Poulsen.
In 2010 Copenhagen Business School's budget for electronic books was €72,000, but this year that leapt to €130,000 and it now spends about 45% of its books budgets on digital publications. To encourage further take-up of e-books, the library has set up a €55,000 fund for students to make purchases.
The Future Libraries report makes the point that an effective service can only be achieved by understanding the needs of users. The Copenhagen library appears not to have tackled this fully, as its digital drive has not been particularly popular. "We know that if students get to choose between print and e-books, they actually prefer the print book," Poulsen admitted. "We are still discussing how to deal with the dilemma."
For example, text books at the business school remain unaffected by the electronic drive because students can't put notes in e-books from the library. "Students prefer to print certain chapters and make notes on the page," he said. "So we have to make e-books more relevant to students."
Other major considerations for the library are whether to purchase publications as an individual institution or as part of a consortium. At the business school, 50% of purchases are part of national agreements and the remainder, which includes most e-books, are purchased as an individual institution.
"Read the contract because some vendors limit the number of downloads… You have to decide which usage model you find acceptable. We have said that we will go for multiple users at one time, not just one," Poulsen said.
Another obstacle to the adoption of digital materials is that inter-library loans are almost impossible without violating copyright. "We have to consider inter-library loans very carefully when setting up deals," he said, adding: "We have a full time contracts manager and she is worth all her salary."
Students and staff at the Copenhagen library are sometimes "confused" about the different formats and models for e-books, but Poulsen and his colleagues are experimenting with different providers to find the best solution. "I hope that in the future the publishers will let the library decide which format they want," he said.
Like the conference speakers, the joint report on the Future Libraries Programme emphasises the importance of public libraries as community focal points, and in meeting the needs of a new generation of library users. The document recommends exploiting digital opportunities, but also admits that the programme does not have all the answers and "is still a work in progress". It concludes that change will only happen if political leadership and professional expertise are "harnessed in the same direction."
Gill Hitchcock, Guardian Professional
Friday, November 11, 2011
Florida Library Makes 34,000 Ebooks Available at International Airport
Travelers at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport can now download free ebooks from the Broward County Library while they wait to claim their luggage.
The partnership between the library and the airport began during the summer but only recently has begun to attract notice. The airport all together has 36 LCD screens that are reserved for advertisements or public service announcements.
Twelve screens near the baggage claim now also display a QR code that the traveler can scan with a QR code reader app on their smartphone or electronic reading device, and then they can access over 34,000 public domain titles via the library’s OverDrive platform. No library card is required and the titles never expire.
“The library did all the heavy lifting and we just provided them the venue,” said Greg Meyer, the airport’s public information officer. “The airport’s position is that it’s one more customer convenience that we can provide to make the experience better. We have free WiFi and when something comes along like this, where there’s only positive impact for the passengers, why not,” he said.
Meyer said the only caveat was that the airport had to make sure that the service would not take money away from airport concessions.
“We had to be careful not to compete with vendors selling hard bound books,” he said. “The library ensured us that it was older books that would not compete with more current titles being sold,” he said.
Catherine McElrath, the library’s publications specialist manager, approached Meyer about the project.
“Working with the airport was a real pleasure. They were really open to the idea,” McElrath said. “It’s a wonderful way to bring library services to people everywhere,” she said.
There is no charge for displaying the QR code since the airport regards it as a public service announcement.
Stephen Grubb, the library’s e-services manager, said the program is averaging about 20 to 30 downloads a month, but he is expecting that number will grow as people learn about the program.
“People think about books when they think of the library, but they haven’t really made the connection between the library and ebooks yet. This raises their awareness,” he said.
He also said using the QR codes was a quick and easy way to get people to the library’s website and also to appeal to a younger demographic who may not be using the library.
The library is planning to expand the program at the airport and also is working with Broward County Transit to display the QR codes at bus stations and also possibly at Port Everglades, which serves all of south Florida.
“These ebooks are things people could go out and find elsewhere, but what libraries do best is bring information to people, like answering a reference question,” Grubb said. “That’s what we do best and this program is an example of that,” he said.
The library is making a concentrated effort to highlight all its e-services in a program called BCL.WOW, or a library without walls, which will include a mobile app that is scheduled to become available in December.
“We want to broaden the perception of library service,” Grubb said.
Michael Kelley, Digital Shift, November 2011
The partnership between the library and the airport began during the summer but only recently has begun to attract notice. The airport all together has 36 LCD screens that are reserved for advertisements or public service announcements.
Twelve screens near the baggage claim now also display a QR code that the traveler can scan with a QR code reader app on their smartphone or electronic reading device, and then they can access over 34,000 public domain titles via the library’s OverDrive platform. No library card is required and the titles never expire.
“The library did all the heavy lifting and we just provided them the venue,” said Greg Meyer, the airport’s public information officer. “The airport’s position is that it’s one more customer convenience that we can provide to make the experience better. We have free WiFi and when something comes along like this, where there’s only positive impact for the passengers, why not,” he said.
Meyer said the only caveat was that the airport had to make sure that the service would not take money away from airport concessions.
“We had to be careful not to compete with vendors selling hard bound books,” he said. “The library ensured us that it was older books that would not compete with more current titles being sold,” he said.
Catherine McElrath, the library’s publications specialist manager, approached Meyer about the project.
“Working with the airport was a real pleasure. They were really open to the idea,” McElrath said. “It’s a wonderful way to bring library services to people everywhere,” she said.
There is no charge for displaying the QR code since the airport regards it as a public service announcement.
Stephen Grubb, the library’s e-services manager, said the program is averaging about 20 to 30 downloads a month, but he is expecting that number will grow as people learn about the program.
“People think about books when they think of the library, but they haven’t really made the connection between the library and ebooks yet. This raises their awareness,” he said.
He also said using the QR codes was a quick and easy way to get people to the library’s website and also to appeal to a younger demographic who may not be using the library.
The library is planning to expand the program at the airport and also is working with Broward County Transit to display the QR codes at bus stations and also possibly at Port Everglades, which serves all of south Florida.
“These ebooks are things people could go out and find elsewhere, but what libraries do best is bring information to people, like answering a reference question,” Grubb said. “That’s what we do best and this program is an example of that,” he said.
The library is making a concentrated effort to highlight all its e-services in a program called BCL.WOW, or a library without walls, which will include a mobile app that is scheduled to become available in December.
“We want to broaden the perception of library service,” Grubb said.
Michael Kelley, Digital Shift, November 2011
Thursday, November 10, 2011
11.22.63
By Stephen King
The point of the tale of terror is not, in the end, the specifics of what kills us – the vampires, the elder gods, the serial killers – so much as the inexorable fact that something will. It is a reminder of death, and of an essentially tragic view of the universe in which any consolation, however welcome, is temporary. In this literature of secular apocalypse, the few happy endings are fleeting, and never eternal; like the other literatures of the fantastic, it is at its best when it says these central things so clearly that they tap into the sublime.
It would be easy and wrong to see Stephen King's fierce new novel 11.22.63 as a generic side-step from his home turf into science fiction. This is, after all, a novel about time-travel, about the attempt to create a new and better world by going back and changing one big thing: in this case, the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Part of its fascination has to do with the process whereby you might do this: SF is all about process and horror often is not. However, the process involved is that of understanding people, and specifically a heavily researched Lee Harvey Oswald, not that of time-travel itself. It's just a given that there is a door into 1958, and that you reset it every time you go through it.
So the time-travel is simply a piece of inexplicable magic. King's hero Jake Epping is warned, by an incoherent drunk, that this magic has a price and he will not want to pay it. Jake is introduced to the door by his friend Al, who makes the best hamburgers in town (there is a reason for that). Suddenly, Al has aged years and is dying; he has tried and failed to carry out a mission, and wants Jake to take his place.
They both think that the Kennedy assassination is where everything went wrong for America, and the way to fix it is to live from that day in 1958 to that day in 1963 which gives the book its title, with foreknowledge of what needs to be done. One of the strengths of the book is King's at once nostalgic and honest view of the end of the Eisenhower era. Jake is conscious that it's quite a nice time for him, but that as a straight white man, it would be. King manages to avoid both sentimentalising the past and treating it with massive condecension; his role as the poet of American brand-names serves him well here.
Jake gets a job teaching, and falls in love with a colleague, and knows enough to try to protect her from a possibly murderous ex-husband. In a trial run, he changes the life of brain-damaged former mature pupil Henry by killing the father who smashed his skull; on his return from that trip, Jake learns from a sister whom the father did not kill that able-bodied Henry never came back from Vietnam, from which he learns nothing important. The past is not a computer game and the people you meddle with there are real. Jake falls in love and finds out the hard way just how real, and fragile, they are.
Like wishes, or trying to create life or live forever, changing the past is a way of cheating, of getting past the way that the universe works: WW Jacobs's story "The Monkey's Paw" is King's model here. Jake and Al have good intentions, but those alone are not enough, and for Jake, the consequences are both tragedy and nightmare. Had King written this book, as he once planned, early in his career, that would moralistically be that. Part of the charm of the older, mellower King is that he allows Jake the grace of putting things right and accepting things as they sadly are by endurance. He gives him not a happy ending, but a bittersweet one. Sometimes things as they are turn out not to be quite as bad as they might be.
Roz Kaveney, The Independant
The point of the tale of terror is not, in the end, the specifics of what kills us – the vampires, the elder gods, the serial killers – so much as the inexorable fact that something will. It is a reminder of death, and of an essentially tragic view of the universe in which any consolation, however welcome, is temporary. In this literature of secular apocalypse, the few happy endings are fleeting, and never eternal; like the other literatures of the fantastic, it is at its best when it says these central things so clearly that they tap into the sublime.
It would be easy and wrong to see Stephen King's fierce new novel 11.22.63 as a generic side-step from his home turf into science fiction. This is, after all, a novel about time-travel, about the attempt to create a new and better world by going back and changing one big thing: in this case, the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Part of its fascination has to do with the process whereby you might do this: SF is all about process and horror often is not. However, the process involved is that of understanding people, and specifically a heavily researched Lee Harvey Oswald, not that of time-travel itself. It's just a given that there is a door into 1958, and that you reset it every time you go through it.
So the time-travel is simply a piece of inexplicable magic. King's hero Jake Epping is warned, by an incoherent drunk, that this magic has a price and he will not want to pay it. Jake is introduced to the door by his friend Al, who makes the best hamburgers in town (there is a reason for that). Suddenly, Al has aged years and is dying; he has tried and failed to carry out a mission, and wants Jake to take his place.
They both think that the Kennedy assassination is where everything went wrong for America, and the way to fix it is to live from that day in 1958 to that day in 1963 which gives the book its title, with foreknowledge of what needs to be done. One of the strengths of the book is King's at once nostalgic and honest view of the end of the Eisenhower era. Jake is conscious that it's quite a nice time for him, but that as a straight white man, it would be. King manages to avoid both sentimentalising the past and treating it with massive condecension; his role as the poet of American brand-names serves him well here.
Jake gets a job teaching, and falls in love with a colleague, and knows enough to try to protect her from a possibly murderous ex-husband. In a trial run, he changes the life of brain-damaged former mature pupil Henry by killing the father who smashed his skull; on his return from that trip, Jake learns from a sister whom the father did not kill that able-bodied Henry never came back from Vietnam, from which he learns nothing important. The past is not a computer game and the people you meddle with there are real. Jake falls in love and finds out the hard way just how real, and fragile, they are.
Like wishes, or trying to create life or live forever, changing the past is a way of cheating, of getting past the way that the universe works: WW Jacobs's story "The Monkey's Paw" is King's model here. Jake and Al have good intentions, but those alone are not enough, and for Jake, the consequences are both tragedy and nightmare. Had King written this book, as he once planned, early in his career, that would moralistically be that. Part of the charm of the older, mellower King is that he allows Jake the grace of putting things right and accepting things as they sadly are by endurance. He gives him not a happy ending, but a bittersweet one. Sometimes things as they are turn out not to be quite as bad as they might be.
Roz Kaveney, The Independant
Penny Vincenzi: My life in publishing
Penny Vincenzi has published fifteen books since 1989. All are bestsellers. Her latest novel, The Decision, was just published in Canada. She will be guest editing The Afterword all this week.
If I ever wrote my autobiography, it would be extremely boring; only just one chapter would be quite interesting, indeed exciting and that is the one that tells the story of the foray my husband Paul and I made into the world of publishing on our own, and consequently into the word of high finance.
It was in the early 70s and had won a contract with Boots the Chemist to publish a fashion and beauty magazine; I was an ex fashion and beauty editor at that time, and working in the cosmetic industry and my husband was an adman. Boots were very keen and although they didn’t put any money in, they contracted to distribute it, and to display it in all their stores and that was worth mega bucks. The only problem was we didn’t have any money to put in either…
So we sold our very nice Victorian house, bought a modern box and used the spare change to finance the early stages. Paul, was confident that once the advertising started rolling in, so would the backers. We both gave up the day jobs and he spent all his days in the boardrooms of various investment bankers, doing his presentation about the wonderful opportunity they were being offered in backing us while I sold advertising space, hired a couple of staff and we set up office in the spare bedroom of our house. It all went swimmingly; and as the launch date approached, we had sold forty pages of cosmetic advertising, no small achievement. The presses were about to start rolling, and the TV commercial we had contracted to make to sell the magazine was in the can; only problem was we still had no backers. It was terrifying: and then out of the blue, came a small team who said they would back us and would only require 20% of the equity in the company. We attended lots of meetings, feeling rather grand and high powered reached Heads of Agreement—a sort of interim contract—and pressed the button on the printing process. A very large sum of money had now been spent—but we still didn’t have the cash. We didn’t even admit to one another how scared we were.
And then—five days before launch, our backers suddenly demanded 80% equity and full editorial control. We knew this was impossible and we were being held to ransom; and we refused to sign.
At which point, we could very easily have gone bankrupt—in fact our lawyers took us into their boardroom and told us what to do when the bailiffs came. It was terrifying; we couldn’t sleep, we couldn’t eat. We would lose our house, our car, everything; we were in debt to the tune of several hundred thousand pounds. And it wasn’t just our own future we had gambled with so recklessly, we had two little girls who would be on the street with us. How, we asked ourselves, could we have been so stupid?
The only way was forward; so we dispatched the copies of the magazine to Boots’ warehouse and watched our commercial on the TV. “There goes our future” I said as it flashed across the screen…
Publication day came and went and two days later we went to check out on the magazine in the stores. I sent my husband in while the girls and I did some (very meager) shopping. He came back looking ashen; “it’s not even on display” he said. I sent him back to see the manager; we stood in the middle of the supermarket, frozen with terror.
Then “there’s daddy” said Polly, our older daughter, “he’s crying” I turned round to look—and he was, but he was smiling too.
“They’re all gone” he said, his voice odd and strained; “it’s a sell out.”
Which it was; and not just in that store, but right across the country…
Paul was right and the backers came running; on the Monday morning we had three to choose from.
But I never got over it, the terror and the despair; and I remain terminally cautious to this day.
National Post
If I ever wrote my autobiography, it would be extremely boring; only just one chapter would be quite interesting, indeed exciting and that is the one that tells the story of the foray my husband Paul and I made into the world of publishing on our own, and consequently into the word of high finance.
It was in the early 70s and had won a contract with Boots the Chemist to publish a fashion and beauty magazine; I was an ex fashion and beauty editor at that time, and working in the cosmetic industry and my husband was an adman. Boots were very keen and although they didn’t put any money in, they contracted to distribute it, and to display it in all their stores and that was worth mega bucks. The only problem was we didn’t have any money to put in either…
So we sold our very nice Victorian house, bought a modern box and used the spare change to finance the early stages. Paul, was confident that once the advertising started rolling in, so would the backers. We both gave up the day jobs and he spent all his days in the boardrooms of various investment bankers, doing his presentation about the wonderful opportunity they were being offered in backing us while I sold advertising space, hired a couple of staff and we set up office in the spare bedroom of our house. It all went swimmingly; and as the launch date approached, we had sold forty pages of cosmetic advertising, no small achievement. The presses were about to start rolling, and the TV commercial we had contracted to make to sell the magazine was in the can; only problem was we still had no backers. It was terrifying: and then out of the blue, came a small team who said they would back us and would only require 20% of the equity in the company. We attended lots of meetings, feeling rather grand and high powered reached Heads of Agreement—a sort of interim contract—and pressed the button on the printing process. A very large sum of money had now been spent—but we still didn’t have the cash. We didn’t even admit to one another how scared we were.
And then—five days before launch, our backers suddenly demanded 80% equity and full editorial control. We knew this was impossible and we were being held to ransom; and we refused to sign.
At which point, we could very easily have gone bankrupt—in fact our lawyers took us into their boardroom and told us what to do when the bailiffs came. It was terrifying; we couldn’t sleep, we couldn’t eat. We would lose our house, our car, everything; we were in debt to the tune of several hundred thousand pounds. And it wasn’t just our own future we had gambled with so recklessly, we had two little girls who would be on the street with us. How, we asked ourselves, could we have been so stupid?
The only way was forward; so we dispatched the copies of the magazine to Boots’ warehouse and watched our commercial on the TV. “There goes our future” I said as it flashed across the screen…
Publication day came and went and two days later we went to check out on the magazine in the stores. I sent my husband in while the girls and I did some (very meager) shopping. He came back looking ashen; “it’s not even on display” he said. I sent him back to see the manager; we stood in the middle of the supermarket, frozen with terror.
Then “there’s daddy” said Polly, our older daughter, “he’s crying” I turned round to look—and he was, but he was smiling too.
“They’re all gone” he said, his voice odd and strained; “it’s a sell out.”
Which it was; and not just in that store, but right across the country…
Paul was right and the backers came running; on the Monday morning we had three to choose from.
But I never got over it, the terror and the despair; and I remain terminally cautious to this day.
National Post
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Toronto’s Kobo acquired by Japanese firm Rakuten for $315-million
Toronto-based e-publishing startup Kobo Inc. has been purchased by Japanese online shopping giant Rakuten Inc. for US$315-million in cash.
Founded in 2009 after being spun out of Indigo Books & Music Ltd. — which remains the largest single shareholder in the company — Kobo has grown to become one of the most successful e-publishing platforms in North America.
According to a joint statement from the two companies, Kobo will continue to maintain its headquarters, management team and employees in Toronto.
“We are very excited about this next step,” said Rakuten chairman and chief executive Hiroshi Mikitani.
“Kobo provides one of the world’s most communal eBook reading experiences with its innovative integration of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter; while Rakuten offers Kobo unparalleled opportunities to extend its reach through some of the world’s largest regional e-commerce companies, including Buy.com in the US, Tradoria in Germany, Rakuten Brazil, Rakuten Taiwan, Lekutian in China, TARAD in Thailand, and Rakuten Belanja Online in Indonesia, and of course, Rakuten Ichiba in Japan.”
Kobo chief executive Michael Serbinis called the two companies a “perfect match” from a business and cultural perspective.
“We share a a common vision of creating a content experience that is both global and social,” he said in a statement.
“Rakuten is already one of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms, while Kobo is the most social eBook service on the market and one of the world’s largest eBook stores with over 2.5 million titles. This transaction will greatly strengthen our position in our current markets and allow us to diversify quickly into other countries and e-commerce categories.”
Kobo and Rakuten expect the deal to close sometime in the first quarter of 2012.
The two companies have scheduled a conference call for 5:15 p.m. ET to discuss the transaction.
Written by Matt Hartley,
Financial Post
Founded in 2009 after being spun out of Indigo Books & Music Ltd. — which remains the largest single shareholder in the company — Kobo has grown to become one of the most successful e-publishing platforms in North America.
According to a joint statement from the two companies, Kobo will continue to maintain its headquarters, management team and employees in Toronto.
“We are very excited about this next step,” said Rakuten chairman and chief executive Hiroshi Mikitani.
“Kobo provides one of the world’s most communal eBook reading experiences with its innovative integration of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter; while Rakuten offers Kobo unparalleled opportunities to extend its reach through some of the world’s largest regional e-commerce companies, including Buy.com in the US, Tradoria in Germany, Rakuten Brazil, Rakuten Taiwan, Lekutian in China, TARAD in Thailand, and Rakuten Belanja Online in Indonesia, and of course, Rakuten Ichiba in Japan.”
Kobo chief executive Michael Serbinis called the two companies a “perfect match” from a business and cultural perspective.
“We share a a common vision of creating a content experience that is both global and social,” he said in a statement.
“Rakuten is already one of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms, while Kobo is the most social eBook service on the market and one of the world’s largest eBook stores with over 2.5 million titles. This transaction will greatly strengthen our position in our current markets and allow us to diversify quickly into other countries and e-commerce categories.”
Kobo and Rakuten expect the deal to close sometime in the first quarter of 2012.
The two companies have scheduled a conference call for 5:15 p.m. ET to discuss the transaction.
Written by Matt Hartley,
Financial Post
CIA’s ‘vengeful librarians’ mine Facebook, Twitter for global intelligence
MCLEAN, VA.—Inside an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to five million a day.
At the agency’s Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the “vengeful librarians” also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.
From Arabic to Mandarin, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in the native tongue. They cross-reference it with the local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.
Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn’t know exactly when revolution might hit, said the centre’s director, Doug Naquin.
The centre had already “predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime,” he said in a recent interview with the Associated Press at the centre. CIA officials said it was the first such visit by a reporter the agency has ever granted.
The CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the 9-11 Commission, with its first priority to focus on counterterrorism and counter-proliferation. But its several hundred analysts — the actual number is classified — track a broad range of information, from Chinese Internet access to the mood on the street in Pakistan.
While most are based in Virginia, analysts are also scattered throughout U.S. embassies worldwide to get a step closer to the pulse of their subjects.
The most successful analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who “knows how to find stuff other people don’t know exists.”
Those with master’s degrees in library science and multiple languages, especially those who grew up speaking another tongue, “make a powerful open source officer,” Naquin said.
The centre had started focusing on social media after watching the Twitter-sphere rock the Iranian regime during the Green Revolution of 2009, when thousands protested the results of the elections that put President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in power. “Farsi was the third-largest presence in social media blogs at the time on the web,” Naquin said.
The centre’s analysis ends up in President Barack Obama’s daily intelligence briefing in one form or another, almost every day.
After bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May, the CIA followed Twitter to give the White House a snapshot of world public opinion.
Since tweets can’t necessarily be pegged to a geographic location, the analysts broke down reaction by language. The result: the majority of tweets in Urdu, the language of Pakistan, and in Chinese were negative. China is a close ally of Pakistan. Pakistani officials protested the raid as an affront to their nation’s sovereignty, a sore point that continues to complicate U.S.-Pakistan relations.
When the president gave his speech addressing Mideast issues a few weeks after the raid, the tweet response over the next 24 hours came in negative from Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, the Persian Gulf and Israel, too, with Arabic and Turkish tweets charging that Obama favoured Israel, and Hebrew tweets denouncing the speech as pro-Arab.
In the next few days, major news media came to the same conclusion, as did analysis by the covert side of U.S. intelligence based on intercepts and human intelligence gathered in the region.
The centre is also in the process of comparing its social media results with the track record of polling organizations, trying to see which produces more accurate results, Naquin said.
“We do what we can to caveat that we may be getting an overrepresentation of the urban elite,” said Naquin, acknowledging that only a small slice of the population in many areas being monitored has access to computers and Internet.
But he points out that access to social media sites via cellphones is growing in regions including Africa, allowing a wider swath of the population to share views online.
Sites such as Facebook and Twitter also have become a key resource for following a fast-moving crisis such as the riots that raged across Bangkok in April and May of last year, the centre’s deputy director said. The Associated Press agreed not to identify him because he sometimes works undercover in foreign countries.
As director, Naquin is identified publicly by the agency although the location of the centre is kept secret to deter attacks, whether physical or electronic.
The deputy director was one of a skeleton crew of 20 U.S. government employees who kept the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok running throughout the riots as protesters surged through the streets, swarming the embassy neighbourhood and trapping U.S. diplomats and Thais alike in their homes.
The army moved in, and traditional media reportage slowed to a trickle as local journalists were either trapped or cowed by government forces.
“But within an hour, it was all surging out on Twitter and Facebook,” the deputy director said. The CIA homed in on 12 to 15 users who tweeted situation reports and cellphone photos of demonstrations.
The CIA staff cross-referenced the tweeters with the limited news reports to figure out who among them was providing reliable information. Tweeters also policed themselves, pointing out when someone else had filed an inaccurate account.
“That helped us narrow down to those dozen we could count on,” the deputy director said.
Ultimately, some two-thirds of the reports coming out of the embassy and being sent back to all branches of government in Washington came from the CIA’s open source analysis throughout the crisis.
Published On Fri Nov 4 2011
Kimberly Dozier Associated Press
At the agency’s Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the “vengeful librarians” also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.
From Arabic to Mandarin, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in the native tongue. They cross-reference it with the local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.
Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn’t know exactly when revolution might hit, said the centre’s director, Doug Naquin.
The centre had already “predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime,” he said in a recent interview with the Associated Press at the centre. CIA officials said it was the first such visit by a reporter the agency has ever granted.
The CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the 9-11 Commission, with its first priority to focus on counterterrorism and counter-proliferation. But its several hundred analysts — the actual number is classified — track a broad range of information, from Chinese Internet access to the mood on the street in Pakistan.
While most are based in Virginia, analysts are also scattered throughout U.S. embassies worldwide to get a step closer to the pulse of their subjects.
The most successful analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who “knows how to find stuff other people don’t know exists.”
Those with master’s degrees in library science and multiple languages, especially those who grew up speaking another tongue, “make a powerful open source officer,” Naquin said.
The centre had started focusing on social media after watching the Twitter-sphere rock the Iranian regime during the Green Revolution of 2009, when thousands protested the results of the elections that put President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in power. “Farsi was the third-largest presence in social media blogs at the time on the web,” Naquin said.
The centre’s analysis ends up in President Barack Obama’s daily intelligence briefing in one form or another, almost every day.
After bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May, the CIA followed Twitter to give the White House a snapshot of world public opinion.
Since tweets can’t necessarily be pegged to a geographic location, the analysts broke down reaction by language. The result: the majority of tweets in Urdu, the language of Pakistan, and in Chinese were negative. China is a close ally of Pakistan. Pakistani officials protested the raid as an affront to their nation’s sovereignty, a sore point that continues to complicate U.S.-Pakistan relations.
When the president gave his speech addressing Mideast issues a few weeks after the raid, the tweet response over the next 24 hours came in negative from Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, the Persian Gulf and Israel, too, with Arabic and Turkish tweets charging that Obama favoured Israel, and Hebrew tweets denouncing the speech as pro-Arab.
In the next few days, major news media came to the same conclusion, as did analysis by the covert side of U.S. intelligence based on intercepts and human intelligence gathered in the region.
The centre is also in the process of comparing its social media results with the track record of polling organizations, trying to see which produces more accurate results, Naquin said.
“We do what we can to caveat that we may be getting an overrepresentation of the urban elite,” said Naquin, acknowledging that only a small slice of the population in many areas being monitored has access to computers and Internet.
But he points out that access to social media sites via cellphones is growing in regions including Africa, allowing a wider swath of the population to share views online.
Sites such as Facebook and Twitter also have become a key resource for following a fast-moving crisis such as the riots that raged across Bangkok in April and May of last year, the centre’s deputy director said. The Associated Press agreed not to identify him because he sometimes works undercover in foreign countries.
As director, Naquin is identified publicly by the agency although the location of the centre is kept secret to deter attacks, whether physical or electronic.
The deputy director was one of a skeleton crew of 20 U.S. government employees who kept the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok running throughout the riots as protesters surged through the streets, swarming the embassy neighbourhood and trapping U.S. diplomats and Thais alike in their homes.
The army moved in, and traditional media reportage slowed to a trickle as local journalists were either trapped or cowed by government forces.
“But within an hour, it was all surging out on Twitter and Facebook,” the deputy director said. The CIA homed in on 12 to 15 users who tweeted situation reports and cellphone photos of demonstrations.
The CIA staff cross-referenced the tweeters with the limited news reports to figure out who among them was providing reliable information. Tweeters also policed themselves, pointing out when someone else had filed an inaccurate account.
“That helped us narrow down to those dozen we could count on,” the deputy director said.
Ultimately, some two-thirds of the reports coming out of the embassy and being sent back to all branches of government in Washington came from the CIA’s open source analysis throughout the crisis.
Published On Fri Nov 4 2011
Kimberly Dozier Associated Press
Friday, October 28, 2011
Royal Society journal archive made permanently free to access
26 October 2011
The Royal Society has today announced that its world-famous historical journal archive – which includes the first ever peer-reviewed scientific journal – has been made permanently free to access online.
Around 60,000 historical scientific papers are accessible via a fully searchable online archive, with papers published more than 70 years ago now becoming freely available.
The Royal Society is the world’s oldest scientific publisher, with the first edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society appearing in 1665. Henry Oldenburg – Secretary of the Royal Society and first Editor of the publication – ensured that it was “licensed by the council of the society, being first reviewed by some of the members of the same”, thus making it the first ever peer-reviewed journal.
Philosophical Transactions had to overcome early setbacks including plague, the Great Fire of London and even the imprisonment of Oldenburg, but against the odds the publication survived to the present day. Its foundation would eventually be recognised as one of the most pivotal moments of the scientific revolution.
Professor Uta Frith FRS, Chair of the Royal Society library committee, said: “I’m delighted that the Royal Society is continuing to increase access to its wonderful resources by opening up its publishing archives. The release of these papers opens a fascinating window on the history of scientific progress over the last few centuries and will be of interest to anybody who wants to understand how science has evolved since the days of the Royal Society’s foundation.”
Treasures in the archive include Isaac Newton’s first published scientific paper, geological work by a young Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated account of his electrical kite experiment. And nestling amongst these illustrious papers, readers willing to delve a little deeper into the archive may find some undiscovered gems from the dawn of the scientific revolution – including accounts of monstrous calves, grisly tales of students being struck by lightning, and early experiments on to how to cool drinks “without the Help of Snow, Ice, Haile, Wind or Niter, and That at Any Time of the Year.”
Henry Oldenburg writes in his introduction to the first edition: “...it is therefore thought fit to employ the Press, as the most proper way to gratify those, whose...delight in the advancement of Learning and profitable Discoveries, doth entitle them to the knowledge of what this Kingdom, or other parts of the World, do, from time to time, afford...”, going on to state that potential contributors are: “...invited and encouraged to search, try, and find out new things, impart their knowledge to one another, and contribute what they can to the Grand design of improving natural knowledge, and perfecting all Philosophical Arts, and Sciences.”
Thomas Huxley FRS wrote in 1870: “If all the books in the world, except the Philosophical Transactions, were to be destroyed, it is safe to say that the foundations of physical science would remain unshaken, and that the vast intellectual progress of the last two centuries would be largely, though incompletely, recorded.”
The move is being made as part of the Royal Society’s ongoing commitment to open access in scientific publishing. Opening of the archive is being timed to coincide with Open Access Week, and also comes soon after the Royal Society announced its first ever fully open access journal, Open Biology.
From: Inside Science Magazine, The Royal Society
The Royal Society has today announced that its world-famous historical journal archive – which includes the first ever peer-reviewed scientific journal – has been made permanently free to access online.
Around 60,000 historical scientific papers are accessible via a fully searchable online archive, with papers published more than 70 years ago now becoming freely available.
The Royal Society is the world’s oldest scientific publisher, with the first edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society appearing in 1665. Henry Oldenburg – Secretary of the Royal Society and first Editor of the publication – ensured that it was “licensed by the council of the society, being first reviewed by some of the members of the same”, thus making it the first ever peer-reviewed journal.
Philosophical Transactions had to overcome early setbacks including plague, the Great Fire of London and even the imprisonment of Oldenburg, but against the odds the publication survived to the present day. Its foundation would eventually be recognised as one of the most pivotal moments of the scientific revolution.
Professor Uta Frith FRS, Chair of the Royal Society library committee, said: “I’m delighted that the Royal Society is continuing to increase access to its wonderful resources by opening up its publishing archives. The release of these papers opens a fascinating window on the history of scientific progress over the last few centuries and will be of interest to anybody who wants to understand how science has evolved since the days of the Royal Society’s foundation.”
Treasures in the archive include Isaac Newton’s first published scientific paper, geological work by a young Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated account of his electrical kite experiment. And nestling amongst these illustrious papers, readers willing to delve a little deeper into the archive may find some undiscovered gems from the dawn of the scientific revolution – including accounts of monstrous calves, grisly tales of students being struck by lightning, and early experiments on to how to cool drinks “without the Help of Snow, Ice, Haile, Wind or Niter, and That at Any Time of the Year.”
Henry Oldenburg writes in his introduction to the first edition: “...it is therefore thought fit to employ the Press, as the most proper way to gratify those, whose...delight in the advancement of Learning and profitable Discoveries, doth entitle them to the knowledge of what this Kingdom, or other parts of the World, do, from time to time, afford...”, going on to state that potential contributors are: “...invited and encouraged to search, try, and find out new things, impart their knowledge to one another, and contribute what they can to the Grand design of improving natural knowledge, and perfecting all Philosophical Arts, and Sciences.”
Thomas Huxley FRS wrote in 1870: “If all the books in the world, except the Philosophical Transactions, were to be destroyed, it is safe to say that the foundations of physical science would remain unshaken, and that the vast intellectual progress of the last two centuries would be largely, though incompletely, recorded.”
The move is being made as part of the Royal Society’s ongoing commitment to open access in scientific publishing. Opening of the archive is being timed to coincide with Open Access Week, and also comes soon after the Royal Society announced its first ever fully open access journal, Open Biology.
From: Inside Science Magazine, The Royal Society
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Battlefield 3: Andy McNab on how he brought realism to shooting games
The ex-SAS soldier and best-selling author on what he told EA Dice about the nature of combat
Famed for his explosive SAS memoir Bravo Two Zero, and now the author of dozens of fictional military thrillers, Andy McNab is a pretty good person to go to if you're concerned with creating an authentic combat game. The decorated ex-soldier worked with EA Dice through the last year of development on Battlefield 3, helping with mission design, dialogue and motion capture sessions. He has also written a tie-in novel, Battlefield 3: The Russian, which explores the activities of special forces operator Dima, who appears as a non-playable character in the game.
But what has he really been able to draw from his covert missions in hotspots around the world? And has his work as a security adviser helped in the task of describing war to a bunch of coders and artists? We spoke to him last week, to find out.
You haven't been heavily involved with a video game before. What drew you to Battlefield 3?
The story. It's as simple as that. Normally, when you're approached by a games company, they just want you to jump on at the end as a marketing tool, or do a bit of motion capture. But when the call came from EA Dice, I went out to Stockholm and the guys there just seemed to get it – they wanted to progress the story-side. You've got to have a lot more than just shooting in games now, you've got to have that sense of engagement.
The first things EA Dice showed me were the scripts – and they had a sense of character, of emotion, of connection. That was what did it for me. And my first job was helping with the writing, coming up with plausible bridges between missions, doing some of the dialogue. Military speak is very progressive and positive. No one says, "Well, we'll try to get to X by 9am", it's all about you will do this, I will do that, this will happen. The point of that is, if you start with a moment of doubt, when things get worse, doubt becomes failure. It's got to be positive from the start. And it's all about brevity – military language is not as formal as we think it is.
And I spent time with the designers and artists, looking at the aesthetics – the right use of weapons, different ranges of fire, operations in urban and desert environments. I worked with the stuntmen and actors in the motion capture studios, showing them how to hold their guns. The team just wanted everything to look right.
This may sound like a stupid question, but are there moments in Battlefield that have reminded you of genuine missions you've been on?
Oh yes, certainly some of the urban stuff. There's quite a lot of action in Tehran, and through the Middle Eastern architecture, it does look very similar to Iraq. The tank section of the game is based on the earthworks that were built along the Iran/Iraq borders during their war. There were huge infantry battalions based around these earthworks. Four or five years ago, I was flying along the border with the Americans – I was working for a private security company at the time – and I saw these almost medieval constructions.
So I took a couple of pictures and when we were going through the tank levels in the game, I dug out them out, sent them over and Dice produced exact replicas in the game. There's an American tank commander who served out in Fallujah and now works for EA Dice in the US – he said the tank level is better than a military simulator.
A lot of people aren't comfortable with the idea of gamers indulging in war simulations for fun. Are you completely OK with it?
Yes! People have always been fascinated by war – games are just another medium for that. There have been war films since the beginning of cinema – you could go along to the Saturday morning pictures and watch John Wayne kill 100 Japanese soldiers in 10 minutes. It's all part of the same thing. And the big arguments about games inducing violence – they're a load of nonsense; violence has always been there. And possibly, the reason the crime rate is declining in the US is that people are now staying in and exploring violence through games rather than going out and beating people up.
It's the same with films and books. I've been blamed for a bank robbery in America somewhere; I've been blamed for a couple of murders. But look… take Chicago and Toronto: they're separated by two lakes, nothing more, the TV is the same, their influences are the same, but Chicago's crime rate is up here and Toronto's is way down there. How can that be? Is it a cultural thing? I don't know.
Are the emotions that you experience in shooter anywhere near the emotions you genuinely face in real-life missions? Are there any similarities at all?
Yes, there are. Once you're engaged with the character, you're part of it. You get fear, anxiety, you get the same rush of endorphins if you're successful; obviously it's all at different levels because it's just entertainment. You don't get wet, cold and hungry! Also, some people have gamers down as solitary and geeky, but that's not the case. It's very social, you're in touch with 16 other gamers in Japan, the US, all over the world.
And soldiers tend to be very good at shooters don't they?
Absolutely. The military uses games to as a teaching tool; soldiers in training have always used games. Conflict is progressing, it's becoming more about stand-off attack – you don't want to face the enemy, because people get killed. So war is becoming much more technical and soldiers do play a lot of games. They get it.
Which are some of the key weapons in Battlefield, do you think? Which are the most authentic?
The RPG works very well, certainly in the urban environments. We spent a lot of time working on that, getting it right, especially the signature left by the back blast. Everyone always expects a big explosion from an RPG, but you don't get that – it's designed to penetrate armour.
And with RPGs in shooting games you'll often get a guy who'll just stand right up and fire. Well, in real-life, sometimes you see them sometimes you don't; what you're looking for is the signature of the back blast, which is quite distinctive, it's a noisy signature. That's in the game, and it should help players find where the fire is coming from.
The M4 carbine is in a lot of games, but it works very well here. The animation in BF3 captures the way that soldiers manipulate these weapons, the different fixtures on the safety catch, whether it's on single shot or auto, all that sort of stuff. Even down to the moments where you have stoppage and you'll just tip the gun to see what's going on – if the working parts are back, you need a new magazine. So you'll just tip and look. That's in the game animation. Geeky things like that.
We spent a lot of time talking about the helicopter gunships, the 40mm cannons, the way that bullet casings come down like rain – that really does happen. So we played with that. Also, they asked me if the gunship would just stay still and hover over the battlefield. I said of course it will; the crew are like, "We've got a big gun, we're heavily armoured, what are you going to do about it?" There's this attitude, "we will go forward" and we've got to get that in the game.
It's about changing people's perceptions. If you have a line of machine guns pointing one in one direction, you think they're going to stitch the wall in a nice line – it doesn't work that way. When rounds fall, they fall in an oval shape, so instead of having the guns facing outwards, you have two slightly turned to each other – that way you have a bigger Beaten Zone. So often you'll get players asking, what's that machine gun doing up there? And actually, it's doing its job because you want the fire to be coming in from the flank, so the Beaten Zones cross. The Germans worked it out in the first world war. That's why we lost so many soldiers at battles like Passchendaele.
You've also talked a lot about ensuring a lived-in look for the vehicles, and about how tanks end up being heavily customised by their crews…
Yeah, I mean, people live in them! They customise them as much as possible. If they can get hold of a barbecue, they'll stick it on there. Some crews, certainly in Iraq, they were nicking air conditioning units and trying to rig them up in the tanks. They plug in their iPods. That's their home. Even in mechanised battalions, in Warriors and all that, they'll get as much of their equipment as they can on the outside, to make sure they can make the inside more comfortable. Everyone wants chargers for their phones in there! And there are mugs everywhere because they're continually getting brews on….
There's a lot of cynicism among the soldiers in Battlefield 3 – they're often very sceptical, even sarcastic, about their mission objectives. Is that realistic?
Yes, I think it's in every soldier's job description! They've always got to moan, they've always got to be saying, 'what the fuck's he on about… oh well, we'll get on and do it'. It's not all, 'yeah, let's go!'. It's not like that, people aren't like that. Everyone just takes the piss out of each other all the time. When they're not taking the piss is when you've got to worry.
The multiplayer element of Battlefield 3 really highlights the importance of good communications between infantry and air force. Is that realistic?
There are occasions where infantry just talk directly to the pilots. There are voice procedures, but if you've got a guy on the ground screaming for support, the pilot can just say "Shut up, where are you, what can you see? Mark it for me." Then they come in and say "Right. I've got it."
But there is a lot of chaos and confusion?
Yes, and I've explained that to the team. With the night mission in Tehran, when you're coming in to the city, I spent ages talking to them about the light flares and what they do as they descend – the shadows they cast, the usual confusion… we've played around with that a lot.
Can I ask you quickly, as a security adviser, what do you think about the current situation in the Middle East and North Africa? Did anyone see the Arab spring and the fall of Gaddafi coming?
No. There's this thing called "the future character of conflict", and both in the commercial military world and the state military world missed all this, it didn't hit anyone's radar. If anything, people were getting more concerned about central Asia. It remains to be seen whether this is all a good thing. I think everyone is relieved that Gaddafi is dead rather than going to the ICC – no one wanted him there. Why would they? It would give him a voice. Now it's cut, it's done, he's dead.
Now it's about keeping out of the way of the NTC, because there's that void to fill – they have to manage themselves. As soon as it was over, they were saying, "OK Nato, out!." That's the right way to do it. It's been about mentoring the NTC. They've got to be in charge of their own destiny. You don't want the Europeans stomping around out there.
If you were still in active service with the SAS, where do you think you would be now?
In Afghanistan probably, in a task force there. Since November, most of the Nato special forces have been all about malleting the leadership of the Taliban. The process of transition has begun in the country; the Afghan national army control Kabul now and have actually been quite successful. So the plan is to remove the hardcore leadership of the Taliban so you're left with people who you can negotiate with. I was out there just before Cameron in November last year and I got a brief that the task forces had malleted about 1,400 Taliban in a 90-day period. It was a huge operation. That's what it's all about – the run up to the point at which combat troops are withdrawn; they're going no matter what – late 2014, probably 2015. They will go, because it will be election time.
So where do you think the next conflict hotspots will be for western powers?
There are many of them – and again it's about assessing the future character of conflict. What all military forces do is assess energy and food security and the routes to and from trade partners. Food and water, we're all right on, so it'll be energy and trade routes – conflicts on the east and west coasts of Africa, possibly. The Americans, I think, still have an aircraft carrier fleet off the west coast protecting that flank. Our energy out of north Africa seems pretty secure now, it's the east and west coast that might be problem…
Battlefield 3 is released on Friday for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.
From: The Guardian
Famed for his explosive SAS memoir Bravo Two Zero, and now the author of dozens of fictional military thrillers, Andy McNab is a pretty good person to go to if you're concerned with creating an authentic combat game. The decorated ex-soldier worked with EA Dice through the last year of development on Battlefield 3, helping with mission design, dialogue and motion capture sessions. He has also written a tie-in novel, Battlefield 3: The Russian, which explores the activities of special forces operator Dima, who appears as a non-playable character in the game.
But what has he really been able to draw from his covert missions in hotspots around the world? And has his work as a security adviser helped in the task of describing war to a bunch of coders and artists? We spoke to him last week, to find out.
You haven't been heavily involved with a video game before. What drew you to Battlefield 3?
The story. It's as simple as that. Normally, when you're approached by a games company, they just want you to jump on at the end as a marketing tool, or do a bit of motion capture. But when the call came from EA Dice, I went out to Stockholm and the guys there just seemed to get it – they wanted to progress the story-side. You've got to have a lot more than just shooting in games now, you've got to have that sense of engagement.
The first things EA Dice showed me were the scripts – and they had a sense of character, of emotion, of connection. That was what did it for me. And my first job was helping with the writing, coming up with plausible bridges between missions, doing some of the dialogue. Military speak is very progressive and positive. No one says, "Well, we'll try to get to X by 9am", it's all about you will do this, I will do that, this will happen. The point of that is, if you start with a moment of doubt, when things get worse, doubt becomes failure. It's got to be positive from the start. And it's all about brevity – military language is not as formal as we think it is.
And I spent time with the designers and artists, looking at the aesthetics – the right use of weapons, different ranges of fire, operations in urban and desert environments. I worked with the stuntmen and actors in the motion capture studios, showing them how to hold their guns. The team just wanted everything to look right.
This may sound like a stupid question, but are there moments in Battlefield that have reminded you of genuine missions you've been on?
Oh yes, certainly some of the urban stuff. There's quite a lot of action in Tehran, and through the Middle Eastern architecture, it does look very similar to Iraq. The tank section of the game is based on the earthworks that were built along the Iran/Iraq borders during their war. There were huge infantry battalions based around these earthworks. Four or five years ago, I was flying along the border with the Americans – I was working for a private security company at the time – and I saw these almost medieval constructions.
So I took a couple of pictures and when we were going through the tank levels in the game, I dug out them out, sent them over and Dice produced exact replicas in the game. There's an American tank commander who served out in Fallujah and now works for EA Dice in the US – he said the tank level is better than a military simulator.
A lot of people aren't comfortable with the idea of gamers indulging in war simulations for fun. Are you completely OK with it?
Yes! People have always been fascinated by war – games are just another medium for that. There have been war films since the beginning of cinema – you could go along to the Saturday morning pictures and watch John Wayne kill 100 Japanese soldiers in 10 minutes. It's all part of the same thing. And the big arguments about games inducing violence – they're a load of nonsense; violence has always been there. And possibly, the reason the crime rate is declining in the US is that people are now staying in and exploring violence through games rather than going out and beating people up.
It's the same with films and books. I've been blamed for a bank robbery in America somewhere; I've been blamed for a couple of murders. But look… take Chicago and Toronto: they're separated by two lakes, nothing more, the TV is the same, their influences are the same, but Chicago's crime rate is up here and Toronto's is way down there. How can that be? Is it a cultural thing? I don't know.
Are the emotions that you experience in shooter anywhere near the emotions you genuinely face in real-life missions? Are there any similarities at all?
Yes, there are. Once you're engaged with the character, you're part of it. You get fear, anxiety, you get the same rush of endorphins if you're successful; obviously it's all at different levels because it's just entertainment. You don't get wet, cold and hungry! Also, some people have gamers down as solitary and geeky, but that's not the case. It's very social, you're in touch with 16 other gamers in Japan, the US, all over the world.
And soldiers tend to be very good at shooters don't they?
Absolutely. The military uses games to as a teaching tool; soldiers in training have always used games. Conflict is progressing, it's becoming more about stand-off attack – you don't want to face the enemy, because people get killed. So war is becoming much more technical and soldiers do play a lot of games. They get it.
Which are some of the key weapons in Battlefield, do you think? Which are the most authentic?
The RPG works very well, certainly in the urban environments. We spent a lot of time working on that, getting it right, especially the signature left by the back blast. Everyone always expects a big explosion from an RPG, but you don't get that – it's designed to penetrate armour.
And with RPGs in shooting games you'll often get a guy who'll just stand right up and fire. Well, in real-life, sometimes you see them sometimes you don't; what you're looking for is the signature of the back blast, which is quite distinctive, it's a noisy signature. That's in the game, and it should help players find where the fire is coming from.
The M4 carbine is in a lot of games, but it works very well here. The animation in BF3 captures the way that soldiers manipulate these weapons, the different fixtures on the safety catch, whether it's on single shot or auto, all that sort of stuff. Even down to the moments where you have stoppage and you'll just tip the gun to see what's going on – if the working parts are back, you need a new magazine. So you'll just tip and look. That's in the game animation. Geeky things like that.
We spent a lot of time talking about the helicopter gunships, the 40mm cannons, the way that bullet casings come down like rain – that really does happen. So we played with that. Also, they asked me if the gunship would just stay still and hover over the battlefield. I said of course it will; the crew are like, "We've got a big gun, we're heavily armoured, what are you going to do about it?" There's this attitude, "we will go forward" and we've got to get that in the game.
It's about changing people's perceptions. If you have a line of machine guns pointing one in one direction, you think they're going to stitch the wall in a nice line – it doesn't work that way. When rounds fall, they fall in an oval shape, so instead of having the guns facing outwards, you have two slightly turned to each other – that way you have a bigger Beaten Zone. So often you'll get players asking, what's that machine gun doing up there? And actually, it's doing its job because you want the fire to be coming in from the flank, so the Beaten Zones cross. The Germans worked it out in the first world war. That's why we lost so many soldiers at battles like Passchendaele.
You've also talked a lot about ensuring a lived-in look for the vehicles, and about how tanks end up being heavily customised by their crews…
Yeah, I mean, people live in them! They customise them as much as possible. If they can get hold of a barbecue, they'll stick it on there. Some crews, certainly in Iraq, they were nicking air conditioning units and trying to rig them up in the tanks. They plug in their iPods. That's their home. Even in mechanised battalions, in Warriors and all that, they'll get as much of their equipment as they can on the outside, to make sure they can make the inside more comfortable. Everyone wants chargers for their phones in there! And there are mugs everywhere because they're continually getting brews on….
There's a lot of cynicism among the soldiers in Battlefield 3 – they're often very sceptical, even sarcastic, about their mission objectives. Is that realistic?
Yes, I think it's in every soldier's job description! They've always got to moan, they've always got to be saying, 'what the fuck's he on about… oh well, we'll get on and do it'. It's not all, 'yeah, let's go!'. It's not like that, people aren't like that. Everyone just takes the piss out of each other all the time. When they're not taking the piss is when you've got to worry.
The multiplayer element of Battlefield 3 really highlights the importance of good communications between infantry and air force. Is that realistic?
There are occasions where infantry just talk directly to the pilots. There are voice procedures, but if you've got a guy on the ground screaming for support, the pilot can just say "Shut up, where are you, what can you see? Mark it for me." Then they come in and say "Right. I've got it."
But there is a lot of chaos and confusion?
Yes, and I've explained that to the team. With the night mission in Tehran, when you're coming in to the city, I spent ages talking to them about the light flares and what they do as they descend – the shadows they cast, the usual confusion… we've played around with that a lot.
Can I ask you quickly, as a security adviser, what do you think about the current situation in the Middle East and North Africa? Did anyone see the Arab spring and the fall of Gaddafi coming?
No. There's this thing called "the future character of conflict", and both in the commercial military world and the state military world missed all this, it didn't hit anyone's radar. If anything, people were getting more concerned about central Asia. It remains to be seen whether this is all a good thing. I think everyone is relieved that Gaddafi is dead rather than going to the ICC – no one wanted him there. Why would they? It would give him a voice. Now it's cut, it's done, he's dead.
Now it's about keeping out of the way of the NTC, because there's that void to fill – they have to manage themselves. As soon as it was over, they were saying, "OK Nato, out!." That's the right way to do it. It's been about mentoring the NTC. They've got to be in charge of their own destiny. You don't want the Europeans stomping around out there.
If you were still in active service with the SAS, where do you think you would be now?
In Afghanistan probably, in a task force there. Since November, most of the Nato special forces have been all about malleting the leadership of the Taliban. The process of transition has begun in the country; the Afghan national army control Kabul now and have actually been quite successful. So the plan is to remove the hardcore leadership of the Taliban so you're left with people who you can negotiate with. I was out there just before Cameron in November last year and I got a brief that the task forces had malleted about 1,400 Taliban in a 90-day period. It was a huge operation. That's what it's all about – the run up to the point at which combat troops are withdrawn; they're going no matter what – late 2014, probably 2015. They will go, because it will be election time.
So where do you think the next conflict hotspots will be for western powers?
There are many of them – and again it's about assessing the future character of conflict. What all military forces do is assess energy and food security and the routes to and from trade partners. Food and water, we're all right on, so it'll be energy and trade routes – conflicts on the east and west coasts of Africa, possibly. The Americans, I think, still have an aircraft carrier fleet off the west coast protecting that flank. Our energy out of north Africa seems pretty secure now, it's the east and west coast that might be problem…
Battlefield 3 is released on Friday for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.
From: The Guardian
Monday, October 17, 2011
The Storyteller Who Returned From the Cold
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY
THE Englishman David Cornwell, who writes under the name John le Carré, has been a best-selling novelist for nearly five decades, and he has been, right from the start, an unusually perverse member of that select class: he writes books that practically beg not to be turned into movies. Of his 22 novels nearly all of them about the perennially popular and movie-friendly subject of espionage, a mere 7 have made the perilous border crossing to the big screen. (Three others have been adapted as television mini-series and one more as a stand-alone television movie.)
An eighth le Carré feature film, Tomas Alfredson’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” will be released on Dec. 9, and it’s a fair illustration of the fiendish difficulties this sly, subtle storyteller’s work presents to moviemakers. Mr. le Carré’s tales always take place in a kind of no man’s land, in the disputed territories of reason, morality and even simple truth. That’s a terrain that major-studio films are almost entirely unfamiliar with these days: it’s too dangerous, too unpredictable, like the wilder reaches of Afghanistan.
The world of “Tinker, Tailor,” which was originally published in 1974, is, though fearsomely murky, at least one with recognizable coordinates. The action takes place during the cold war, when East was East and West was West, and the point of intersection was a wall in the divided city of Berlin. That wall is the scene of the melancholy climax of the first movie made from a le Carré novel, Martin Ritt’s “Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1965), in which a British intelligence agent named Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) is asked by his masters to pretend to defect to the other side.
The novel, Mr. le Carré’s third, had been a publishing sensation; it was on The New York Times’s best-seller list for over a year, much of that time at No. 1. Part of the book’s appeal was its apparent realism about the sordid details of international espionage. Mr. le Carré’s rumpled, depressed-looking spies didn’t much resemble Ian Fleming’s impossibly suave James Bond. (David Cornwell, before he became John le Carré, had worked in British intelligence, where he seems not to have encountered any 007s.)
And the film, shot in black and white and equipped with a moody jazz score, lived up (or down) to the novel’s clammy atmosphere. It didn’t sell tickets like “Goldfinger,” but it made an impression, and it holds up. Watching “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” now — the Criterion Collection released an excellent DVD in 2008 — you can still feel the grim, gray slog of the cold war in your bones.
In retrospect it seems miraculous that the movies did so well by Mr. le Carré on that first go. The next couple of attempts, Sidney Lumet’s 1966 “Deadly Affair” (based on the novel “Call for the Dead”) and Frank R. Pierson’s “Looking Glass War” (1969), were largely bungled operations, though “Deadly Affair” benefits from the casting of James Mason as a version of Mr. le Carré’s most famous character, the mild-mannered and deceptively wily spymaster George Smiley. After “The Looking Glass War,” an adaptation roughly as successful as the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, Mr. le Carré withdrew from the field for better than a decade. He knew when it was time to come in from the cold.
What the failed adaptations of his books had made clear was that even in his relatively straightforward early novels his narrative techniques were a little too tricky for the movies to handle. Mr. le Carré is maybe the most eccentric constructor of fiction in English literature since Joseph Conrad. His stories are full of digressions and long flashbacks; he circles around his plots for the longest time, as if he were doing reconnaissance on them before deciding to go in for the kill. And the verbal textures of the books can be challenging too, because his spies tend to speak in their own special jargon, which seems like normal speech, but isn’t quite. It’s like one of those maddeningly elusive regional English dialects: you need to get the hang of it, and it always takes longer than you would have thought possible.
In the ’70s Mr. le Carré’s novels became yet more daunting: denser, more complex, more stubbornly ambiguous. It’s as if he had determined to make them movie-proof. “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” his sixth novel, dates from that era, and at the time it was the twistiest, most labyrinthine act of narration he had ever perpetrated: a novel in which Smiley, in the course of an operation to sniff out a high-level Soviet mole (i.e., double agent) in the British intelligence service, hears story after story about his agency’s failures and apparent successes, and finds himself constantly doubling back on his own history, reinterpreting everything he thought he knew. This is a remarkable performance, both by the writer and by his troubled hero, and one that only an exceptionally intrepid filmmaker would try to wrangle into a two-hour movie. None did.
But in 1979 the BBC did the sensible thing and turned “Tinker, Tailor” into a six-hour mini-series, directed by John Irvin, which allowed Mr. le Carré’s intricate plot to unspool at a pace that didn’t do violence to either the story or the audience; even at leisure you have to be pretty agile to keep up. The casting of Alec Guinness as Smiley was beyond sensible; “inspired” is the word that comes to mind.
A second mini-series, “Smiley’s People,” directed by Simon Langton and again starring Guinness, followed three years later; this time Mr. le Carré had a hand in the script. The expansive serial form was clearly the right approach for his more demanding books. Unfortunately the makers of “The Little Drummer Girl” (1984), one of Mr. le Carré’s densest novels, chose instead to try to condense all the nuance and detail of that rangy story about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a single feature film. The movie feels hasty, like a message scrawled on a napkin.
By the late ’80s the cold war was winding down at last, and Mr. le Carré would begin to turn his attention to different sorts of conflicts. (John Boorman made a lively 2001 movie of the Central American story “The Tailor of Panama,” and one of Mr. le Carré’s books about Africa, “The Constant Gardener,” was filmed, beautifully, by Fernando Meirelles in 2005.) But as a kind of valediction he wrote an uncharacteristically simple novel called “The Russia House,” which the Australian director Fred Schepisi in 1990 turned into perhaps the best feature film ever made from one of his books.
It’s about a Soviet scientist named Yakov (Klaus Maria Brandauer), who offers top-secret military information to a book publisher (Sean Connery) whom he once met, briefly, at a party. British intelligence brings the full weight of its formidable analytic skills — augmented (or perhaps diminished) by those of the C.I.A. — to the task of figuring out whether the scientist’s information is real. The espionage pros wind up looking a little foolish, because for once, at this moment not long before the fall of the Soviet Union, everything is exactly as it seems to be; Yakov is, to the shock of the veteran spooks, perfectly sincere. You know the cold war is over when somebody actually tells the truth.
But it’s back, in all its gloomy, paranoiac glory, in the new “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” which views the bygone world through a very dark glass and yet feels, somehow, nostalgic. Mr. Alfredson’s visual style is moody, muted, crepuscular, and his rhythm is contemplative. And as if managing the novel’s many temporal shifts weren’t challenge enough, he and the screenwriters, Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, have added a flashback that doesn’t appear in the book, a Christmas-party sequence that shows the main characters drinking and singing and laughing in the good old days when they (almost) trusted one another.
The film returns to this scene, which doesn’t advance the plot, again and again, and the effect is, helplessly, elegiac. It’s an odd tone; Mr. le Carré, who can be spotted among the party guests, never struck this note in any of his novels. But perhaps for those who lived through the cold war, as he did, it may still feel at least passing strange that it’s really over, dead and gone these 20 years.
And it may be possible, in the lingering glow of the West’s victory, to experience a fleeting rush of pride: a sense that, even out in the cold, the lonely place where spies and writers ply their trade, one knew — once — exactly where one stood. What does it say about the muddle the world’s in today that the cold war now looks clear?
From: The New York Times
THE Englishman David Cornwell, who writes under the name John le Carré, has been a best-selling novelist for nearly five decades, and he has been, right from the start, an unusually perverse member of that select class: he writes books that practically beg not to be turned into movies. Of his 22 novels nearly all of them about the perennially popular and movie-friendly subject of espionage, a mere 7 have made the perilous border crossing to the big screen. (Three others have been adapted as television mini-series and one more as a stand-alone television movie.)
An eighth le Carré feature film, Tomas Alfredson’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” will be released on Dec. 9, and it’s a fair illustration of the fiendish difficulties this sly, subtle storyteller’s work presents to moviemakers. Mr. le Carré’s tales always take place in a kind of no man’s land, in the disputed territories of reason, morality and even simple truth. That’s a terrain that major-studio films are almost entirely unfamiliar with these days: it’s too dangerous, too unpredictable, like the wilder reaches of Afghanistan.
The world of “Tinker, Tailor,” which was originally published in 1974, is, though fearsomely murky, at least one with recognizable coordinates. The action takes place during the cold war, when East was East and West was West, and the point of intersection was a wall in the divided city of Berlin. That wall is the scene of the melancholy climax of the first movie made from a le Carré novel, Martin Ritt’s “Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1965), in which a British intelligence agent named Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) is asked by his masters to pretend to defect to the other side.
The novel, Mr. le Carré’s third, had been a publishing sensation; it was on The New York Times’s best-seller list for over a year, much of that time at No. 1. Part of the book’s appeal was its apparent realism about the sordid details of international espionage. Mr. le Carré’s rumpled, depressed-looking spies didn’t much resemble Ian Fleming’s impossibly suave James Bond. (David Cornwell, before he became John le Carré, had worked in British intelligence, where he seems not to have encountered any 007s.)
And the film, shot in black and white and equipped with a moody jazz score, lived up (or down) to the novel’s clammy atmosphere. It didn’t sell tickets like “Goldfinger,” but it made an impression, and it holds up. Watching “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” now — the Criterion Collection released an excellent DVD in 2008 — you can still feel the grim, gray slog of the cold war in your bones.
In retrospect it seems miraculous that the movies did so well by Mr. le Carré on that first go. The next couple of attempts, Sidney Lumet’s 1966 “Deadly Affair” (based on the novel “Call for the Dead”) and Frank R. Pierson’s “Looking Glass War” (1969), were largely bungled operations, though “Deadly Affair” benefits from the casting of James Mason as a version of Mr. le Carré’s most famous character, the mild-mannered and deceptively wily spymaster George Smiley. After “The Looking Glass War,” an adaptation roughly as successful as the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, Mr. le Carré withdrew from the field for better than a decade. He knew when it was time to come in from the cold.
What the failed adaptations of his books had made clear was that even in his relatively straightforward early novels his narrative techniques were a little too tricky for the movies to handle. Mr. le Carré is maybe the most eccentric constructor of fiction in English literature since Joseph Conrad. His stories are full of digressions and long flashbacks; he circles around his plots for the longest time, as if he were doing reconnaissance on them before deciding to go in for the kill. And the verbal textures of the books can be challenging too, because his spies tend to speak in their own special jargon, which seems like normal speech, but isn’t quite. It’s like one of those maddeningly elusive regional English dialects: you need to get the hang of it, and it always takes longer than you would have thought possible.
In the ’70s Mr. le Carré’s novels became yet more daunting: denser, more complex, more stubbornly ambiguous. It’s as if he had determined to make them movie-proof. “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” his sixth novel, dates from that era, and at the time it was the twistiest, most labyrinthine act of narration he had ever perpetrated: a novel in which Smiley, in the course of an operation to sniff out a high-level Soviet mole (i.e., double agent) in the British intelligence service, hears story after story about his agency’s failures and apparent successes, and finds himself constantly doubling back on his own history, reinterpreting everything he thought he knew. This is a remarkable performance, both by the writer and by his troubled hero, and one that only an exceptionally intrepid filmmaker would try to wrangle into a two-hour movie. None did.
But in 1979 the BBC did the sensible thing and turned “Tinker, Tailor” into a six-hour mini-series, directed by John Irvin, which allowed Mr. le Carré’s intricate plot to unspool at a pace that didn’t do violence to either the story or the audience; even at leisure you have to be pretty agile to keep up. The casting of Alec Guinness as Smiley was beyond sensible; “inspired” is the word that comes to mind.
A second mini-series, “Smiley’s People,” directed by Simon Langton and again starring Guinness, followed three years later; this time Mr. le Carré had a hand in the script. The expansive serial form was clearly the right approach for his more demanding books. Unfortunately the makers of “The Little Drummer Girl” (1984), one of Mr. le Carré’s densest novels, chose instead to try to condense all the nuance and detail of that rangy story about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a single feature film. The movie feels hasty, like a message scrawled on a napkin.
By the late ’80s the cold war was winding down at last, and Mr. le Carré would begin to turn his attention to different sorts of conflicts. (John Boorman made a lively 2001 movie of the Central American story “The Tailor of Panama,” and one of Mr. le Carré’s books about Africa, “The Constant Gardener,” was filmed, beautifully, by Fernando Meirelles in 2005.) But as a kind of valediction he wrote an uncharacteristically simple novel called “The Russia House,” which the Australian director Fred Schepisi in 1990 turned into perhaps the best feature film ever made from one of his books.
It’s about a Soviet scientist named Yakov (Klaus Maria Brandauer), who offers top-secret military information to a book publisher (Sean Connery) whom he once met, briefly, at a party. British intelligence brings the full weight of its formidable analytic skills — augmented (or perhaps diminished) by those of the C.I.A. — to the task of figuring out whether the scientist’s information is real. The espionage pros wind up looking a little foolish, because for once, at this moment not long before the fall of the Soviet Union, everything is exactly as it seems to be; Yakov is, to the shock of the veteran spooks, perfectly sincere. You know the cold war is over when somebody actually tells the truth.
But it’s back, in all its gloomy, paranoiac glory, in the new “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” which views the bygone world through a very dark glass and yet feels, somehow, nostalgic. Mr. Alfredson’s visual style is moody, muted, crepuscular, and his rhythm is contemplative. And as if managing the novel’s many temporal shifts weren’t challenge enough, he and the screenwriters, Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, have added a flashback that doesn’t appear in the book, a Christmas-party sequence that shows the main characters drinking and singing and laughing in the good old days when they (almost) trusted one another.
The film returns to this scene, which doesn’t advance the plot, again and again, and the effect is, helplessly, elegiac. It’s an odd tone; Mr. le Carré, who can be spotted among the party guests, never struck this note in any of his novels. But perhaps for those who lived through the cold war, as he did, it may still feel at least passing strange that it’s really over, dead and gone these 20 years.
And it may be possible, in the lingering glow of the West’s victory, to experience a fleeting rush of pride: a sense that, even out in the cold, the lonely place where spies and writers ply their trade, one knew — once — exactly where one stood. What does it say about the muddle the world’s in today that the cold war now looks clear?
From: The New York Times
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Do Androids Dream of Electric Authors?
By PAGAN KENNEDY
One day, I stumbled across a book on Amazon called “Saltine Cracker.” It didn’t make sense: who would pay $54 for a book entirely about perforated crackers? The book was co-edited by someone called Lambert M. Surhone — a name that sounds like one of Kurt Vonnegut’s inventions. According to Amazon, Lambert M. Surhone has written or edited more than 100,000 titles, on every subject from beekeeping to the world’s largest cedar bucket. He was churning out books at a rate that was simply not possible for a human being.
So who was Lambert M. Surhone? Just looking at the numbers, you could argue that he’s one of the most prolific creators of literature who ever lived. But was he even human? There are now software programs — robots, if you will — that can gather text and organize it into a book. Surhone might be one of them.
Whatever he was, Lambert M. Surhone worked under the auspices of a German company, VDM Publishing. In addition to selling conventional books, VDM also extrudes thousands of paperbacks every year using content available without cost on the Internet. These books, or booklike products, lie in wait for the distracted shopper, someone who might think, Oh good, I really need a tome on Spearman’s law of diminishing returns, so I’ll just go ahead and pay $84. And with one overhasty click on the “Place your order” button, the shopper can pay a lot of money for a book that turns out to be warmed-over Wikipedia.
VDM Publishing puts a notice on the cover of its books, boasting “high-quality content by Wikipedia articles!” Still, not every buyer sees the disclaimer. Librarians, for instance, report that they must be vigilant in order to avoid wasting money on the robot-books. Readers complain that the books proliferate like kudzu in online stores.
But the invasion of robot-books is unsettling for another reason. I think we can all agree that it’s O.K. for robots to take over unpleasant jobs — like cleaning up nuclear waste. But how could we have allowed them to commandeer one of the most gratifying occupations, that of author?
Which brings me back to Lambert M. Surhone. Might he be a robot? Reading the fine print, I traced some of Surhone’s books to a VDM branch office in the island nation of Mauritius, off the coast of Madagascar. I called. As the faraway phone rang, I fantasized about what I would say to Surhone. By now I imagined him as a character in a Vonnegut novel, and so I was tempted to ask whether he hailed from Tralfamadore, the planet inhabited by robots. But I never had a chance. No one at the company answered the phone.
Then, when I least expected it, Surhone came for me. One day, a book titled “Pagan Kennedy” popped up on Barnesandnoble.com, priced at $50. The lead editor: Lambert M. Surhone. I was both thrilled and creeped out. Reader, I ordered it. Within a few days, the book appeared on my doorstep. The cover was adorned with a stripy abstraction that looked like a beach towel. Inside was the Pagan Kennedy Wikipedia entry, and then a random collection of wiki-text tenuously connected to my path through life. (About a quarter of the book is devoted to Dartmouth College, where I worked as a visiting writer a few years ago.) Some of the text is so small you might need a jeweler’s loupe to read it. So the book was, as advertised, Wikipedia content — though it’s hard to imagine anyone would want it in this format.
Around that time, I also heard from a managing director of VDM, who responded to my badgering questions about robots. “Our wiki-books are produced by a group of about 40 editors,” Wolfgang Philipp Müller told me via e-mail. “Editors start at A and end their work at Z. Every topic that has enough content for a book is our target.” He said that last year, the company sold about 3,000 wiki-books — not a lot. Still, with prices that average around $50, it’s likely the company sees a high profit on each one.
Müller assured me that the editors are human. But many of the titles of these books suggest the mind of a machine at work. It’s hard to imagine a person signing off on, for instance, a book titled “Storage Ring: Particle Accelerator, Particle Beam, Accelerator Physics, Beamline, Australian Synchrotron, Cyclotron, Dipole Magnet, Electromagnetism.” Also, there were other robotlike errors: one of VDM’s books about the rock band the Police was paired with a cover illustration of actual police officers.
These mistakes made me wonder: Could robots ever be trusted to write original novels, histories, scientific papers and sonnets? For years, artificial-intelligence experts have insisted that machines can succeed as authors. But would we humans ever want to read the robot-books? For a serious consideration of the matter, I consulted Philip Parker, an economist and inventor who sees a bright future for the computer as author. Parker believes that A.I.-produced books, issued in a dazzling array of languages, could be crucial to the spread of literacy. Think of farmers in Malawi who lack the most basic guides to agriculture in their own language. Parker talked about the need to distribute books aimed at people who speak underserved languages like Chichewa and Tumbuka. “One thing that’s missing is the content itself — the textbooks,” Parker said, and A.I. could offer a cheap solution. In the late 1990s, he began using automatic text-generation software to produce such books. More recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has financed Parker’s use of A.I. to produce weather reports for the radio in local languages.
But Chris Csikszentmihalyi, a co-founder of the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is skeptical. “Would you really want to bet your life on text generated by a robot? Imagine a book on fixing the diesel engine on your tractor. If one piece of information is wrong, you could ruin the engine. It gets even more complicated when you think about books that dispense medical advice.”
And, he added, what’s the point of using artificial intelligence to simulate the kind of work that humans enjoy? If you want to generate books in a plethora of languages, he said, “You can use the power of the diaspora from Malawi or Mozambique,” the army of highly educated volunteers who are eager to help their countrymen. “That obviates the need for A.I.”
The Internet itself offers proof of the enormous human desire to produce text — to pontificate, edit, elegize, redact, hash out, bloviate, opine and instruct. We’re spewing out billions of comments a day. VDM Publishing may have created a niche business for itself, but in the long run, I suspect, the robots will have a hard time getting a word in edgewise.
Pagan Kennedy, a 2010 Knight science journalism fellow, is the author, most recently, of “The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories.”
From: New York Times Book Review
One day, I stumbled across a book on Amazon called “Saltine Cracker.” It didn’t make sense: who would pay $54 for a book entirely about perforated crackers? The book was co-edited by someone called Lambert M. Surhone — a name that sounds like one of Kurt Vonnegut’s inventions. According to Amazon, Lambert M. Surhone has written or edited more than 100,000 titles, on every subject from beekeeping to the world’s largest cedar bucket. He was churning out books at a rate that was simply not possible for a human being.
So who was Lambert M. Surhone? Just looking at the numbers, you could argue that he’s one of the most prolific creators of literature who ever lived. But was he even human? There are now software programs — robots, if you will — that can gather text and organize it into a book. Surhone might be one of them.
Whatever he was, Lambert M. Surhone worked under the auspices of a German company, VDM Publishing. In addition to selling conventional books, VDM also extrudes thousands of paperbacks every year using content available without cost on the Internet. These books, or booklike products, lie in wait for the distracted shopper, someone who might think, Oh good, I really need a tome on Spearman’s law of diminishing returns, so I’ll just go ahead and pay $84. And with one overhasty click on the “Place your order” button, the shopper can pay a lot of money for a book that turns out to be warmed-over Wikipedia.
VDM Publishing puts a notice on the cover of its books, boasting “high-quality content by Wikipedia articles!” Still, not every buyer sees the disclaimer. Librarians, for instance, report that they must be vigilant in order to avoid wasting money on the robot-books. Readers complain that the books proliferate like kudzu in online stores.
But the invasion of robot-books is unsettling for another reason. I think we can all agree that it’s O.K. for robots to take over unpleasant jobs — like cleaning up nuclear waste. But how could we have allowed them to commandeer one of the most gratifying occupations, that of author?
Which brings me back to Lambert M. Surhone. Might he be a robot? Reading the fine print, I traced some of Surhone’s books to a VDM branch office in the island nation of Mauritius, off the coast of Madagascar. I called. As the faraway phone rang, I fantasized about what I would say to Surhone. By now I imagined him as a character in a Vonnegut novel, and so I was tempted to ask whether he hailed from Tralfamadore, the planet inhabited by robots. But I never had a chance. No one at the company answered the phone.
Then, when I least expected it, Surhone came for me. One day, a book titled “Pagan Kennedy” popped up on Barnesandnoble.com, priced at $50. The lead editor: Lambert M. Surhone. I was both thrilled and creeped out. Reader, I ordered it. Within a few days, the book appeared on my doorstep. The cover was adorned with a stripy abstraction that looked like a beach towel. Inside was the Pagan Kennedy Wikipedia entry, and then a random collection of wiki-text tenuously connected to my path through life. (About a quarter of the book is devoted to Dartmouth College, where I worked as a visiting writer a few years ago.) Some of the text is so small you might need a jeweler’s loupe to read it. So the book was, as advertised, Wikipedia content — though it’s hard to imagine anyone would want it in this format.
Around that time, I also heard from a managing director of VDM, who responded to my badgering questions about robots. “Our wiki-books are produced by a group of about 40 editors,” Wolfgang Philipp Müller told me via e-mail. “Editors start at A and end their work at Z. Every topic that has enough content for a book is our target.” He said that last year, the company sold about 3,000 wiki-books — not a lot. Still, with prices that average around $50, it’s likely the company sees a high profit on each one.
Müller assured me that the editors are human. But many of the titles of these books suggest the mind of a machine at work. It’s hard to imagine a person signing off on, for instance, a book titled “Storage Ring: Particle Accelerator, Particle Beam, Accelerator Physics, Beamline, Australian Synchrotron, Cyclotron, Dipole Magnet, Electromagnetism.” Also, there were other robotlike errors: one of VDM’s books about the rock band the Police was paired with a cover illustration of actual police officers.
These mistakes made me wonder: Could robots ever be trusted to write original novels, histories, scientific papers and sonnets? For years, artificial-intelligence experts have insisted that machines can succeed as authors. But would we humans ever want to read the robot-books? For a serious consideration of the matter, I consulted Philip Parker, an economist and inventor who sees a bright future for the computer as author. Parker believes that A.I.-produced books, issued in a dazzling array of languages, could be crucial to the spread of literacy. Think of farmers in Malawi who lack the most basic guides to agriculture in their own language. Parker talked about the need to distribute books aimed at people who speak underserved languages like Chichewa and Tumbuka. “One thing that’s missing is the content itself — the textbooks,” Parker said, and A.I. could offer a cheap solution. In the late 1990s, he began using automatic text-generation software to produce such books. More recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has financed Parker’s use of A.I. to produce weather reports for the radio in local languages.
But Chris Csikszentmihalyi, a co-founder of the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is skeptical. “Would you really want to bet your life on text generated by a robot? Imagine a book on fixing the diesel engine on your tractor. If one piece of information is wrong, you could ruin the engine. It gets even more complicated when you think about books that dispense medical advice.”
And, he added, what’s the point of using artificial intelligence to simulate the kind of work that humans enjoy? If you want to generate books in a plethora of languages, he said, “You can use the power of the diaspora from Malawi or Mozambique,” the army of highly educated volunteers who are eager to help their countrymen. “That obviates the need for A.I.”
The Internet itself offers proof of the enormous human desire to produce text — to pontificate, edit, elegize, redact, hash out, bloviate, opine and instruct. We’re spewing out billions of comments a day. VDM Publishing may have created a niche business for itself, but in the long run, I suspect, the robots will have a hard time getting a word in edgewise.
Pagan Kennedy, a 2010 Knight science journalism fellow, is the author, most recently, of “The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories.”
From: New York Times Book Review
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Library sees boom in e-book use — and print, too
Patty Winsa
It looks like e-books are easy reading.
The Toronto Public Library is reporting that digital downloads from its site will hit 500,000 this year, double the number from 2010 and more than 10 times what they were in 2007.
“This is a huge jump,” said Anne Marie Aikins, the library’s manager of community relations. “And incidentally, book borrowing is increasing slightly as well, so the book isn’t dead. That's for sure.” The library had its busiest year in 2010, with 18 million visits and 32 million items circulated.
But the library may have to limit additions to its digital and print collections this year, as it searches for ways to cut the mandated 10 per cent — or $17 million — from its 2011 operating budget to reduce the city’s deficit.
The recommended staff cuts will be released Thursday afternoon in advance of Monday’s library board meeting. Although Aikins wouldn’t say what the recommendations involved, she did say closing library branches isn’t one of them.
Seventy-five per cent of the library’s operating budget goes toward paying staff. The remaining 25 per cent covers new purchases and maintaining and operating buildings.
Staff have already identified about $4 million in savings by reorganizing the way books are circulated throughout the system and automating check-out service, which it has already completed in 40 branches throughout the city.
“In general, our focus was to try and leave customer service intact but look at where technology could help us,” says City Librarian Jane Pyper. Staff were also offered a voluntary separation package.
The library currently spends a small percentage of its acquisition budget on e-books, which only really took off about four years ago when Kindle released its first e-reader. But demand has been “skyrocketing,” says Pyper.
Currently, borrowers can download material using devices such as the Kobo and Sony readers and the iPad and iPhone. But one of the most popular readers, the Kindle, isn’t on the list because of an exclusive deal with Amazon.
However, just last month it was announced in the U.S. that public libraries and schools can now lend e-books for the Amazon Kindle through OverDrive, the same company that distributes e-books for the Toronto Public Library.
Pyper says the challenge for Toronto branches is maintaining a collection that has the depth to meet the economic and linguistic diversity across the city. That means providing e-books and printed books, but also providing free access to magazines such as The New Yorker and National Geographic, and free Internet access and wi-fi.
“I think (e-books) will be a very important part of our future, a big growth area,” says Pyper. But “there are many people for whom e-books aren’t a reality, who have other language needs or are adult learners with low literacy levels. The wonderful thing about our collection is it speaks to all those interests across the city.”
LIBRARY GROWTH
Total circulation
2007: 28.9 million
2010: 32.3 million
E-downloads
(includes digital books, audio books and reference material)
2007: 39,001
2010: 257,715
Visits
2007: 16.3 million
2010: 18.3 million
From, Toronto Star
It looks like e-books are easy reading.
The Toronto Public Library is reporting that digital downloads from its site will hit 500,000 this year, double the number from 2010 and more than 10 times what they were in 2007.
“This is a huge jump,” said Anne Marie Aikins, the library’s manager of community relations. “And incidentally, book borrowing is increasing slightly as well, so the book isn’t dead. That's for sure.” The library had its busiest year in 2010, with 18 million visits and 32 million items circulated.
But the library may have to limit additions to its digital and print collections this year, as it searches for ways to cut the mandated 10 per cent — or $17 million — from its 2011 operating budget to reduce the city’s deficit.
The recommended staff cuts will be released Thursday afternoon in advance of Monday’s library board meeting. Although Aikins wouldn’t say what the recommendations involved, she did say closing library branches isn’t one of them.
Seventy-five per cent of the library’s operating budget goes toward paying staff. The remaining 25 per cent covers new purchases and maintaining and operating buildings.
Staff have already identified about $4 million in savings by reorganizing the way books are circulated throughout the system and automating check-out service, which it has already completed in 40 branches throughout the city.
“In general, our focus was to try and leave customer service intact but look at where technology could help us,” says City Librarian Jane Pyper. Staff were also offered a voluntary separation package.
The library currently spends a small percentage of its acquisition budget on e-books, which only really took off about four years ago when Kindle released its first e-reader. But demand has been “skyrocketing,” says Pyper.
Currently, borrowers can download material using devices such as the Kobo and Sony readers and the iPad and iPhone. But one of the most popular readers, the Kindle, isn’t on the list because of an exclusive deal with Amazon.
However, just last month it was announced in the U.S. that public libraries and schools can now lend e-books for the Amazon Kindle through OverDrive, the same company that distributes e-books for the Toronto Public Library.
Pyper says the challenge for Toronto branches is maintaining a collection that has the depth to meet the economic and linguistic diversity across the city. That means providing e-books and printed books, but also providing free access to magazines such as The New Yorker and National Geographic, and free Internet access and wi-fi.
“I think (e-books) will be a very important part of our future, a big growth area,” says Pyper. But “there are many people for whom e-books aren’t a reality, who have other language needs or are adult learners with low literacy levels. The wonderful thing about our collection is it speaks to all those interests across the city.”
LIBRARY GROWTH
Total circulation
2007: 28.9 million
2010: 32.3 million
E-downloads
(includes digital books, audio books and reference material)
2007: 39,001
2010: 257,715
Visits
2007: 16.3 million
2010: 18.3 million
From, Toronto Star
Friday, September 30, 2011
Will Christmas come early for the book trade?
As hundreds of titles hit the shops tomorrow, publishers hope for a happy ending to 2011
By Rob Sharp, Arts Correspondent
Wednesday, 28 September 2011
Alan Sugar, Steve Coogan, Lee Evans and Jamie Oliver will be among those doing battle from tomorrow, as publishers simultaneously release hundreds of titles in a bid to win a place on customers' Christmas shopping lists.
Dubbed "Super Thursday" by the book trade, this week will see publishers push books by everyone from Robert Harris to fictional teenagers The Inbetweeners using six-figure marketing budgets, newspaper tie-ins and in-store promotions. Over 200 titles will appear in supermarkets, high-street bookshops and online retailers, around three times the number released in an average week.
"I think this year will shape up very well against last year, one of the most high-profile years in recent memory, because there are some very big hitters," said Anna Valentine, editorial director at Harper NonFiction, which will publish Coogan's fictional Alan Partridge autobiography, I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan. "To succeed, the books need to be distinctive and stage a launch which propels them into the bestseller ranks. Many of the titles will have a core readership which will help".
Alan Sugar, Steve Coogan, Lee Evans and Jamie Oliver will be among those doing battle from tomorrow, as publishers simultaneously release hundreds of titles in a bid to win a place on customers' Christmas shopping lists.
Dubbed "Super Thursday" by the book trade, this week will see publishers push books by everyone from Robert Harris to fictional teenagers The Inbetweeners using six-figure marketing budgets, newspaper tie-ins and in-store promotions. Over 200 titles will appear in supermarkets, high-street bookshops and online retailers, around three times the number released in an average week.
"I think this year will shape up very well against last year, one of the most high-profile years in recent memory, because there are some very big hitters," said Anna Valentine, editorial director at Harper NonFiction, which will publish Coogan's fictional Alan Partridge autobiography, I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan. "To succeed, the books need to be distinctive and stage a launch which propels them into the bestseller ranks. Many of the titles will have a core readership which will help".
From, The Independant
By Rob Sharp, Arts Correspondent
Wednesday, 28 September 2011
Alan Sugar, Steve Coogan, Lee Evans and Jamie Oliver will be among those doing battle from tomorrow, as publishers simultaneously release hundreds of titles in a bid to win a place on customers' Christmas shopping lists.
Dubbed "Super Thursday" by the book trade, this week will see publishers push books by everyone from Robert Harris to fictional teenagers The Inbetweeners using six-figure marketing budgets, newspaper tie-ins and in-store promotions. Over 200 titles will appear in supermarkets, high-street bookshops and online retailers, around three times the number released in an average week.
"I think this year will shape up very well against last year, one of the most high-profile years in recent memory, because there are some very big hitters," said Anna Valentine, editorial director at Harper NonFiction, which will publish Coogan's fictional Alan Partridge autobiography, I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan. "To succeed, the books need to be distinctive and stage a launch which propels them into the bestseller ranks. Many of the titles will have a core readership which will help".
Alan Sugar, Steve Coogan, Lee Evans and Jamie Oliver will be among those doing battle from tomorrow, as publishers simultaneously release hundreds of titles in a bid to win a place on customers' Christmas shopping lists.
Dubbed "Super Thursday" by the book trade, this week will see publishers push books by everyone from Robert Harris to fictional teenagers The Inbetweeners using six-figure marketing budgets, newspaper tie-ins and in-store promotions. Over 200 titles will appear in supermarkets, high-street bookshops and online retailers, around three times the number released in an average week.
"I think this year will shape up very well against last year, one of the most high-profile years in recent memory, because there are some very big hitters," said Anna Valentine, editorial director at Harper NonFiction, which will publish Coogan's fictional Alan Partridge autobiography, I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan. "To succeed, the books need to be distinctive and stage a launch which propels them into the bestseller ranks. Many of the titles will have a core readership which will help".
From, The Independant
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Have we fallen out of love with chick lit?
It was once the frothy genre that spelt big profits for publishers. But the latest sales figures read like a horror story
By Adam Sherwin
A stiletto and a cupcake on a pink jacket used to guarantee that your novel would fly off the shelf. But now publishers are asking if the "chick-lit" genre is exhausted after a spectacular slump in sales.
Sales of the most recent novels by commercial women's authors including Marian Keyes, Jodi Picoult, Veronica Henry, Catherine Alliott, Louise Mensch, MP (née Bagshawe), Dorothy Koomson, Harriet Evans, Jill Mansell and Lesley Pearse are all down by more than 20 per cent on their previous mass-market publications over comparative sales periods, The Bookseller has found.
Victims include Marian Keyes, whose latest novel The Brightest Star in the Sky has sold 260,000 copies since February, down 42 per cent on her previous book. Jodi Picoult's Harvesting the Heart is down almost 50 per cent on her previous novel, with 120,235 copies and Veronica Henry's The Birthday Party recorded a 71 per cent slump to 16,479 copies.
The Bookseller found that women's commercial fiction was underperforming compared to the rest of the book market with the top 20 commercial women's fiction authors down 10 per cent in like-for-like sales for their most recent mass-market title against the previous novel. Overall, the fiction market has fallen by 8 per cent.
The decline has been blamed on a squeeze on supermarket spending, with retailers drastically reducing the number of titles they order and a shift to digital books sales.
But literary experts believe that readers are rejecting the identically-jacketed "sex, shoes and shopping" tales pushed by publishers in favour of more complex, psychologically ambitious novels by women writers.
Kathy Lette, the author who claims to have invented the genre by penning "first person, funny, feminist fiction" 22 years ago, welcomed the apparent demise of "chick lit". She told The Independent: "Men who write first person, social satire, like Nick Hornby and David Nicholls and co, are compared to Chekov. While women authors get pink covers and condescension."
Ms Lette, who would like to rename the genre "clit lit", argued that "the market has been flooded with a lot of second-rate writing." She said: "Many 'chick lit' books are just Mills & Boon with Wonderbras, with the heroines waiting to be rescued by a knight in shining Armani. So, perhaps, in this economic downturn, a creative cull may ensure that only literary lionesses prevail."
Eithne Farry, literary editor of Marie Claire, blamed patronising marketing campaigns. She said: "Chick lit has become a derogatory term. I'm surprised when I see that a lot of books are sold in covers with shoes and cupcakes because often the subject matter of the book inside isn't frothy and frivolous."
Ms Farry believes Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, a dream-like story about competing 19th-century magicians and Daughter Of Smoke and Bone, the first in a hotly-tipped fantasy trilogy by Laini Taylor, will fill up space on women's shelves.
Sheila Crowley, a literary agent at Curtis Brown said: "The move to eBooks and the impact of austerity is having a massive impact on consumer behaviour."
Tastes are evolving. Ms Crowley said: "The culture of the Richard and Judy Book Club has encouraged the reader to be more aspirational and to 'read up'. That's benefited writers like Jojo Moyes and Santa Montefiore."
The backlash against "chick lit" resulted in the author Polly Courtney publicly dropping her publisher, HarperCollins, in protest at the "condescending and fluffy" sleeves they had chosen for her books. "The implication with chick lit is that it's about a girl wanting to meet the man of her dreams," Ms Courtney said. Although acknowledging that her new novel, It's A Man's World, set in a lads' mag, was "page-turning commercial fiction," she said it should not be reduced to "chick lit" because it dealt with social issues.
Maeve Binchy challenged her inclusion in The Bookseller list of mass-market female authors whose sales have fallen. A spokeswoman for Ms Binchy said: "Maeve is by no means 'chick lit' and we don't think her sales are falling. Electronic books have, however, added another dimension."
The history of chick lit
Derided as novels defined by "sex, shoes and shopping", the term "chick lit" was first embraced in the late 1980s by US students seeking a literary equivalent to Hollywood's "chick flicks". The phrase entered popular consciousness with the publication of a 1995 anthology titled Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction.
Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary sparked a wave of novels exploring the conflict between the independence enjoyed by young, professional "singletons" and the emotional security offered by a partner. Fay Weldon led the backlash, complaining that her novels were being sold in misleading "chick-lit" jackets and dismissing most similar books as "instantly forgettable".
Marian Keyes
Irish novelist whose 1995 book Watermelon, about a dumped wife who finds love again, is a key chick lit text. Keyes has sold 22 million copies of darkly comic stories which often trade on her own experiences. Sales down: 42 per cent
Jodi Picoult
American writer who has sold 14 million copies of emotional novels which often deal in struggles to overcome illness. She sidesteps a lack of critical endorsement by touring the world to meet her fans. Sales down: 50 per cent
Veronica Henry
Author and Heartbeat television scriptwriter has twice been listed for the Romantic Novelists' Association prize. Novels such as Marriage And Other Games praised for being "easy to read" and great for the beach. Sales down: 71 per cent
By Adam Sherwin
A stiletto and a cupcake on a pink jacket used to guarantee that your novel would fly off the shelf. But now publishers are asking if the "chick-lit" genre is exhausted after a spectacular slump in sales.
Sales of the most recent novels by commercial women's authors including Marian Keyes, Jodi Picoult, Veronica Henry, Catherine Alliott, Louise Mensch, MP (née Bagshawe), Dorothy Koomson, Harriet Evans, Jill Mansell and Lesley Pearse are all down by more than 20 per cent on their previous mass-market publications over comparative sales periods, The Bookseller has found.
Victims include Marian Keyes, whose latest novel The Brightest Star in the Sky has sold 260,000 copies since February, down 42 per cent on her previous book. Jodi Picoult's Harvesting the Heart is down almost 50 per cent on her previous novel, with 120,235 copies and Veronica Henry's The Birthday Party recorded a 71 per cent slump to 16,479 copies.
The Bookseller found that women's commercial fiction was underperforming compared to the rest of the book market with the top 20 commercial women's fiction authors down 10 per cent in like-for-like sales for their most recent mass-market title against the previous novel. Overall, the fiction market has fallen by 8 per cent.
The decline has been blamed on a squeeze on supermarket spending, with retailers drastically reducing the number of titles they order and a shift to digital books sales.
But literary experts believe that readers are rejecting the identically-jacketed "sex, shoes and shopping" tales pushed by publishers in favour of more complex, psychologically ambitious novels by women writers.
Kathy Lette, the author who claims to have invented the genre by penning "first person, funny, feminist fiction" 22 years ago, welcomed the apparent demise of "chick lit". She told The Independent: "Men who write first person, social satire, like Nick Hornby and David Nicholls and co, are compared to Chekov. While women authors get pink covers and condescension."
Ms Lette, who would like to rename the genre "clit lit", argued that "the market has been flooded with a lot of second-rate writing." She said: "Many 'chick lit' books are just Mills & Boon with Wonderbras, with the heroines waiting to be rescued by a knight in shining Armani. So, perhaps, in this economic downturn, a creative cull may ensure that only literary lionesses prevail."
Eithne Farry, literary editor of Marie Claire, blamed patronising marketing campaigns. She said: "Chick lit has become a derogatory term. I'm surprised when I see that a lot of books are sold in covers with shoes and cupcakes because often the subject matter of the book inside isn't frothy and frivolous."
Ms Farry believes Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, a dream-like story about competing 19th-century magicians and Daughter Of Smoke and Bone, the first in a hotly-tipped fantasy trilogy by Laini Taylor, will fill up space on women's shelves.
Sheila Crowley, a literary agent at Curtis Brown said: "The move to eBooks and the impact of austerity is having a massive impact on consumer behaviour."
Tastes are evolving. Ms Crowley said: "The culture of the Richard and Judy Book Club has encouraged the reader to be more aspirational and to 'read up'. That's benefited writers like Jojo Moyes and Santa Montefiore."
The backlash against "chick lit" resulted in the author Polly Courtney publicly dropping her publisher, HarperCollins, in protest at the "condescending and fluffy" sleeves they had chosen for her books. "The implication with chick lit is that it's about a girl wanting to meet the man of her dreams," Ms Courtney said. Although acknowledging that her new novel, It's A Man's World, set in a lads' mag, was "page-turning commercial fiction," she said it should not be reduced to "chick lit" because it dealt with social issues.
Maeve Binchy challenged her inclusion in The Bookseller list of mass-market female authors whose sales have fallen. A spokeswoman for Ms Binchy said: "Maeve is by no means 'chick lit' and we don't think her sales are falling. Electronic books have, however, added another dimension."
The history of chick lit
Derided as novels defined by "sex, shoes and shopping", the term "chick lit" was first embraced in the late 1980s by US students seeking a literary equivalent to Hollywood's "chick flicks". The phrase entered popular consciousness with the publication of a 1995 anthology titled Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction.
Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary sparked a wave of novels exploring the conflict between the independence enjoyed by young, professional "singletons" and the emotional security offered by a partner. Fay Weldon led the backlash, complaining that her novels were being sold in misleading "chick-lit" jackets and dismissing most similar books as "instantly forgettable".
Marian Keyes
Irish novelist whose 1995 book Watermelon, about a dumped wife who finds love again, is a key chick lit text. Keyes has sold 22 million copies of darkly comic stories which often trade on her own experiences. Sales down: 42 per cent
Jodi Picoult
American writer who has sold 14 million copies of emotional novels which often deal in struggles to overcome illness. She sidesteps a lack of critical endorsement by touring the world to meet her fans. Sales down: 50 per cent
Veronica Henry
Author and Heartbeat television scriptwriter has twice been listed for the Romantic Novelists' Association prize. Novels such as Marriage And Other Games praised for being "easy to read" and great for the beach. Sales down: 71 per cent
Monday, September 26, 2011
The early bird raises the bookworm
Young brains soak up the information around them like tiny, too-cute sponges. That’s the reason, put simply, why it is important to get children interested in reading in the early years of life.
Janette Pelletier, director of the Institute of Child Studies at the University of Toronto, simplifies the science: “The early years provide a unique opportunity for learning,” she says. “Enriched experiences mean more and faster connections in the brain, whereas deprived environments can have the opposite effect.”
Developing the right reading habits can never start too early, Pelletier adds. “These early experiences have cumulative effects that in essence, set children along trajectories that become increasingly stable over time.” She’s not suggesting private preschool, but a nightly Robert Munsch reading will do more good than you think.
Margaret Eaton, president of ABC Life Literacy Canada, says as a parent, the most important thing to do is to create a reading culture around your child.
“When you make reading a social activity that you do aloud together, that really fosters the love of reading,” she says. Eaton suggests participating in literacy activities as a family, many of which can be done around the house. “You can let your child make the grocery list, look at recipes and cook, and you can even search for things on the Internet together,” she says. Pelletier similarly suggests playing word games, such as finding items in the house that start with a particular sound.
ABC Life Literacy Canada runs a yearly Family Literacy Day Jan. 27 to shine a spotlight on the role parents can play in their children acquiring literacy skills. A reading culture can also extend outside of the house, by creating an awareness of print in your child’s outside environment as well as inside. Lisa Heggum, the Children and Youth Advocate for Toronto Public Library Services, says it’s as simple as pointing at signs and reading them along with your child.
Heggum works on the library of Toronto’s year-round Ready for Reading program. The program organizes story-times for parents and children at library branches across Toronto, and produces brochures that offer information on how to encourage a love for reading. The free, half-hour story-time sessions are an interactive way to get young children into reading. “They are full of songs, stories and rhymes — all of which are key ways to make reading fun for kids,” Heggum says. The librarians that lead the sessions also offer parents advice on how to get their children into reading.
Heggum says one of the most important tips they suggest is for parents to be role model readers. “If you take special time yourself to read, and your kids see you doing that, it will have a huge impact.”
By Ania Medrek
National Post, Afterword
Janette Pelletier, director of the Institute of Child Studies at the University of Toronto, simplifies the science: “The early years provide a unique opportunity for learning,” she says. “Enriched experiences mean more and faster connections in the brain, whereas deprived environments can have the opposite effect.”
Developing the right reading habits can never start too early, Pelletier adds. “These early experiences have cumulative effects that in essence, set children along trajectories that become increasingly stable over time.” She’s not suggesting private preschool, but a nightly Robert Munsch reading will do more good than you think.
Margaret Eaton, president of ABC Life Literacy Canada, says as a parent, the most important thing to do is to create a reading culture around your child.
“When you make reading a social activity that you do aloud together, that really fosters the love of reading,” she says. Eaton suggests participating in literacy activities as a family, many of which can be done around the house. “You can let your child make the grocery list, look at recipes and cook, and you can even search for things on the Internet together,” she says. Pelletier similarly suggests playing word games, such as finding items in the house that start with a particular sound.
ABC Life Literacy Canada runs a yearly Family Literacy Day Jan. 27 to shine a spotlight on the role parents can play in their children acquiring literacy skills. A reading culture can also extend outside of the house, by creating an awareness of print in your child’s outside environment as well as inside. Lisa Heggum, the Children and Youth Advocate for Toronto Public Library Services, says it’s as simple as pointing at signs and reading them along with your child.
Heggum works on the library of Toronto’s year-round Ready for Reading program. The program organizes story-times for parents and children at library branches across Toronto, and produces brochures that offer information on how to encourage a love for reading. The free, half-hour story-time sessions are an interactive way to get young children into reading. “They are full of songs, stories and rhymes — all of which are key ways to make reading fun for kids,” Heggum says. The librarians that lead the sessions also offer parents advice on how to get their children into reading.
Heggum says one of the most important tips they suggest is for parents to be role model readers. “If you take special time yourself to read, and your kids see you doing that, it will have a huge impact.”
By Ania Medrek
National Post, Afterword
Monday, September 12, 2011
New York City's spots for book lovers
Bibliophiles can turn to several tourist spots in New York City, including the public library and Book Row, to get a good read on the printed word and its writers.
by: Christopher Reynolds
Reporting from New York— On the third floor of a big, gray building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, silver-haired docent Julie Chelminski recently stepped up to the middle of a hushed room and faced 15 spellbound tourists.
"On the walls of this room there were 9,000 drawers," Chelminski said. "And in those drawers were 10 million cards."
This was in the New York Public Library's catalog room. And these were book people, as happy as pilgrims in the Holy Land, imbibing every detail of how the library switched from cards to computers in 1983. Within minutes, they would stand in a reading room as grand as a cathedral. That same day, they could see Charlotte Brontë's private diary (such tiny lettering!) at the Morgan Library a few blocks away or hear the tale of Dylan Thomas' final binge in the bar where it happened.
These are dire days for old-fashioned books. The 48 bookshops that once lined Manhattan's Book Row on 4th Avenue are gone or relocated. By the end of September, the bankrupt Borders chain's last outlet is expected to close. At Amazon.com, ebooks outsell hardbacks. As those marble lions in front of the New York Public Library celebrate their 100th anniversary, Kindles, Nooks, iPads and their ilk multiply like bunnies in bedrooms and airline cabins around the planet.
So, old-fashioned book people, hit literary Manhattan soon and hard. Even if you have only three days, as I did earlier this year, you can squeeze in an eight-stop tour, complete with thinking, drinking, Bibles, tote bags and a certain pair of municipal mascots. Here's how my circuit went.
First, check into the Library Hotel, a for-profit venture with an irresistible gimmick: It stands at Madison Avenue and 41st Street, about three blocks from the New York Public Library, and its 60 rooms (and the 6,000 books within them) are organized by the topics of the Dewey Decimal System. (I was on the Languages floor, in the Germanic room.) Know, however, that the least-expensive rooms are tiny.
Next, stare at the sidewalk. Not just because the New Yorkers all around you are doing so, but because there are dozens of bronze plaques with literary quotes set in the sidewalk on 41st Street near Madison Avenue. My favorite is from E.B. White: "I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens."
The Algonquin Hotel's Round Table Room, the storied West 44th Street gathering spot where Dorothy Parker and other wits of the '20s and '30s once cracked wise, makes a fine third stop. You can order a bowl of soup (French onion, $13), but don't fuss over the furniture. As a senior waiter acknowledged during my visit, the famous table itself left the building long ago, its destination unknown.
You can, however, see the old gang over the fireplace — gathered in a Natalie Ascencios painting that includes Parker, humorist Robert Benchley, critic Alexander Woollcott, editor Harold Ross, playwright George S. Kaufman and comedian Harpo Marx. (The Algonquin recently updated its rooms and may be better known these days for the cabaret shows in its Oak Room Supper Club.)
Your fourth stop is the White Horse Tavern, which has stood in the West Village since long before Dylan Thomas' time. Sip a beer (cash only) and admire the old tin ceiling and an agreeably spooky portrait of the poet, which hangs in a hallway. In it Thomas is wide-eyed, forever gazing toward the bar.
"He didn't actually die here," bartender Lova Rasoamanana noted.
After staggering back to his room at the Hotel Chelsea one night in November 1953, Thomas bragged of downing 18 whiskeys. He fell into a coma and died days later in a New York hospital. (The Encyclopedia Britannica blames "an overdose of alcohol," but biographer Paul Ferris has counterproposed pneumonia and possible medical malpractice.)
Next up is the Morgan Library & Museum at Madison Avenue and 36th Street, built as the private domain of financier Pierpont Morgan in 1906, later recast as a nonlending public institution. Now we commoners can gawk at the myriad cultural prizes Morgan amassed between 1890 and 1913, including medieval manuscripts, letters by Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, handwritten scores by Mozart and Beethoven and three Gutenberg Bibles. The walnut bookshelves rise three stories. The fireplace is big enough to burn three Christmas trees at once (although we discourage this because it can be dangerous). Next door, in a bright, contemporary space that Renzo Piano designed for the Morgan's 2006 expansion, temporary exhibitions rotate.
Onward to stop No. 6. At East 59th Street you can browse Argosy Old & Rare Books, Prints & Maps, which goes back three generations to 1925. Argosy has its share of $15-$25 volumes near the front, along with all sorts of autographs (Herbert A. Wilson, "corrupt commissioner of the Boston Police Dept.," $35). But much of the six-story building is filled with antiquarian volumes, art, maps and Americana aimed at wealthier customers. A $75 1965 edition of Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano." A $7,500 F. Scott Fitzgerald first edition ("All the Sad Young Men," 1926).
If Argosy is yin among long-standing Manhattan booksellers, Strand Bookstore, our seventh stop, might be yang. Strand, the lone survivor of the old Book Row, opened in 1927 and moved to Broadway (at 12th) in the 1950s.
Still owned by the founding Bass family, Strand stays vital by courting bargain-hunters with staggering variety — an estimated 18 miles of books on several levels. The Basses will sell you a tote bag, buy your old books, rent you books by the foot for a photo shoot, sell you a used paperback "Catch-22" for $8 or a signed Patti Smith "Just Kids" (also a paperback) for $12.80. Most weeks, the store hosts several book signings.
"We've got a challenge ahead of us," co-owner Fred Bass, 82, told me. Not long ago, he added, he was invited to talk about Strand's future with a group of women librarians. "If you people don't buy enough stuff from me," he told them, "I'll turn it into a gentlemen's club."
Your final stop is where we began, the New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, completed in May 1911. Free 50-minute tours start at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. most days, with just a 2 p.m. tour on Sundays.
Start with the lions, designed by Edward Clark Potter, nicknamed Patience and Fortitude during the Great Depression by a desperately cheerleading Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. They've been tidied up for the centennial, but face it, after 100 years of acid rain, noxious exhaust, miscreant kids and pigeon poop, you'd look beleaguered, too.
Inside, you shuffle through grand Astor Hall, check the Gottesman Exhibition Hall, admire the gilt ceiling of the map room and the cityscape paintings in the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room. The Children's Center has the originalWinnie the Pooh, a tattered bear that author A.A. Milne gave his son, Christopher, in 1921.
Upstairs, you pause at the murals and woodwork in the McGraw Rotunda, the chandeliers in that old card catalog room, and finally, the library's main reading room, nearly 300 feet long, dramatically restored and named in 1998 for the Rose family.
Its resources are open to anybody with a library card, and requests are still carried to the seven levels of stacks below by way of an ancient system of pencils, papers, pneumatic tubes and conveyor belts. On 42 long tables, 168 reading lamps glow through gold shades.
"If you want to see New Yorkers intensely at work in one of the most beautiful rooms in the country, go to the Rose Main Reading Room," Paul LeClerc, until recently the chief executive officer of the library, told me. (He has since been succeeded by Anthony W. Marx.) "You walk in there, you see 600 or 700 people. Who knows who they are or what they're doing?"
The room's 52-foot ceiling is the sort of thing you'd expect to see sheltering the head of a 19th century European emperor. Daylight filters down through a procession of arched windows.
Linger here. Maybe you'll spot Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and Nobel Laureate whom staffers have served repeatedly in the last year. Or maybe you'll just tumble to a comforting thought: American civilization isn't an oxymoron after all, and this place is the proof.
from: LA Times
by: Christopher Reynolds
Reporting from New York— On the third floor of a big, gray building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, silver-haired docent Julie Chelminski recently stepped up to the middle of a hushed room and faced 15 spellbound tourists.
"On the walls of this room there were 9,000 drawers," Chelminski said. "And in those drawers were 10 million cards."
This was in the New York Public Library's catalog room. And these were book people, as happy as pilgrims in the Holy Land, imbibing every detail of how the library switched from cards to computers in 1983. Within minutes, they would stand in a reading room as grand as a cathedral. That same day, they could see Charlotte Brontë's private diary (such tiny lettering!) at the Morgan Library a few blocks away or hear the tale of Dylan Thomas' final binge in the bar where it happened.
These are dire days for old-fashioned books. The 48 bookshops that once lined Manhattan's Book Row on 4th Avenue are gone or relocated. By the end of September, the bankrupt Borders chain's last outlet is expected to close. At Amazon.com, ebooks outsell hardbacks. As those marble lions in front of the New York Public Library celebrate their 100th anniversary, Kindles, Nooks, iPads and their ilk multiply like bunnies in bedrooms and airline cabins around the planet.
So, old-fashioned book people, hit literary Manhattan soon and hard. Even if you have only three days, as I did earlier this year, you can squeeze in an eight-stop tour, complete with thinking, drinking, Bibles, tote bags and a certain pair of municipal mascots. Here's how my circuit went.
First, check into the Library Hotel, a for-profit venture with an irresistible gimmick: It stands at Madison Avenue and 41st Street, about three blocks from the New York Public Library, and its 60 rooms (and the 6,000 books within them) are organized by the topics of the Dewey Decimal System. (I was on the Languages floor, in the Germanic room.) Know, however, that the least-expensive rooms are tiny.
Next, stare at the sidewalk. Not just because the New Yorkers all around you are doing so, but because there are dozens of bronze plaques with literary quotes set in the sidewalk on 41st Street near Madison Avenue. My favorite is from E.B. White: "I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens."
The Algonquin Hotel's Round Table Room, the storied West 44th Street gathering spot where Dorothy Parker and other wits of the '20s and '30s once cracked wise, makes a fine third stop. You can order a bowl of soup (French onion, $13), but don't fuss over the furniture. As a senior waiter acknowledged during my visit, the famous table itself left the building long ago, its destination unknown.
You can, however, see the old gang over the fireplace — gathered in a Natalie Ascencios painting that includes Parker, humorist Robert Benchley, critic Alexander Woollcott, editor Harold Ross, playwright George S. Kaufman and comedian Harpo Marx. (The Algonquin recently updated its rooms and may be better known these days for the cabaret shows in its Oak Room Supper Club.)
Your fourth stop is the White Horse Tavern, which has stood in the West Village since long before Dylan Thomas' time. Sip a beer (cash only) and admire the old tin ceiling and an agreeably spooky portrait of the poet, which hangs in a hallway. In it Thomas is wide-eyed, forever gazing toward the bar.
"He didn't actually die here," bartender Lova Rasoamanana noted.
After staggering back to his room at the Hotel Chelsea one night in November 1953, Thomas bragged of downing 18 whiskeys. He fell into a coma and died days later in a New York hospital. (The Encyclopedia Britannica blames "an overdose of alcohol," but biographer Paul Ferris has counterproposed pneumonia and possible medical malpractice.)
Next up is the Morgan Library & Museum at Madison Avenue and 36th Street, built as the private domain of financier Pierpont Morgan in 1906, later recast as a nonlending public institution. Now we commoners can gawk at the myriad cultural prizes Morgan amassed between 1890 and 1913, including medieval manuscripts, letters by Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, handwritten scores by Mozart and Beethoven and three Gutenberg Bibles. The walnut bookshelves rise three stories. The fireplace is big enough to burn three Christmas trees at once (although we discourage this because it can be dangerous). Next door, in a bright, contemporary space that Renzo Piano designed for the Morgan's 2006 expansion, temporary exhibitions rotate.
Onward to stop No. 6. At East 59th Street you can browse Argosy Old & Rare Books, Prints & Maps, which goes back three generations to 1925. Argosy has its share of $15-$25 volumes near the front, along with all sorts of autographs (Herbert A. Wilson, "corrupt commissioner of the Boston Police Dept.," $35). But much of the six-story building is filled with antiquarian volumes, art, maps and Americana aimed at wealthier customers. A $75 1965 edition of Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano." A $7,500 F. Scott Fitzgerald first edition ("All the Sad Young Men," 1926).
If Argosy is yin among long-standing Manhattan booksellers, Strand Bookstore, our seventh stop, might be yang. Strand, the lone survivor of the old Book Row, opened in 1927 and moved to Broadway (at 12th) in the 1950s.
Still owned by the founding Bass family, Strand stays vital by courting bargain-hunters with staggering variety — an estimated 18 miles of books on several levels. The Basses will sell you a tote bag, buy your old books, rent you books by the foot for a photo shoot, sell you a used paperback "Catch-22" for $8 or a signed Patti Smith "Just Kids" (also a paperback) for $12.80. Most weeks, the store hosts several book signings.
"We've got a challenge ahead of us," co-owner Fred Bass, 82, told me. Not long ago, he added, he was invited to talk about Strand's future with a group of women librarians. "If you people don't buy enough stuff from me," he told them, "I'll turn it into a gentlemen's club."
Your final stop is where we began, the New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, completed in May 1911. Free 50-minute tours start at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. most days, with just a 2 p.m. tour on Sundays.
Start with the lions, designed by Edward Clark Potter, nicknamed Patience and Fortitude during the Great Depression by a desperately cheerleading Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. They've been tidied up for the centennial, but face it, after 100 years of acid rain, noxious exhaust, miscreant kids and pigeon poop, you'd look beleaguered, too.
Inside, you shuffle through grand Astor Hall, check the Gottesman Exhibition Hall, admire the gilt ceiling of the map room and the cityscape paintings in the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room. The Children's Center has the originalWinnie the Pooh, a tattered bear that author A.A. Milne gave his son, Christopher, in 1921.
Upstairs, you pause at the murals and woodwork in the McGraw Rotunda, the chandeliers in that old card catalog room, and finally, the library's main reading room, nearly 300 feet long, dramatically restored and named in 1998 for the Rose family.
Its resources are open to anybody with a library card, and requests are still carried to the seven levels of stacks below by way of an ancient system of pencils, papers, pneumatic tubes and conveyor belts. On 42 long tables, 168 reading lamps glow through gold shades.
"If you want to see New Yorkers intensely at work in one of the most beautiful rooms in the country, go to the Rose Main Reading Room," Paul LeClerc, until recently the chief executive officer of the library, told me. (He has since been succeeded by Anthony W. Marx.) "You walk in there, you see 600 or 700 people. Who knows who they are or what they're doing?"
The room's 52-foot ceiling is the sort of thing you'd expect to see sheltering the head of a 19th century European emperor. Daylight filters down through a procession of arched windows.
Linger here. Maybe you'll spot Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and Nobel Laureate whom staffers have served repeatedly in the last year. Or maybe you'll just tumble to a comforting thought: American civilization isn't an oxymoron after all, and this place is the proof.
from: LA Times
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Dictionary compilers create endangered words list
Collins experts remove obsolete words – including aerodrome and wittol – from smaller dictionaries
Aerodrome and charabanc are among the words presumed to have become extinct in the past year, according to lexicographers.
Collins Dictionary experts have compiled a list of words which have fallen out of use by tracking how often they appear.
Other words on the list include "wittol"– a man who tolerates his wife's infidelity, which has not been much used since the 1940s.
The terms "drysalter", a dealer in certain chemical products and foods, and "alienism", the study and treatment of mental illness, have also faded from use.
Some of the vanished words are old-fashioned modes of transport such as the "cyclogiro", a type of aircraft propelled by rotating blades, and charabanc, a motor coach.
The "stauroscope", an optical instrument for studying the crystal structure of minerals under polarized light, is also no longer used.
Dr Ruth O'Donovan, asset development manager at Collins Language Division in Glasgow, said: "We track words using a very large database of language which is a very large collection of various texts from spoken and written language, including books, newspapers and magazines so we can track language change over time.
"We track new words but we can also track for the frequency of existing words and when they get below a certain threshold we see them as being obsolete, though they may be used in very specialist circumstances.
"Such words are in our largest dictionary but we've categorised them as obsolete, as although they go out of general use they are still of interest to historians so it's useful to have them in the dictionary. But we would exclude them from our smaller dictionaries."
Other words which have passed out of use include 'supererogate' which means to do or perform more than is required.
While 'succedaneum', meaning something used as a substitute also no longer trips off the modern tongue.
Neither does 'woolfell'. the skin of a sheep or similar animal with the fleece still attached.
The dictionary experts have also identified a word still commonly used in the 21st century, though its meaning has changed.
While 'fun fur' now means synthetic fur, up until the 1960s it meant cheap fur from animals such as rabbit, which was often dyed various colours.
The data was discovered as part of research for the publication of the next Collins English Dictionary in October this year.
from: Guardian
Aerodrome and charabanc are among the words presumed to have become extinct in the past year, according to lexicographers.
Collins Dictionary experts have compiled a list of words which have fallen out of use by tracking how often they appear.
Other words on the list include "wittol"– a man who tolerates his wife's infidelity, which has not been much used since the 1940s.
The terms "drysalter", a dealer in certain chemical products and foods, and "alienism", the study and treatment of mental illness, have also faded from use.
Some of the vanished words are old-fashioned modes of transport such as the "cyclogiro", a type of aircraft propelled by rotating blades, and charabanc, a motor coach.
The "stauroscope", an optical instrument for studying the crystal structure of minerals under polarized light, is also no longer used.
Dr Ruth O'Donovan, asset development manager at Collins Language Division in Glasgow, said: "We track words using a very large database of language which is a very large collection of various texts from spoken and written language, including books, newspapers and magazines so we can track language change over time.
"We track new words but we can also track for the frequency of existing words and when they get below a certain threshold we see them as being obsolete, though they may be used in very specialist circumstances.
"Such words are in our largest dictionary but we've categorised them as obsolete, as although they go out of general use they are still of interest to historians so it's useful to have them in the dictionary. But we would exclude them from our smaller dictionaries."
Other words which have passed out of use include 'supererogate' which means to do or perform more than is required.
While 'succedaneum', meaning something used as a substitute also no longer trips off the modern tongue.
Neither does 'woolfell'. the skin of a sheep or similar animal with the fleece still attached.
The dictionary experts have also identified a word still commonly used in the 21st century, though its meaning has changed.
While 'fun fur' now means synthetic fur, up until the 1960s it meant cheap fur from animals such as rabbit, which was often dyed various colours.
The data was discovered as part of research for the publication of the next Collins English Dictionary in October this year.
from: Guardian
Friday, September 9, 2011
'No, we shouldn’t just Google it': John Walsh laments the death of the reference book
Sales of reference books are sinking fast as we turn online for the answers to life's big – and small – questions. But our civilisation would be infinitely poorer if Roget's, Brewer's and Fowler's go out of print, argues John Walsh
by: John Walsh
Here come the new words, rolling and tumbling towards us in their shiny, multi-hued novelty like those thousands of coloured balls that cascaded down a street in that television commercial. These are the words that have just joined the language, and have been included in the 12th edition of The Chambers Dictionary, out this week.
You won't be surprised to learn that "retweet" and "vuvuzela" have been admitted to the language, along with over-used terms such as "national treasure" and recessional clichés such as "double dip" and "quantitative easing". Other new entries take a moment for their meaning to become clear. There's "crowdsourcing" (meaning to canvass suggestions from the general public before adopting a course of action), "freegan" (someone who finds all their food, gratis, in supermarket bins), "upcycle" (to transform waste products into better-quality products) and "globesity" (the worldwide outbreak of morbid fatness in civilised countries).
Sceptics might wonder if words such as "globesity", far from being authentic popular slang on the streets of Dagenham or Detroit, were invented by a smart young lexicographer working at Chambers HQ, or were tweeted to the dictionary publishers by a smart alec in Tooting. But we have no time to worry about their status as echt English words, because there'll be more arriving in a few months, as Oxford University Press and its Cambridge equivalent and the other dictionary publishers bring out new editions with their own cargo of neologisms, and the publicity departments manufacture another flap over the admission of "metrosexual" or "rehab" to the hallowed temple of English.
You may detect a note of desperation in their pronouncements. But then they have much to despair about. Bluntly put, dictionaries are in trouble, and have been for years. The big, dusty, 2,000-page family dictionary has become surplus to requirements, as potential users have turned to the internet for their definitions. The figures for 2010 show that spending on dictionaries fell for the seventh consecutive year, to a record low of £9.2m. Single-language and bilingual dictionaries dropped 13 per cent. Other reference books, including atlases and home-learning titles, sank by 10 per cent. But as early as 2007 some publishers were predicting that paper dictionaries will die out completely, as the word-curious turn wholly online. And if they go the way of reel-to-reel tape recorders, vinyl records and camera film, we'll have lost a substantial source of intellectual delight: the reference shelf.
The reference shelf used to be something no professional writer or scrupulous journalist would be without: the books represented a small army of helpers in the fight to express oneself in writing or to understand obscure words or references in someone's work.
The volumes jostling for shelf space would be The Chambers Dictionary (or the Concise Oxford English), Roget's Thesaurus, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Fowler's Modern English Usage, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Some of these may be unfamiliar to 21st-century readers; they were once considered essential. Roget's Thesaurus was the work you consulted when the word you were looking for was on the tip of your tongue but refused to come out. At least you knew the flipping word was to be found somewhere in the pages of Roget. If you were writing an article about translation and you'd already used the word "translation" four times and were searching for a word that meant something like "translation", you looked up Roget and found "version, rendering, crib, paraphrase, précis, abridgement, adaptation, decoding, decipherment..." along with several other semi-synonyms.
Fowler's Modern English Usage, which first appeared in 1926, was the 20th century's most influential style guide for writers – its author, Henry Watson Fowler, was anti-pretension, anti-pedantry, suspicious of old-fashioned rules of grammar and impatient with archaic terms and fancy foreign words. He was a sleek and witty writer, and it sometimes felt morally beneficial to be in his company.
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable dates back to 1870, when the Rev E Cobham Brewer set out to explain to a new generation of autodidacts – aspiring readers without a university education – the literary allusions or learned phrases they met when reading classic authors or Times leaders. If you were puzzled by a mention, in a Victorian novel, of "Phalaris's bull", Brewer would tell you about the hapless brass sculptor Perillos, who proposed a new torture method to Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum. He offered to cast a bronze bull with a door in its side; the victim would be locked in and roasted to death, while his wails and scream would issue from the bull's throat like a thrilling bovine bellow. The tyrant agreed to the commission – but said it should be tried out first on Perillos himself.
Don't you feel better for knowing that, for having it confirmed that you should never propose to a tyrant any scheme involving pain? Dipping into Brewer was always fun. Nowhere else would you be likely to stumble on the information that "hocus-pocus" – the word used by a magician to hoodwink his audience – is a satirical corruption of "hoc est corpus meum", the words said while the host is raised at the climax of the Catholic mass. Dipping into Fowler, you always came away knowing a lot more than when you opened it. There's a serendipitous joy in finding arcane information when turning the pages in search of something else.
Discovering the evolution of words is a constant pleasure. I once asked Magnus Magnusson, the late television quizmaster, if he'd managed to retain any of the million-odd pieces of information that had whizzed past him over the years on Mastermind. Very few, he said; but one was the derivation of the word "shibboleth". It means, of course, a slogan, catchphrase or "password" beloved of a certain group, sect or political party. He'd been delighted to find (in The Oxford English Dictionary) that it was the old Hebrew word for an ear of corn; and that, according to the Bible, during the war between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites, it was used as a lethal password – Ephraimites pronounced it "skibboleth" rather than "shibboleth" and any hapless soldier who couldn't say it properly was promptly executed.
Again – how pleasing to know this. It's precisely the kind of detail you'll find in a dictionary – and only in a paper dictionary with words on pages. There's shibboleth, and its fascinating etymology, in the current OED, and in my 10th-edition Chambers. But if I look it up online, on www.dictionary.cambridge.org, I'm given only the definition.
Traditional dictionaries are being gradually overtaken by a number of shrill online sites. Press the "search" key and, four times out of five, you'll get a curt, one-line definition. If you're lucky, you'll be given several shades of meaning (www.thefreedictionary.com makes a fair stab at being semantically comprehensive) – but of that word only, with no sense of its derivation or associations. Ask for a definition of "declare" and you'll get seven definitions of "declare" – but no helpful peripheral nods to "declaration", "declarative" or "declaredly". When online, you are never encouraged to browse, or stray, or graze around the word-meadow above and below the definition you've sought.
Those who suspect that online dictionaries are, to an alarming extent, callow, partial, crass and academically threadbare enterprises should read a recent blog on www.dictionary.com, which reported that several words have been deemed "obsolete" by Collins lexicographers (they include "charabanc" and "aerodrome") and won't be used in future Collins print dictionaries. "An argument could be made that, if a word is rarely used or searched for, it may not matter if it is in the dictionary or not," the website ruminated. This argument has been seen before – in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where The Party deems that language has become too sprawling and unwieldy, and invents Newspeak to keep it under greater control. Instead of having 40 or 50 terms for "wicked" or "wrong", they say, let us agree to say "ungood" to mean all of them – and, if emphasis is needed, "doubleplusungood".
And if you want to see where democratic lexicography is heading online, check out the Urban Dictionary (at www.urbandictionary.com). It will acquaint you with more sexual terms than you dreamt existed, will amaze you with the ironclad illiteracy and vulgarity of the contributors, and will make your head spin with its vast lexicon of racist abuse (such as the thousand-odd phrases containing the word "nigger"). It's put together by online users for the edification of others. And they sure aren't going to listen to the chaps from the Chambers and Oxford lexicographical departments deliberating about whether some of the words should be admitted to the English language some day. Online, they're here already...
It's easy to feel a nostalgic throb for the old reference library on your desk. As the dictionary market steadily declines, and sales of thesauruses plummet by a shocking 24 per cent, the very word "thesaurus" has never sounded more like a dinosaur. But we should not be downhearted. We could be seeing the start of something, rather than the end. I predict a retro-revolution in writers' vocabularies. Faced with the internet's fascination with street language and lack of interest in old words, I can see us taking a perverse delight in embracing stridently Baroque, efflorescent English words from the lexicon of Dickens, Milton, Dr Johnson, Shakespeare himself, until our paragraphs are full of "slubberdegullion" and "tatterdemalion", "dundreary" and "mulligrubs", "snoozle" and "wallydrag". We will drive readers mad with inkhorn terminology. We will send them rushing to old-fashioned dictionaries to learn what on earth is meant by "absquatulate" and "jobbernowl". We shall not rest until every Independent reader is saying to him or herself, "I wonder what 'humdudgeon' means. I must just go and look it up..."
from: Independent
by: John Walsh
Here come the new words, rolling and tumbling towards us in their shiny, multi-hued novelty like those thousands of coloured balls that cascaded down a street in that television commercial. These are the words that have just joined the language, and have been included in the 12th edition of The Chambers Dictionary, out this week.
You won't be surprised to learn that "retweet" and "vuvuzela" have been admitted to the language, along with over-used terms such as "national treasure" and recessional clichés such as "double dip" and "quantitative easing". Other new entries take a moment for their meaning to become clear. There's "crowdsourcing" (meaning to canvass suggestions from the general public before adopting a course of action), "freegan" (someone who finds all their food, gratis, in supermarket bins), "upcycle" (to transform waste products into better-quality products) and "globesity" (the worldwide outbreak of morbid fatness in civilised countries).
Sceptics might wonder if words such as "globesity", far from being authentic popular slang on the streets of Dagenham or Detroit, were invented by a smart young lexicographer working at Chambers HQ, or were tweeted to the dictionary publishers by a smart alec in Tooting. But we have no time to worry about their status as echt English words, because there'll be more arriving in a few months, as Oxford University Press and its Cambridge equivalent and the other dictionary publishers bring out new editions with their own cargo of neologisms, and the publicity departments manufacture another flap over the admission of "metrosexual" or "rehab" to the hallowed temple of English.
You may detect a note of desperation in their pronouncements. But then they have much to despair about. Bluntly put, dictionaries are in trouble, and have been for years. The big, dusty, 2,000-page family dictionary has become surplus to requirements, as potential users have turned to the internet for their definitions. The figures for 2010 show that spending on dictionaries fell for the seventh consecutive year, to a record low of £9.2m. Single-language and bilingual dictionaries dropped 13 per cent. Other reference books, including atlases and home-learning titles, sank by 10 per cent. But as early as 2007 some publishers were predicting that paper dictionaries will die out completely, as the word-curious turn wholly online. And if they go the way of reel-to-reel tape recorders, vinyl records and camera film, we'll have lost a substantial source of intellectual delight: the reference shelf.
The reference shelf used to be something no professional writer or scrupulous journalist would be without: the books represented a small army of helpers in the fight to express oneself in writing or to understand obscure words or references in someone's work.
The volumes jostling for shelf space would be The Chambers Dictionary (or the Concise Oxford English), Roget's Thesaurus, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Fowler's Modern English Usage, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Some of these may be unfamiliar to 21st-century readers; they were once considered essential. Roget's Thesaurus was the work you consulted when the word you were looking for was on the tip of your tongue but refused to come out. At least you knew the flipping word was to be found somewhere in the pages of Roget. If you were writing an article about translation and you'd already used the word "translation" four times and were searching for a word that meant something like "translation", you looked up Roget and found "version, rendering, crib, paraphrase, précis, abridgement, adaptation, decoding, decipherment..." along with several other semi-synonyms.
Fowler's Modern English Usage, which first appeared in 1926, was the 20th century's most influential style guide for writers – its author, Henry Watson Fowler, was anti-pretension, anti-pedantry, suspicious of old-fashioned rules of grammar and impatient with archaic terms and fancy foreign words. He was a sleek and witty writer, and it sometimes felt morally beneficial to be in his company.
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable dates back to 1870, when the Rev E Cobham Brewer set out to explain to a new generation of autodidacts – aspiring readers without a university education – the literary allusions or learned phrases they met when reading classic authors or Times leaders. If you were puzzled by a mention, in a Victorian novel, of "Phalaris's bull", Brewer would tell you about the hapless brass sculptor Perillos, who proposed a new torture method to Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum. He offered to cast a bronze bull with a door in its side; the victim would be locked in and roasted to death, while his wails and scream would issue from the bull's throat like a thrilling bovine bellow. The tyrant agreed to the commission – but said it should be tried out first on Perillos himself.
Don't you feel better for knowing that, for having it confirmed that you should never propose to a tyrant any scheme involving pain? Dipping into Brewer was always fun. Nowhere else would you be likely to stumble on the information that "hocus-pocus" – the word used by a magician to hoodwink his audience – is a satirical corruption of "hoc est corpus meum", the words said while the host is raised at the climax of the Catholic mass. Dipping into Fowler, you always came away knowing a lot more than when you opened it. There's a serendipitous joy in finding arcane information when turning the pages in search of something else.
Discovering the evolution of words is a constant pleasure. I once asked Magnus Magnusson, the late television quizmaster, if he'd managed to retain any of the million-odd pieces of information that had whizzed past him over the years on Mastermind. Very few, he said; but one was the derivation of the word "shibboleth". It means, of course, a slogan, catchphrase or "password" beloved of a certain group, sect or political party. He'd been delighted to find (in The Oxford English Dictionary) that it was the old Hebrew word for an ear of corn; and that, according to the Bible, during the war between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites, it was used as a lethal password – Ephraimites pronounced it "skibboleth" rather than "shibboleth" and any hapless soldier who couldn't say it properly was promptly executed.
Again – how pleasing to know this. It's precisely the kind of detail you'll find in a dictionary – and only in a paper dictionary with words on pages. There's shibboleth, and its fascinating etymology, in the current OED, and in my 10th-edition Chambers. But if I look it up online, on www.dictionary.cambridge.org, I'm given only the definition.
Traditional dictionaries are being gradually overtaken by a number of shrill online sites. Press the "search" key and, four times out of five, you'll get a curt, one-line definition. If you're lucky, you'll be given several shades of meaning (www.thefreedictionary.com makes a fair stab at being semantically comprehensive) – but of that word only, with no sense of its derivation or associations. Ask for a definition of "declare" and you'll get seven definitions of "declare" – but no helpful peripheral nods to "declaration", "declarative" or "declaredly". When online, you are never encouraged to browse, or stray, or graze around the word-meadow above and below the definition you've sought.
Those who suspect that online dictionaries are, to an alarming extent, callow, partial, crass and academically threadbare enterprises should read a recent blog on www.dictionary.com, which reported that several words have been deemed "obsolete" by Collins lexicographers (they include "charabanc" and "aerodrome") and won't be used in future Collins print dictionaries. "An argument could be made that, if a word is rarely used or searched for, it may not matter if it is in the dictionary or not," the website ruminated. This argument has been seen before – in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where The Party deems that language has become too sprawling and unwieldy, and invents Newspeak to keep it under greater control. Instead of having 40 or 50 terms for "wicked" or "wrong", they say, let us agree to say "ungood" to mean all of them – and, if emphasis is needed, "doubleplusungood".
And if you want to see where democratic lexicography is heading online, check out the Urban Dictionary (at www.urbandictionary.com). It will acquaint you with more sexual terms than you dreamt existed, will amaze you with the ironclad illiteracy and vulgarity of the contributors, and will make your head spin with its vast lexicon of racist abuse (such as the thousand-odd phrases containing the word "nigger"). It's put together by online users for the edification of others. And they sure aren't going to listen to the chaps from the Chambers and Oxford lexicographical departments deliberating about whether some of the words should be admitted to the English language some day. Online, they're here already...
It's easy to feel a nostalgic throb for the old reference library on your desk. As the dictionary market steadily declines, and sales of thesauruses plummet by a shocking 24 per cent, the very word "thesaurus" has never sounded more like a dinosaur. But we should not be downhearted. We could be seeing the start of something, rather than the end. I predict a retro-revolution in writers' vocabularies. Faced with the internet's fascination with street language and lack of interest in old words, I can see us taking a perverse delight in embracing stridently Baroque, efflorescent English words from the lexicon of Dickens, Milton, Dr Johnson, Shakespeare himself, until our paragraphs are full of "slubberdegullion" and "tatterdemalion", "dundreary" and "mulligrubs", "snoozle" and "wallydrag". We will drive readers mad with inkhorn terminology. We will send them rushing to old-fashioned dictionaries to learn what on earth is meant by "absquatulate" and "jobbernowl". We shall not rest until every Independent reader is saying to him or herself, "I wonder what 'humdudgeon' means. I must just go and look it up..."
from: Independent
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