A Limit on Lending E-Books

by: Julie Bosman


Heather Stephenson, a librarian at the main Siouxland Library, in Sioux Falls, S.D., demonstrates how to download an e-book.

A print book can be checked out of a library countless times, at least until it falls apart and needs to be replaced.


What about an e-book?

HarperCollins, the publisher of Michael Crichton, Sarah Palin and Dennis Lehane, said on Friday that it had revised its restrictions for libraries that offer its e-books to patrons.

Until now, libraries that have paid for the privilege of making a publisher’s e-books available for borrowing have typically been granted the right to lend an e-book — say, the latest John Grisham thriller — an unlimited number of times. Like print books, e-books in libraries are lent to one person at a time, often for two weeks. Then the book automatically expires from the borrower’s account.

HarperCollins said on Friday that it had changed its mind. Beginning March 7, its books may be checked out only 26 times before the license expires.

“We believe this change balances the value libraries get from our titles with the need to protect our authors and ensure a presence in public libraries and the communities they serve for years to come,” it said in a statement. The policy does not affect books already licensed by libraries.

Steve Potash, the chief executive of OverDrive, a provider of e-books to public libraries, said HarperCollins was the first publisher to limit how many times an e-book may be checked out.

The announcement was a reminder of the publishers’ squeamishness over having their e-books available in libraries. More people are using libraries for e-reading, a practice that does not require visiting a library in person, and is possible on many electronic devices, including the Nook and the iPad.

While hundreds of publishers make their e-books available to libraries, at least two major publishers, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan, do not.

Librarians fumed about the limit, complaining that it would require them to pay more for HarperCollins’s books when budgets are being cut.

“All libraries are going to think twice about what e-books they’re going to purchase in the future,” Leah L. White, a librarian at the Morton Grove Public Library in suburban Chicago, said Friday. Mr. Potash said the change would force some libraries, especially those that stock a lot of best sellers, to be more careful about the publishers from which they buy. “Libraries will have to consider whether they want to invest in titles that, after a year or 18 months or so, they’ll have to replenish or buy additional units,” he said. “There will be some who may have to be more selective about how they can use their digital book budgets.”

On Sunday, he said that OverDrive would take HarperCollins titles out of its general e-book catalog, which would keep them available but make them less easily accessible.

from: NY Times

Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins

by: Dirk Johnson

CHICAGO — Locked in a climate-controlled vault at the Newberry Library here, a volume titled “The Pen and the Book” can be studied only under the watch of security cameras.


The book, about making a profit in publishing, scarcely qualifies as a literary masterpiece. It is highly valuable, instead, because a reader has scribbled in the margins of its pages.


The scribbler was Mark Twain, who had penciled, among other observations, a one-way argument with the author, Walter Besant, that “nothing could be stupider” than using advertising to sell books as if they were “essential goods” like “salt” or “tobacco.” On another page, Twain made some snide remarks about the big sums being paid to another author of his era, Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.

Like many readers, Twain was engaging in marginalia, writing comments alongside passages and sometimes giving an author a piece of his mind. It is a rich literary pastime, sometimes regarded as a tool of literary archaeology, but it has an uncertain fate in a digitalized world.

“People will always find a way to annotate electronically,” said G. Thomas Tanselle, a former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. “But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved. And that is a problem now facing collections libraries.”

These are the sorts of matters pondered by the Caxton Club, a literary group founded in 1895 by 15 Chicago bibliophiles. With the Newberry, it is sponsoring a symposium in March titled “Other People’s Books: Association Copies and the Stories They Tell.”

The symposium will feature a new volume of 52 essays about association copies — books once owned or annotated by the authors — and ruminations about how they enhance the reading experience. The essays touch on works that connect President Lincoln and Alexander Pope; Jane Austen and William Cooper; Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau.

Marginalia was more common in the 1800s. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a prolific margin writer, as were William Blake and Charles Darwin. In the 20th century it mostly came to be regarded like graffiti: something polite and respectful people did not do.

Paul F. Gehl, a curator at the Newberry, blamed generations of librarians and teachers for “inflicting us with the idea” that writing in books makes them “spoiled or damaged.”

But marginalia never vanished. When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in South Africa in 1977, a copy of Shakespeare was circulated among the inmates. Mandela wrote his name next to the passage from “Julius Caesar” that reads, “Cowards die many times before their deaths.”

Studs Terkel, the oral historian, was known to admonish friends who would read his books but leave them free of markings. He told them that reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.

Books with markings are increasingly seen these days as more valuable, not just for a celebrity connection but also for what they reveal about the community of people associated with a work, according to Heather Jackson, a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

Professor Jackson, who will speak at the symposium, said examining marginalia reveals a pattern of emotional reactions among everyday readers that might otherwise be missed, even by literary professionals.

“It might be a shepherd writing in the margins about what a book means to him as he’s out tending his flock,” Professor Jackson said. “It might be a schoolgirl telling us how she feels. Or maybe it’s lovers who are exchanging their thoughts about what a book means to them.”

Just about anyone who has paged through a used college textbook has seen marginalia, and often added comments of their own.

Not everyone values marginalia, said Paul Ruxin, a member of the Caxton Club. “If you think about the traditional view that the book is only about the text,” he said, “then this is kind of foolish, I suppose.”

David Spadafora, president of the Newberry, said marginalia enriched a book, as readers infer other meanings, and lends it historical context. “The digital revolution is a good thing for the physical object,” he said. As more people see historical artifacts in electronic form, “the more they’re going to want to encounter the real object.”

The collection at the Newberry includes a bound copy of “The Federalist” once owned by Thomas Jefferson. Besides penciling his initials in the book, Jefferson wrote those of the founding fathers alongside their essays, which had originally been published anonymously.

“It’s pretty interesting to hold a book that Jefferson held,” Mr. Spadafora said. “Besides that, if we know what books were in his library in the years leading to the writing of the Declaration of Independence, it tells us something about what might have inspired his intellect.”

In her markings, Rose Caylor gave us a sense of her husband, the playwright Ben Hecht. In her copy of “A Child of the Century,” which Mr. Hecht wrote, she had drawn an arrow pointing to burns on a page. “Strikes matches on books,” she noted about her husband, who was a smoker.

Some lovers of literature even conjure dreamy notions about those who have left marginalia for them to find. In his poem “Marginalia,” Billy Collins, the former American poet laureate, wrote about how a previous reader had stirred the passions of a boy just beginning high school and reading “The Catcher in the Rye.”

As the poem describes it, he noticed “a few greasy smears in the margin” and a message that was written “in soft pencil — by a beautiful girl, I could tell.” It read, “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”
from: NYTimes

Kindle e-book piracy accelerates

by: David Carnoy

Several months ago I set up a Google alert for my book, "Knife Music," to keep abreast of anything anybody was saying--good or bad--about the thing. Over the months I've received news of the occasional blog post and tweets, but more recently I popped open an alert to learn that my book was being pirated--both as a separate file and part of two larger Torrents called 2,500 Retail Quality Ebooks (iPod, iPad, Nook, Sony Reader) and 2,500 Retail Quality Ebooks for Kindle (MOBI).

I had the strange reaction of being both dismayed and weirdly honored that someone had selected my book to strip free of its copy-protection (DRM) and include as part of a collection of "quality" e-books, many of which were from very good authors.

OK, so the use of the term "quality" was a reference to the formatting of the e-books and not the quality of the actual work, but for a moment I wasn't too bothered. After all, if someone downloads 2500 books, what are the odds he or she is going to even bother looking at yours? I was probably only losing a few bucks, especially considering my e-book is currently priced at $3.99, which only leaves me with about 50 cents a book after the publisher, e-book seller, and agent, take their cuts. Even if I missed out on selling 200 e-books, that's a mere $100. No big deal, right?

Well, obviously, for big authors, this whole pirating thing presents a bigger problem--and a bigger loss. But that isn't what dismayed me so much (sorry, but when you're a little guy, you don't care so much about how much the big guys are losing). Rather, what's shocking, and what the publishers should be most concerned about, is the fact that a library of 2,500 books can be downloaded in a matter of hours. E-books are small files and 2,500 of them can be packed into a single download (Torrent) that's only about 3.4GB. If you set the average price per book at a measly $2, the worth of said download would be $5,000. Bring it up to $4 a book and you're at $10,000. (In fact, publishers charges much more for some of these books).

By comparison, a single DVD movie is usually larger than that, as well as many retail PC games, which tend to run in the 4GB to 7.5GB range. A "major" PSP title is about 1GB, sometimes a bit larger (yes, the PSP has been severely impacted by piracy).

I probably don't need to point this out but I will. I have about 600 books in my paper book collection, which took me years to gather and prune during various moves. Digitally, that same collection could be downloaded in around 30 minutes and stored on a cheap 1GB thumb drive, which could then be copied in a matter of seconds and passed on to someone else.

A lot of people think moving away from paper is a good thing. Maybe it is. But what should also be alarming to publishers is that the number of people pirating books is growing along with the number of titles that are available for download. As I've written in the past, the rise of the iPad has spurred some of the pirating, but now the huge success of the Kindle is also leading to increased pirating. Yes some companies, such as Attributor, have done some studies about the issue, and seen increases. But for my evidence one only need glance at Pirate Bay and see what people are downloading and how many of them are doing it.

The most popular e-book download on Pirate Bay is the Kindle Books Collection, which has something like 650 e-books in it (it's just less than 1GB), and is ahead of a 224-page PDF e-book called "Advanced Sex: Explicit Positions for Explosive Lovemaking." At the time of this writing, 668 people were "seeding" the Kindle collection while 153 people were downloading it. A few month ago, the numbers of people downloading e-book collections like this at given moment were in the 50 to 60 range with fewer seeders.

Now some of you in the comments section are going to inevitably say, who needs 2,500 books? And most people don't read all that much anyway. But the point here is that there may very well be a dark side to the success of e-books, which some are speculating will make up 50 percent of the market in as little as 5 years.

You can argue whether it was Napster or the rise of the iPod--or most probably both--that led to the huge amount of music piracy, but the book business will also take its share of big losses as it moves further into the digital realm. True, it's much harder to get someone to invest the time to read a book than to listen to an album, watch a movie, or play a game, so chances are piracy won't hurt the book business as much as those industries. But on the flip side, as I said before, it's also much quicker to download a huge collection of books or a number of New York Times bestsellers with a single click of a button.

How much will price play into all this? Well, you already have plenty of folks out there who think it's outrageous for publishers to price an e-book at $12.99 or $14.99 when the hardcover is first released. And some of those folks may feel justified in downloading pirated versions of books in protest--or just because they say they don't like getting ripped off. And while some pricing decisions by publishers are clearly bad, pricing may be a smaller part of the piracy equation than you might think. What a surprising number of people have told me is that they pirate stuff for the same reason that a lot of people like the Kindle: it's all about instant gratification.

As one friend put it, "You want something, you click a button, you get it." He has a Netflix account and knows he can get a particular movie within 36 hours delivered to his door, yet he he says sometimes uses Bit Torrent to get the movie so he can watch it faster.

This is something publishers will have to contend with going forward. They know it, and Scott Turow, the President of the Author's Guild and a practicing lawyer, is acutely aware of how much of a problem it is and could become.

"It [piracy] has killed large parts of the music industry," he said in an interview. "Musicians make up for the copies of their songs that get pirated by performing live. I don't think there will be as many people showing up to hear me read as to hear Beyonce sing. We need to make sure piracy is dealt with effectively."

Alas, so far it hasn't been dealt with effectively and I doubt it ever will be. It won't cost me much now--and it may even help me find a few readers who might not have read my book--but in the long run, it could really hurt. And unlike the New York Time's David Pogue, I've got no live act. Perhaps I need to get one, though I think I'd have a hard time matching his rendition of "Apps, I did it again."

Comments?

from: CNET

TPL Workers Rally Against Urban Affairs Library Closure

by: Steve Kupferman

The rally in front of Metro Hall, earlier today. Photo by Lodoe-Laura Haines-Wangda/Torontoist.

If the Urban Affairs Library at Metro Hall doesn't remain open once this year's budget wrangling is over with, it won't have been for lack of opposition.from: Torontoist


At a rally today in front of Metro Hall, about twenty people—most of them connected with the TPL workers' union, CUPE Local 4948—spoke out against the branch's possible closure. The Urban Affairs Library could shutter if TPL can't come up with the money to keep it open subsequent to this year's final budget deliberations at City Hall, set to begin Wednesday.

Though initially conceived as a reference library for City staff and urban-affairs researchers, the branch's proximity to new condo developments has made it into a small, functional neighbourhood branch.

Maureen O'Reilly, president of Local 4948, thinks closing the Urban Affairs Library would be unwise. "There are four other libraries that do less business than the Urban Affairs Library," she said on Monday. "You could be cutting one of those if you were so concerned about cutting the library that did least well out of all your branches."

That is true, according to TPL's latest usage statistics. Since 2007, when hold pickup was introduced at the Urban Affairs Library, circulation has shot up considerably, to 73,121 items last year (up from 45,517 in 2009). Four other branches didn't do quite as well, although one of those was a bookmobile.

There were 111,625 visits to the Urban Affairs Library in 2010, which makes it more popular than several other neighbourhood libraries around the city—though TPL staff have been quick to point out that there are plenty of other branches nearby, including the one at City Hall. There's also a new branch being built at Fort York Boulevard and Bathurst Street, but by last estimate it won't be open until 2014.

O'Reilly is particularly concerned about the loss of 3.6 full-time equivalencies (each roughly equal to a full-time job) that would come with closing the branch. "I think it's a major cut," she added.

At the rally, workers paced in circles while a small cadre of security guards looked on. One sign said: "Hosni Ford: Step off our libraries."

"Do you think this'll turn into an Egypt type of thing?" one bystander, wearing a sweater with a City of Toronto logo on it, asked us.

"No," we said. "Definitely not."

Kate Zieman, who works in the CBC's tape library (in other words, a private library, not affiliated with TPL), was standing at the periphery of today's rally with some co-workers. The CBC building is just a short walk away from Metro Hall, and so CBC staff have come to rely upon the Urban Affairs Library as a place to lay hands on research, and even leisure-reading, materials.

Zieman said the branch's closure would be a disappointment. "It [the closure] is personally inconvenient, and it's professionally inconvenient for librarians at CBC," she added.

This smallish rally wasn't the first attempt to save the Urban Affairs Library. TPL's own board, consisting of eight citizen members and five city councillors, has been at it for months.

When TPL staff first floated the notion of shutting down the branch as a means of shrinking the system-wide operating budget in accordance with City Hall's cost-reduction expectations for 2011, the board squashed the idea, and asked the City for a 2.6% increase over 2010's budget, to cover not only the Urban Affairs Library but several other existing service offerings. That was January.

But the City manager's office, with Rob Ford's blessing, has been asking for 5% cuts across the board, and so it was apparent, even in January, that such a generous increase wasn't going to fly. That's even though library staff estimate that because of ever-increasing costs, TPL would actually need something like a 3.6% increase just to maintain its current service levels for the year.

City council's budget committee requested that TPL reduce their 2011 increase request from 2.6% to a more modest 2%. At their February meeting, the TPL board again defied City Hall. They asked for 2.06%. The extra 0.06% was the amount necessary to keep the Urban Affairs Library open.

But at its last meeting, the budget committee again handed down a strict 2% increase edict, which will face one last round of approval at this week's special session of city council.

City council has the power to tell TPL how much money they can spend, but not how to spend it, and so if the 2% increase holds up, the library board could still decide to forego closing the Urban Affairs Library. They could instead commit themselves to scrounging up equivalent savings from elsewhere in the TPL budget. Though where "elsewhere" might be is not publicly known.

Closing the Urban Affairs Library would save the City $100,000 in 2011, and an additional $629,000 in 2012.

Who's killing the Dewey decimal system?

Some suburban libraries begin turning away from the longtime classification system

by: Robert McCoppin

To find a favorite book in Elgin's Rakow Branch library, 6-year-old Rina Teglia marched straight to the "Ready to Read" section and picked out "Bathtime for Biscuit."


While she was at it, a nearby book titled "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" caught her eye, so she grabbed it to take home too.

"I like it a lot," Rina said of the library. "You can find books easily."

Score one for the library's bookstore-style layout. And shed a tiny tear for the Dewey Decimal Classification system, long the standard in the industry.

A handful of pioneering suburban libraries are transitioning from the librarian-loved but misunderstood Dewey to the type of organization system used by booksellers. The new layout groups books by subject rather than number, uses signs to highlight contemporary, popular categories, and displays books by their covers.


Critics say the new system is a nightmare for anyone trying to find a specific book that doesn't fit into an obvious category. Supporters counter that the system does what libraries should be doing: encourage people to read more books.

A library in south suburban Frankfort is among a small number of libraries nationwide that have switched entirely to the new format. Other libraries in Darien, Oak Park and Westmont are using it for parts of their collections, and Deerfield officials are considering it for the future.

Rakow, which is part of the Gail Borden Public Library District in Elgin, was designed to embody the new system when it opened in 2009.

Rakow is relatively small, with 32,000 items, but it attracts some 400 patrons a day who check out about 21,000 items a month, more than similar-size peers. Every fiction genre has a higher percentage of books checked out at Rakow than at Elgin's main library, and nonfiction gets checked out at almost twice the rate as at the Dewey-style main library. Part of the increase is attributable to Rakow stocking only the most popular, newer books, officials said, but the new system's appeal also plays a role.

Rakow uses a "de-emphasized" or "mash-up" system, in which books are grouped by category under large signs reading "In the News" for current events, or "New & Hot" for best-sellers, but are filed within each category by the Dewey numbers on the spines.

"For us, we can definitely say this appeals to people," Rakow library Director Margaret Peebles said. "They can pick up a book they wouldn't have found otherwise."

Still, Dewey remains by far the dominant system for organizing books. More than 200,000 libraries in 135 countries are estimated to use Dewey, making it the most popular book classification system in the world.


Named after the man who created it in the 1870s, librarian Melvil Dewey, the system groups all knowledge into 10 categories numbered 000 through 900, then subdivides further for each subject, moving from general to specific.

Dewey goes deeper and broader than bookstore headings, classifying books much more specifically, with 27,000 categories, compared with about 3,000 in the bookstore system, known as Book Industry Standards and Communications, or BISAC.

Long ago, most public libraries stopped using Dewey to group fiction books, instead putting them in alphabetical order by the author's last name. The new wave of non-Dewey classifications extends that concept to other popular subjects like diet and health or gardening, and sometimes pulls together books Dewey would keep far apart.


For instance, at Rakow, "Pack Your Bags" brings together travel books and language books, which would be separate under Dewey, but which people planning a trip often want together.

Some readers, like Gena McNamara of Elgin, remain skeptical.

While the system may be good for new books, McNamara questioned how easy it is to find works by genre, such as "Thriller" and "Horror," as she discovered when looking for movies.

"In whose eyes is it a comedy, a drama, or action?" she asked. "You'd have to look in three different sections … which is useless."

Some librarians share those concerns, calling BISAC part of a fad to dumb down libraries. They say libraries can be more user-friendly simply by putting better signs with subject headings on existing Dewey shelves.

Other librarians fear a lack of standardization will mean chaos when lending books between libraries, or for librarians working in different systems.

Rather than Dewey, most academic libraries use the Library of Congress classification, which is more efficient and specific for large collections and new technical material, but also more complex. The Chicago Public Library, which uses Library of Congress, tries to keep it user-friendly by separating the most popular or timely books into bookstore-style display areas.

The debate between Dewey and BISAC enflames passions in the stereotypically staid domain of librarians.

The Annoyed Librarian, who blogs anonymously for Library Journal, casts the debate primarily as research versus browsing: "…presumably the (academic) librarians are still interested in bringing order out of chaos instead of making the chaos more comfy. Saving the time of the reader isn't very important when the readers don't know what they want anyway."


Michael Gorman, past president of the American Library Association, says the trend follows a mistaken assumption that people are too dumb to grasp Dewey.

Libraries must cater not just to the majority, as bookstores do, Gorman said, but to those with more specialized interests, like genealogy or Greek archeology.

"I'd argue it's not very helpful," he said. "It's subjective. One could quibble with Dewey, but there is a logic to it, and you can train people very quickly to understand it."


Undaunted by criticism, librarians at the Frankfort Public Library District near Tinley Park converted their entire 29,000-piece adult collection to a Dewey-free system in 2009. They relabeled each spine and relocated each book, put new subject signs on each shelf and made new library maps. The effort took 18 months with the help of volunteers and cost $25,000.

When a patron searches for a book on a computer, a layout map shows where it's located, and color-coded signs show the location of each subject category. Following the change, circulation for the 2009-2010 fiscal year increased 8.5 percent, though many libraries have seen a spike in use during the recession.

The vast majority of Frankfort's readers, according to a survey, are not looking for a specific book, but are there to browse. Melissa Rice, head of adult services, said the new system is working well, though library Director Pierre Gregoire acknowledged he's "not thrilled" with it because it can be harder to find a particular book.

But reader Joan Wyzukovicz of Elgin, browsing at the Rakow library, prefers the new approach. "It presents itself nicely," she said. "I can look quickly. Occasionally, I find a surprise."

Supporters of the concept say libraries need to be more responsive to what general readers want.

Dewey can be "daunting" for readers and librarians alike, said Audra Caplan, president of the Public Library Association. Numbered systems are time-consuming for staff members to put on shelves and require regular "shelf-reading," in which staff members check to make sure the inventory is ordered correctly. If a book isn't in the right spot, it's basically lost. She said each library has to find the best way to meet its community's needs.

"My personal opinion is we can keep very high standards and not attract a lot of people to our libraries," she said. "A lot of times, we're responding to what librarians think customers need, as opposed to what customers think they need."


from: Chicago Tribune

Forget fight club - join book club

Once men used to get together to watch sport and drink beer. Now they have muscled in on a female craze. Viv Groskop asks whether there is such a thing as a man’s read.
by: Viv Groskop

‘Men debate things in a different way,” says a friend of mine who has been in an all-male book group for several years. “From what I’ve heard of women’s book groups, they tend to get together, talk about the book and then go off into different topics. Whereas in a men’s book group, if the book is good we will argue about it vociferously until midnight. It can get quite aggressive and passionate.”


Another man I know was thrown out of his (mixed) book group for suggesting the wrong kind of literature. “I really wanted to do Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band. Things got out of control. One of the other members sent an email saying: ‘You don’t even like Orhan Pamuk so what do you know about anything?’ Everyone else thought Orhan Pamuk was amazing and I thought he was pretentious. So that was it. I was dumped. They just carried on without me.”

Fifteen years after Oprah Winfrey first launched her book club, spawning a predominantly female craze, men’s reading groups appear to be on the rise. The Boston Globe asked recently: “Where are the guys? They’re at their book group. Discussing books.” Or are they? Rick Marin replied on Salon.com: “We’re middle-aged guys who needed an excuse to hang out, read and sometimes look at porn. Got a problem with that?”

Last month the Canadian writer Malcolm Johnston performed an experiment in his five-strong all-male book club: they decided to read a novel by the romance writer Nora Roberts, one of the first authors to sell more than one million copies on Kindle alongside James Patterson and Stieg Larsson. Conclusion? “I can get why girls read this. It’s easy to slip into the fantasy and the ridiculous sex scenes and the girls being girls. You can see why it sells like hot cakes.”

So is the traditionally feminine face of the book group changing? And are men’s groups more likely to discuss the book to the exclusion of anything else?

Ten years ago Jenny Hartley’s survey Reading Groups concluded that there were around 50,000 groups in Britain. Sixty-nine per cent were women only. Only four per cent were men only. Although there is no new data on book groups, an American survey published last month suggests that the business of reading is more male-dominated than we imagine. And anecdotally male books groups are definitely on the rise.


Men’s groups appear to be more likely to have blogs, online reading lists or organise themselves via Facebook groups. It seems common for them to have actual written rules and even more common – hilariously, surely? – for them to have a chairman.

The author Guy Walters has confessed that his all-male book club, The Dissectors, has a monogrammed tie (a quill pen with a blade on the end), a charter and a chairman. This is serious stuff compared with most women’s groups. (In my own book group – of women – we struggle to decide on a monthly date to meet and we’ve been going for over five years.)

There is still, though, a certain snobbery about book groups that may put some men off. Sebastian Faulks writes in his new book Faulks on Fiction: “There are monthly book groups that meet to discuss a novel but end up talking only about two things: the extent to which the contents are drawn from the author’s life and the extent to which these in turn tally with the readers’ own experience of such matters.” Not exactly a resounding endorsement of book group culture.

As well as usually wanting to discuss the writer’s life and their own lives, all book groups tend to have one other thing in common: members rarely want to betray their group. So my attempts to observe two men-only groups were politely but firmly rebuffed.

Several men in mixed book groups expressed disbelief that men-only groups existed at all. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an all-male book group,” said one enthusiastic member of a mixed-gender neighbours’ book group. Another told me he knew one men’s group very well: “They’ve only ever had one book. They never read it. And they meet in the pub.”

Others are more committed. Simon Chambers, a mathematician from Ipswich, maintains an online reading list for his club, The Men Only Book Group, who have tackled everything from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov to Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. They’re currently reading Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. A group of six, they meet at the pub at 7.30pm strictly and later adjourn for curry. They read 11 books a year, with a break over Christmas: “Every November we have the chance to choose a long book,” Chambers explains. “Recently someone chose War and Peace. Everyone sighed and groaned. But it was absolutely wonderful. After I finished it, I regretted coming to the end.”

There is no rule in his group that you have to finish the book, but usually everyone does. (Only one person didn’t finish War and Peace. And who can blame him?) But do they actually talk about the books and only the books? “Sometimes, if it’s a very light book, the conversation will move on to sport and beer. But usually we do two hours solid on the book or things that come out of the book,” he says.

Since 2004, Chambers’s Men Only Book Group has read only a handful of titles by women – although Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française was one of their most popular choices.

Other groups are even more draconian. One American book group member writes: “My friends requested a book club for men, reading books by men, written for men. I know it sounds a little macho but this was what they wanted. And it has worked well for us.”

On Amazon there is even a recommended reading list entitled “Books for Men: the Anti-Oprah Book Club” that features American Pastoral by Philip Roth, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. But it also lists John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, which resulted in one of my (all-women) book club’s best-ever discussions.

Surely there is no such thing, then, as a man’s read? Gender and reading is still a fraught subject.

Last month a study by Vida, an organisation in the United States for women in the arts, uncovered a huge gender imbalance in which authors are reviewed and by whom. It found that in the London Review of Books, books by men took up 74 per cent of space and 78 per cent of the reviews were written by men. The New York Review of Books was worse, with more than 80 per cent male authors and reviewers.

It is a widely acknowledged truism that women still drive book sales – some estimate as much as 80 per cent of the fiction-buying market. As Ian McEwan once put it: “Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”

In 2009 a survey of 2,000 British readers concluded that “men are just not that into reading”. It found 48 per cent of women qualified as Page Turners (“avid readers”) compared with only 26 per cent of men. In the Slow Worms category (“they read one or two books a year”) there were 32 per cent men, 18 per cent women.

The novelist Lionel Shriver (a woman who changed her name from Margaret Ann at the age of 15 and whose work appeals to anyone who wants an intelligent read, regardless of gender) has complained “that publishing’s notion of ‘what women want’ is dated and condescending”.

This gender debate is now being taken increasingly seriously in the US (where one study shows – gulp – that one in four people have never read a book). The editor turned bestselling thriller writer Jason Pinter recently wrote in the Huffington Post that “this empty excuse of ‘Men Don’t Read’ has begotten a vicious cycle”. Publishers rarely publish books directly aimed at men, he added: “Somehow that equates to our entire gender having given up on the reading of books.” He dismantled research claiming that women read more fiction than men by a 4-1 margin. Men love books, he concluded, but editorial meetings in publishing houses are overpopulated by women and no one is marketing at male readers.

Perhaps the rise of men’s book groups can finally turn this around. Chambers says: “We get a lot of enjoyment out of reading novels and without the discipline of the group we wouldn’t otherwise read them. It’s because we’re not obvious readers that it works so well.”

Still doesn’t appeal? Maybe start with Mötley Crüe instead.

from: Telegraph

Experiment: Gym Class Helps Kids Read Better

by: Liz Dwyer


It looks like all the school districts that have cut back or eliminated recess and physical education classes in order to spend more time on test prep are on the wrong track. According to results from a 3,000 student high school out in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois, putting students who struggle in reading and math into physical education classes can shrink waistlines and boost academic performance.


PBS NewsHour recently highlighted the innovative exercise program at Naperville Central High School where freshman and sophomores start their school day with 7:45 a.m. workouts. Teachers were skeptical when the brains behind the program, retired physical education coordinator Paul Zientarski, first came up with the idea six years ago, but the results are impressive.

                     On average, kids who signed up for physical education directly before
                     reading comprehension read half-a-year ahead of those who opted out 
                     of the exercise program.

                     And in math, the improvements were even more dramatic. Students with
                     the benefit of P.E. before pre-algebra consistently did better, improving
                     two to four times more than their peers on standardized tests.

Student Nadlene Alnass says that after P.E., she's able to, "focus more on to the teacher, more on the lessons, more on everything." Indeed, Naperville is one of the top performing school districts in Illinois and Zientarski believes plenty of credit should go to the fitness-based P.E. programs. He wants to spread the idea to other school districts around the nation. Unfortunately, that takes money.

If you watch the video posted at http://www.good.is/post/study-gym-class-helps-kids-read-better, the fitness facilities students at Naperville High have access to look like they're from a high-price gym like Crunch. Naperville schools are surely being hit by budget cuts, but the city also has a median household income of $101,894 to cushion the blow—a far cry from what's going on in low-income neighborhoods.

If getting in some exercise before starting school really does boost academic performance, what would it take to have fitness facilities like Naperville's in high schools labeled as dropout factories?


from: Good Education

Technology Skills Library Staff Should Have

by: Sarah Houghton-Jan

I was recently asked to draw up a list of technology skills that I thought members a library staff should possess. I wrote my list in very broad strokes, before making it really specific to different tasks or specifying certain items only for certain positions. I thought I would share this “rough list” with the rest of the library world in case it would help you too. I advise getting more specific if you’re having staff self-assess on what skills they have, or actually provide trainings in these areas. But this is a good starting point.


So what did I miss? What would you take out? Leave comments and let’s develop this list together!



Terminology
•Technology terms glossary



Hardware
•Parts of your desktop computer

•Parts of a laptop computer

•Using printers

•Using photocopiers

•Using telephones

•Using fax machines

•Using self-checks

•Using projectors

•Using digital still cameras

•Using digital video cameras

•Using digital microphones

•Using sorting systems



Software
•Operating system

•Effective management of files and folders systems

•Word Processing software

•Spreadsheet software

•Presentation software

•Multimedia players and plug-ins

•Web browsers

•E-mail and calendar software (Outlook or whatever)

•ILS (back-end staff-side stuff)

•Computer and/or room reservation software

•Online reference software

•Photo editing software

•Video editing software

•Audio editing software



Security and Privacy
•Policies regarding security on public computers

•Policies regarding security on staff computers

•Policies regarding user data collection and privacy



Public Computing
•Familiarity with software

•Familiarity with hardware

•Familiarity with wired and wireless networks

•Familiarity with computer and network use policies



Ergonomics
•Proper ergonomic computer set-up

•How to avoid repetitive stress injuries

•How to avoid eye strain with computers



Library web presence
•URLs for library’s website and catalog

•Using the library’s website

•Using the library’s web catalog

•Best practices for searching the catalog and website

•Familiarity with library’s or library vendors’ mobile apps or sites

•Familiarity with eBooks collections

•Familiarity with databases

•Familiarity with virtual reference and tutoring services

•Familiarity with accessibility requirements and procedures

•Writing for the web best practices

•How to post content (text, links, images) to the library’s website

•How to post content to the library’s intranet

•Best practices for social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

•How to post photos to Flickr

•How to post video or audio files (to whatever sites you’re using)



Troubleshooting
•Assisting in-house users effectively on our equipment or theirs

•Assisting remote users effectively on their equipment



Personal Skills
•Continuous learning

•Change management

•Planning and evaluating new information technology systems

•Ability to quickly learn and adapt to new web services

•One-on-one training best practices


from: ALA Learning

How the Toronto Public Library handles complaints

by: Paul Terefenko

Ready for a good ol’ book bannin’? No, this isn’t about restarting the Huckleberry Finn n-word debate; it’s just time for the Toronto Public Library’s annual list of materials patrons wanted pulled from shelves.

The TPL’s 2010 tally totalled just nine items. “It’s not an unusual year,” says Vickery Bowles, the library’s director of collections management, adding that last year the number was seven.

What is a little unusual is what’s been targeted. There’s no Twain. No Vonnegut, Bradbury, Salinger or Lee. Even the Harry Potter series, with its heavy occult imagery, didn’t make the cut. Instead, the naughty nine were comprised of children’s and teen fiction, graphic novels, a Vanity Fair magazine article, Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno DVD and a book on being a Chartered Financial Analyst.

A CFA exam book? Where’s the battle there? Give the public The Diviners or The Handmaid’s Tale to defend. Now there’s a fight.

“[Challenges] tend to consist of books that are not classics,” explains Franklin Carter, a researcher and editor for the Book and Periodical Council of Canada (BPC). “If someone questions a classic, the news media will go to press with it for days.”

But, by taking on Swans in the Mist, a piece of teen lit one patron said contained “sadistic scenes” and “might give teens violent ideas,” you probably won’t get front page headlines.

People will not mass in the streets to defend The Waiting Dog, a picture book aimed at seven-year-olds with “obscene content and language,” that tells the tale of a dog fantasizing about eating a mailman (but doesn’t act on animal urges and greets him happily).

For the record, both Swans in the Mist and The Waiting Dog were retained in their respective collections.

Tintin in the Congo, however, did get moved to the adult graphic book collection from the children’s collection, after it was deemed kids wouldn’t be able to place racist and colonial views in the context for which it was penned.

To be clear, the Toronto Public Library doesn’t take reconsideration requests lightly.

“This process is important to us,” Bowles explains. “It is respectful. People see we’ve taken requests very seriously. We look at reviews, other library holdings, read the materials and then consider all the information in context.”

And that’s just what happens after concerned folks are given the library’s material selection policy and asked if they still want to take complaints to another level.

The turnaround time for the committee of librarians is 12 weeks, and at the end of it, graphic novels like Tintin do occasionally get moved.

This year, Tintin was the only reclassified item. War Stories Volume 1, a collection of four fictional Second World War illustrated stories by all-star comic book artists including Dave Gibbons and David Lloyd, didn’t budge. Nor did The New Adventures of Jesus Christ: The Second Coming, a compilation of Frank Stack’s ’60s and ’70s critique of American culture.

Bruno, which takes on the hyper-sensitive and homophobic, was also — fittingly — retained in the adult collection.

In fact, the only thing that was rejected from the collection was the CFA book.

CFA: 100 Success Secrets — 100 Most Asked Questions was deemed to be “unreliable,” “misleading” and filled with “numerous grammatical and typographical mistakes.” The self-published tome just wasn’t useful to CFA exam students, according to the library’s findings.

“Sometimes we make an error,” Bowles admits. “That was one book we shouldn’t have acquired,” she says, adding that with the increase in self-published books, having a few mistakes squeeze through 850,000 annual acquisitions is understandable and highlights the importance of the review process.

After all, it’s about getting everyone’s point of view in. “Intellectual freedom is an important principle in our public library system,” Bowles says.

The release of challenged items also leads nicely into Freedom to Read Week (Feb. 20-26).

“The twin purpose of Freedom to Read Week is to make people aware that there are censorship challenges, but also to get them to appreciate they have this great and glorious freedom to read,” says Carter of the Week designated by the BPC’s Freedom of Expression Committee.

By way of national context, the TPL’s handful of contested items is eclipsed by the 139 challenges across Canada in 2009 (the most recent year for which stats are available).

Among those: Gossip Girl novels, Now magazine, Adbusters, The Anal Sex Position Guide, The Story of Seabiscuit (with Shirley Temple), Hooking Up with Tila Tequila and The Krakow Ghetto and the Plaszow Camp Remembered. It’s a wide net, as you can gather.

While they may not make headlines, these challenges are present in Canada.

“The censorship issue doesn’t go away,” says Carter, acknowledging that we don’t face anything close to that of, say, North Korea. “But there are people and organizations in this society that believe the most effective way to deal with troublesome ideas, images or information is simply to ban it.”

from: Natonal Post

Free comic book enters the fray for commuter eyes

by: Derek Flack

A new publication has entered the free commuter market, one that surprisingly has nothing to do with news. Launched last week, the Mosaik Project is a comic book that's available across the TTC network at Gateway newsstands. Published by animation house Ex Machina 7, the first edition comes in at 56 pages and features original comic strips, interviews with comic creators, and profiles the work of a select number of Canadian comic artists.


The free commuter market might not be completely saturated, but with Metro, 24hrs, t.o.night and alt weeklies Eye and NOW, it's got to be a pretty daunting task to compete for reader eyes. Toward that end, I caught up with the Mosaik Project's editor-in-chief, Carlton Branch to chat about the publication and who it's aimed for.

Can you tell me what the Mosaik Project is and what your goals are?

The Mosaik Project is a completely-free, bimonthly, comics magazine. As a 'Canadian Comics Magazine for the Internet Generation,' so don't expect to see spandex-clad underwear models posing on rooftops! Instead, each issue features original comics, comic strips, interviews with Canadian creators, and artist showcases. We also provide opportunities for reader participation through our open letters page and reader contests.

The goal of the Mosaik Project is simple - to create an independent platform for Canadian comic artists to work profitably and reach a mainstream audience. As a free magazine, our profitability relies on an ever-expanding readership, and in today's highly-competitive market, only fresh and innovative work has a chance to break through and build a substantial audience. This is the role that we hope the Mosaik Project will take on.

You've just released your first issue, how many do you plan to offer?

Our next issue is scheduled for release on April 7th, and we have a plan in place to deliver five more issues in 2011. Heading into 2012, we plan to continue that schedule, but as we bring new artists on board, we want to eventually shift into a regular monthly cycle (assuming of course that the Mayan-apocalypse doesn't destroy the world... because that might put a slight damper on our plans).

The issues are free. How have you funded your project?


The issues are completely-free and have been entirely financed by our publishers, Ex Machina 7... With our demographic aimed squarely at the 12 and up crowd, we expect that we will continue to expand the number of pages available for local and international advertisements to offset the costs of producing each issue. This will allow us to continue to produce creative work and expand the amount of content that we are able to deliver with each issue.

How many do you print for each run?

The launch of the first issue of the Mosaik Project had well over 5000 copies and those were distributed in 85 TTC and GO Train stations across the GTA. Next month, a completely free digital version of that issue will be available from our blog. The April 7th issue, will repeat these numbers, and we are currently working with the Toronto Public Library to have additional copies available in libraries across Toronto!

From the inception of the Mosaik Project, we have been working closely with the TPL. We arranged to provide advertising services for them, so that they can promote the wonderful programs and services that they have planned throughout the year.

How many artists do you feature each issue? Will the contributors remain the same or change?

The first issue of the Mosaik Project featured the work of no less than six individual artists! Our goal is always to innovate, so the individual contributors can, and likely will, change as we are able to bring new artists on-board. Right now, the second issue is on-track to have more individual stories and more artists featured than the first issue!

What's next for the Mosaik Project?

At this moment in time, we are keeping our sights firmly fixed on the next issue! We have had an extremely positive response to the first issue and we are looking to build on that.

from: BlogTO

Hardware keyloggers discovered at public libraries

by: Graham Cluley 

Public libraries in Manchester, England, have been advised to keep their eyes peeled for USB bugs after two devices were discovered monitoring every keystroke made by every user of affected PCs.


According to local media reports, the small surveillance devices were found attached to the keyboard sockets at the back of two PCs in Wilmslow and Handforth libraries.

The devices - which look similar to USB drives - capture all keyboard activity, meaning that if everything you type (such as when you log into your email, book a holiday, check your bank account or make an online purchase) can be gathered by a returning criminal for later exploitation.

It's not known how long the devices have been in place at the libraries, or what information may have been stolen, but as the affected computers are used by a wide range of people (and are frequently accessed by members of the public who may not be able to afford internet access at home) the impact could be considerable.


According to reports, staff have been advised to conduct frequent checks on computers to try to reduce the chance of hardware keyloggers being deployed again, and rules have been in put in place advising that all keyboards must be plugged in to the (more visible) front of the PC's base unit rather than the rear.

But with human nature being what it is, and the cheap price and easy availability of hardware keyloggers in both USB and PS/2 connection forms, it's unlikely that we've heard the last of similar identity thefts on public computers.

Organisations concerned about the possibility of hardware keyloggers in the business environment may wish to investigate Sophos's SafeGuard Enterprise Configuration Protection facility.

BBC News reporter David Guest made a short video describing the threat, at one of the affected library computers.


from: Naked Security

Table Disservice

Some Cafes Bar the Door to Kindles and iPads
by: Virginia Heffernan


Kevin Van Aelst for The New York Times

No Kindles in cafes? You’ve got to be kidding. This is an affront, not only to readers and gadget lovers, but also to the spirit of cafes!

Many indie New York City cafes now heavily restrict, or ban outright, the use of Kindles, Nooks and iPads. Evidently, too many coffee shops in town have had their ambience wrecked when itinerant word processors with laptops turn the tables into office space. Sure, that phenomenon can be depressing — whether you’re a scornful lady who lunches or the nomadic freelancer who fields glares. And full-dress computers are perhaps too much personal furniture for cafes to accommodate. But banning devices the size of books, like Kindles and iPads, is going too far, and it’s anathema to the character and history of cafes.


Unwholesome things have always happened wherever people drink coffee together. They gossip and complain about powerful jerks; they read, write and scheme about their own comebacks. On the sidelines of those conversations — muttering, silently judging, chiming in — have always been loners who loiter with books and newspapers all day, ready to be recruited into conversation. This might come as hard news to would-be restaurateurs looking only to taste that sweet margin of coffee markup, but loiterers and readers must be part of the cafe equation. People who sit at bars are going to make out and brawl; people who sit in cafes are going to read and talk.

And often what they’re reading and talking about is unsavory. Coffeehouse patrons have always been a little bit . . . wired. This has been true at least since 1555, when the world’s first coffeehouses opened in Istanbul. High on caffeine and impromptu colloquy, 16th-century coffee­house patrons denounced the government. Sultans didn’t like it. Later, in 1675, Charles II described the coffeehouses in England as “places where the disaffected met and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers.” In 1721, Montesquieu wrote of the coffeehouse scene in France: “Were I the King, I would close the cafes, for the people who frequent those places heat their brains in a very tiresome manner. I would rather see them get drunk in taverns. Then, at least, they would harm only themselves, while the intoxication which coffee arouses in them causes them to endanger the country’s future.”

But what the powerful disdain, the bookish and garrulous adore. Well before Jean-Paul Sartre made Parisian cafes the headquarters of Western literary life — saying he wrote in cafes because the clamor helped him concentrate — coffeehouses were a place to try out ideas. Jean Chardin, a French visitor to Istanbul, couldn’t get enough of the curious Turkish brew: readers, writers, populists buzzing with class rage and even dervishes (real dervishes) reciting poetry. But what he appreciated most about cafes was not that you got to express yourself in them. He was delighted that you were not required to listen to anyone else express himself. “No one is forced to give up his game or his conversation” just because another coffee drinker is trying to hold court. Amen.

Knowing how to tune in and out, by turns, has long been a skill of cafe people. Now headphones facilitate that practice — both symbolizing and enforcing public solitude. That works for cafe novices, but in the long term, it’s the job of anyone in a public space to learn the fine art of ignoring people.

Not long ago in Brooklyn, a man with an iPod, whose headphones were whining, pulled off his headset. He asked two gossiping women nearby to talk more quietly. “Why don’t you turn your music down?” one of them asked. “It’s turned up so loud to drown you out!” shouted the man, in full 16th-century mode. Tempers spiked but, by cafe common law, both parties were wrong. There are all kinds of freedoms in cafes, but you can’t tell other people to turn it down. (The caffeine-induced irritability was a nice traditional touch, however.)

You also can’t tell cafe patrons to stop reading — even when e-readers don’t look (for now) as classy as paperbacks, newspapers or pamphlets. Sure, e-readers are dangerous: someone reading on one might make a note or check Facebook or play Scrabble. Sorry, proprietors — if they can find the Web with their tablet or phone, you shouldn’t be stopping them.

On July 1, Starbucks locations all over the United States started offering free, one-click, unlimited wireless service to their patrons. “We want to provide you with a great digital experience to go with your great cup of coffee,” the chain explains. Starbucks has long seemed to me like a flawed franchise that is squarely in the public good. In my eyes, this seals it.

As for the fancy tech-unfriendly cafes that shut out writers and readers like infidels in Ottoman times, maybe they should just style themselves as restaurants, with tablecloths, silverware and full service. If you have to bus your own table, history teaches, you’re in a cafe — and you can read and write what you want.

Points of Entry: This Week’s Recommendations
THE GRINDING PERK
Chronicle after chronicle insists on the historical seriousness of coffee — but can’t resist a punning title. “Uncommon Grounds,” a 2000 history of coffee by Mark Pendergrast, is no different. Read the e-book version at Starbucks, or anywhere e-books are welcome.

THE FUTURE TURNS 10
The USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future published its 10th annual report in a database that tracks broadband at home, the wireless Internet, online media, user-generated content and social networking at digitalcenter.org

VENTI EVERYTHING
Starbucks’s Web site and apps are studded with free content, like a video interview with Colin Meloy of the Decemberists at starbucks.com/coffeehouse.

from: NYTimes

iPad Storybook Apps and The Kids Who Love Them

by: Omar Gallaga

Omar Gallaga is the technology reporter for the Austin American-Statesman.


It's bedtime for my 3-year-old daughter, Lilly. She climbs into her little twin-size bed with Tinkerbell sheets. It's covered with dolls and stuffed animals. As she gets settled in, we choose tonight's bedtime stories.

"Do you want to read regular books or iPad?" I ask. "iPad!" is her reply.

In November, I started reviewing children's iPad apps for Kirkus Reviews.

Lilly is my review partner. We've gone through 50 apps in two months. Like much of the Apple App Store, the quality of what's available runs the gamut from crude cash-ins with ugly illustrations, barely worth their 99-cent price tag, to lavish productions with top-notch voice talent and 3-D pages. The priciest can cost up to $10.

Lily can name the ones she knows: Alice in Wonderland, Teddy, Jack and the Beanstalk. She doesn't know how to use the Internet or a computer mouse, but she can easily navigate the iPad's touch screen.

Her small hands flip past pages of apps, and she taps a finger on the ones she wants.

Lilly is in her princess phase and is obsessed with not one but two apps that tell the story of Rapunzel. The first is a straight-forward storybook with colorful, hand-drawn illustrations, numerous hidden sound effects and animations you can activate by pressing the screen.

The second is a pop-up book that asks the reader to complete small challenges before Rapunzel can meet and fall in love with her prince.

She's not as crazy about some of the apps I've given high marks to, like PopOut! The Tale of Peter Rabbit, where the characters don't just appear; they giggle and wiggle on virtual springs. Lilly pokes them to make them speak, or slides what look like tabs in a paper pop-up book to make Peter squeeze under a fence or to make Mr. McGregor chase the rabbit with a rake.


The apps we both love tend to build on traditional works to create something even better — like Ayars Animation's Jack and the Beanstalk, a great app that features voice acting, hidden sound effects and original music.

Cows moo, the golden harp plays a song, and the giant will sway on the beanstalk if Lilly tilts the iPad back and forth. Do it too much and the giant tells her, "Will you stop that already?"

Some say electronic books are creating a more passive reading experience, but Lilly frequently reads along with the narration, pokes the iPad screen to interact with the stories and asks me to help her solve puzzles.

When we read traditional paper books, whether it's Goodnight Moon, or Mercer Mayer's Little Critters series, she is more apt to lie down and listen.

By the time we're done, we've read five stories and stayed up long past Lilly's bedtime.

"We read a lot of books tonight, huh?" I ask as I tuck her in.

"Yeah!" she says, as she kisses me goodnight.

from: NPR

Canadians dominate Commonwealth Writers' Prize Shortlist

by: Mark Medley

Some of the Canadian nominees for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (clockwise from top left) Miguel Syjuco, Emma Donoghue, Alexander MacLeod, and Sarah Selecky. (Natioanl Post Staff)

Canadian authors dominate the regional shortlists for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, which were announced on Thursday.

Every single one of the ten nominees in the two categories — Best Book and Best First Book — are Canadian authors. The winners of the regional categories, who will then compete for the overall prizes, will be announced on March 3.

The nominees for Best Book (Canada and the Caribbean) are:
• Caroline Adderson for The Sky is Falling
• Emma Donoghue for Room
• Jack Hodgins for The Master of Happy Endings
• Adam Lewis Schroeder for In The Fabled East
• Michael Winter for The Death of Donna Whalen
• Richard B. Wright for Mr. Shakespeare’s Bastard

The nominees for Best First Book (Canada and the Caribbean) are:
• Katrina Best for Bird Eat Bird
• Carole Enahoro for Doing Dangerously Well
• Darcie Friesen Hossack for Mennonites Don’t Dance
• Alexander MacLeod for Light Lifting
• Sarah Selecky for This Cake is for the Party
• Miguel Syjuco for Ilustrado

from: National Post

Indie bookstores stage comeback

Nimble operators adjust to cityscape.
by: Matthew Flamm

Borders, the No. 2 brick-and-mortar bookstore chain, is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, hammered by online discounting and the explosive growth of e-books. Barnes & Noble, the biggest chain, is so focused on digital expansion that last month it fired many of its top executives who dealt with physical books.


But all is not lost in the world of traditional bookselling. In retailing's version of a David and Goliath story, the independent bookstore is making a comeback in New York.

That's right: in the land of crushing rents. Over the past couple of years, more than half a dozen indie bookshops have opened around the city, from Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, to Book Culture on upper Broadway. (Another independent store may soon appear in midtown Manhattan.) The shops have been launched by both first-timers and veteran entrepreneurs, and though their long-term survival is far from assured, the new businesses are succeeding, thanks to smart merchandising and carefully chosen locations.

Their presence is not just good for publishers who rely on the indies' 10% market share to help launch new writers. They're also a sign of a larger truth in business: that nimble operators can adjust to a changed landscape better than some bigger players.

“If you do your numbers right, it can work out,” said Robert Fader, who runs Posman Books in Grand Central Terminal.

The bookseller added a second location, at Chelsea Market, in September 2009. Sales at the new 2,000-square-foot store were up 22% in January year-over-year, despite last month's snows. First-year revenue came to more than $1 million, or good enough that the bookseller and its landlord are putting final touches on a 10-year lease.

Mr. Fader adds that he's planning to renovate the store in March, and is close to signing with another landlord for a smaller space in midtown.

By contrast, at Posman's 5,000-square-foot Grand Central shop, sales have been declining since late 2008, when Lehman Bros. collapsed and e-books took off. Hardcover best-sellers, a longtime favorite of commuters, have been among the reading categories hit hardest by digital publishing.

Selling more than books

Mr. Fader said the new store owes its growth to a customer base that includes local residents, tourists and people who work in the building, like the Food Network staffers who buy from the strong selection of cookbooks.

Like other indies, Posman also has also been experimenting with its merchandise mix. The new shop draws only 75% of its revenue from books, and much of the rest from such things as $6 handcrafted greeting cards.

Booksellers say they need to hedge against the temptation for even loyal customers to pay less on Amazon.

“Part of the success of the store is creating an atmosphere for buying things that are not just books,” said Chris Doeblin, who opened Book Culture, an 1,800-square-foot shop on Broadway and 114th Street, in November 2009. The store's inventory includes hand-carved chess sets from India.

The location broke even in its first year, grossing around $750,000, Mr. Doeblin reports. December and January's sales were up 30% from a year ago, and he's hoping to top $1 million in revenue in 2011. At his much larger, scholarly bookstore two blocks away, sales have fallen 25% over the past five years.

Despite the success of these new indies, physical bookstores remain an endangered species. Some analysts expect digital book sales to account for 50% of the market within five years, up from the current 10%. That would make survival nearly impossible—even with the help of the e-bookstores that many independents have launched on their websites in partnership with Google.

“The new indies are tilting at windmills,” said Albert Greco, a Fordham University professor who studies the book industry.

In the short run, however, Mr. Greco believes some independents will pick up business if Borders closes stores. And the American Booksellers Association, the indies' trade group, argues that the tide has turned, noting that its membership grew slightly in 2010 after declining steadily for a decade.

ABA Chief Executive Oren Teicher credits the new owners' business smarts and the backing of communities that value local shops.

The founders of Greenlight Bookstore, on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, have certainly benefited from the support of their literary neighborhood: $70,000 of their $345,000 in startup costs came from a community lender program.

“Human scale”

Open since October 2009, the store turned a profit in its first year on $1.1 million in sales, according to owners Jessica Stockton Bagnulo and Rebecca Fitting. The two first-time entrepreneurs have also found that carrying 25,000 titles—a quarter of the selection at a superstore—can be enough.

“If you have a wall of text, you can't see any of it,” said Ms. Fitting, a former Random House sales rep. “We narrow it down to human scale.”

Correction: Greenlight Bookstore's name was misstated in an earlier version of this article, which was originally published online Feb. 6. 2011.

from: Crain's New York

Graphic novel's appeal widens

by: Adam Tedder

Years of waiting for acceptance from a broader audience than teen-agers and die-hard fans and collectors seem to have paid off for graphic novelists.


The popularity of the illustrated books has soared, with comic and book stores and even libraries devoting large amounts of shelf space to them.

Elgin has two comic book stores that sell graphic novels. They also can be found in separate sections of book stores such as Border’s and Barnes & Noble.

The graphic novel sections at the Gail Borden Public Library and its Rakow Branch, meanwhile, have grown and have some of the highest checkout rates of any collection in the library. The main library has more than 6,100 graphic novels available for checkout. Coupled with the Rakow Branch’s collection, the total jumps to more than 7,100 total graphic novels in the library district’s collection.

The library even labels its teen and adult graphic novels under several categories: collected comic books; manga; original literary works in graphic novel form; collected newspaper cartoons; and short nonfiction books or adaptations of literary classics in the graphic novel form.

“Graphic novels are also expanding to a younger audience,” said Jennifer Bueche, assistant director of youth services at the Gail Borden Public Library. “There are several books made to look like graphic novels, set up in the same format, to help younger readers start reading. A publisher, Toon Books, has a series with different authors aimed at the second- and third-grade reading level to help them read.”

Evolving form

The wide variety of books being published and considered graphic novels means the art form is evolving, according to Thom Wicklein, the owner of Thom’s Comics & Collectibles at 817 Walnut Ave. in Elgin, who prefers going by his first name.

“When Marvel Comics and DC Comics started putting out graphic novels, they were original stories collected in one volume,” Thom said.

He explained by using an example of a Superman comic in the continuing series.

“If it (connects) a certain issue to another issue (like #1 to #8), then it’s not a graphic novel. It’s a trade-paperback collected together in one book,” he said.

But Thom said he understands the term is used more loosely now.

Like those different categories in the library, there are different definitions — often vague and debatable — for what a graphic novel is. But most seem to agree with this description from the The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: A novel whose narrative is related through a combination of text and art, often in comic-strip form.

Like a more traditional novel, a graphic novel usually consists of a beginning, middle and end of a story. In its loosest definition, it’s sequential art telling a story collected in a volume of work, though many comic and graphic novel “purists” would argue that’s considered an anthology.

Though defining what a graphic novel is might be difficult, the rising popularity is easy to see.

Outside of ordering more graphic novels and having a high checkout rate, the Gail Borden library also had a themed comic book/graphic novel exhibit last summer and also had artists and writers show up for free comic book day last May.

A few employees from Graham Crackers Comics, 610 S. Randall Road in St. Charles, gave their input on how libraries expanding their sections have helped the popularity of graphic novels and helped sales at their stores.

“I think it helps overall,” said Dan, manager at Graham Crackers Comics. Like Thom in Elgin — and certain entertainers — Dan prefers going just by his first name.

He explained if a person checks out a graphic novel and likes it, the reader might come in to buy the book or get more into comics and graphic novels. He also thinks it might get more comic book buyers into the libraries.

“I think it works both ways,” he said.

Thom said his shop sees only die-hard fans most of the time. The library, on the other hand, gives people an opportunity to read the material for free. While that probably doesn’t help business, it does keep people interested in reading comics and graphic novels, he said.

“If people can get the graphic novels for free, then why would they want to pay for it?” he said. “I don’t think it helps bring in a lot of new customers. I usually see the same group of people come into the store. But it could make people more interested in comics, sure. Maybe after that they would want to become collectors.”

Hollywood connection

Both Thom and Dan pointed to Hollywood being one of the biggest factors in the rising popularity of comic books and graphic novels, with a number of movies based on the them.

As the appeal of graphic novels has grown in recent years, the plots and themes have matured as well, which has caught the eye of many filmmaker and producers.

The film “Green Hornet” currently out in theatres is considered in the comic-book movie realm, but it got its start in the 1930s as a radio program and was a television series in the 1960s. The fact it had a comic book series and a subsequent stand-alone graphic novels puts it in the category of comic-book movie.

Other new comic-based movies slated for release later this year include “Thor” and “The First Avenger: Captain America.”

But Hollywood hasn’t only concentrated on big name superhero movie adaptations. Filmmakers also have looked into lesser known source material from graphic novels. An example is 2002’s “Road to Perdition” starring Tom Hanks, much of which was shot in the northern Fox Valley.

Sometimes, however, the “based on a graphic novel” gets left out of the advertising for a film like “Road to Perdition.” The movie “Whiteout” (2009), starring Kate Beckinsale, is another example of a film based on a graphic novel, but lacking the heavy promotion.


from: Courier-News

Super library arrives as hundreds of others face closures

• Birmingham spends £200m on Centenary Square building

• Authors protest against cuts to library service
by: Maev Kennedy

An artist's impression of the super library being built in Birmingham city centre.

The camera swoops and swirls through a vast space that could be the lobby of a luxury hotel, all carpets and coffee cups and clusters of designer seating; daylight streams in through huge windows and music plays softly in the distance.


As almost nobody would guess at first glance, this building – which Birmingham council taxpayers were seeing for the first time in a computer-generated fly-through – is a library.

The launch comes at an extraordinary time. All over Britain, library users spent the weekend protesting against closures and imminent swingeing cuts, which could decimate book stocks, staff and opening hours.

On Saturday thousands joined authors including Philip Pullman, who described Oxfordshire's proposal to close 20 of 43 libraries as "a darkening of things"; Mark Haddon; Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson, who delivered a protest statement to the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh; children's author John Dougherty and musician Billy Bragg in local events.

At one London branch, Save Our Libraries Day continued into Sunday morning, when protesters voted to continue their "read-in" overnight at New Cross library in south-east London. A 10-minute film, We Love Libraries, with quotes from celebrities and ordinary library users, has become a YouTube hit, the number one non-profit video.

In Birmingham itself, every one of the 40 branch libraries is under review, and major cuts are expected in staffing and the book budgets. Despite this, two enormous concrete towers have risen above a huge hole in the ground in Centenary Square in the city centre: the new super library, planned for a decade, under construction for the last year, is due to open in the summer of 2013, on schedule and, it is claimed, slightly below its original £200m budget.

The cavernous lobby will join the library to its neighbour, the Birmingham Rep theatre, with a single box office and reception desk for both. The Rep – which moves out this week, leaving its home to the builders while the company tours – will run the new 600-seat studio theatre in the library, and the librarians hope to keep book stacks open so theatre-goers can read and borrow books in the intervals of plays.

Brian Gambles, assistant director of culture – effectively chief librarian – insisted: "Books will always be at the heart of what we do." Council leader Mike Whitby said every city in the world would envy his library. And site director Simon Dingle, of the construction firm Carillion, said: "I've been in this business 23 years, and this is definitely the best project I've ever been involved in, including the Channel tunnel."

But not everybody is thrilled. The 20th Century Society campaigned to win hearts and minds for the present library building, half a mile away on a site where there have been public libraries for more than 150 years. The current one opened in 1974, a loved and loathed monument to concrete brutalism by local architect John Madin. Its fate was sealed in 2009 when the government rejected the advice of English Heritage and refused to list it, though the bulldozers won't move in until the new building is complete.

John Dolan, the former city chief librarian, who now works in urban regeneration after a spell as head of libraries policy at the soon to be abolished Museums, Libraries and Archives council, says the existing building is not fit for purpose, and is confident the new library will be an international landmark.

He is also anxious about the operating budget for the new building. "What is absolutely crucial is that the council doesn't just cut the nice red ribbon on the door on opening day and then walk away from it," he said.

The spending decisions will be taken at a council meeting on Valentine's Day. Nothing has been decided yet, Whitby said, but he warned: "We cannot expect to hold on to everything we have."

Sybil Ruth, poet, author and ardent campaigner for libraries, said: "Despite all the hype and spin about the new building, Birmingham city council is currently keeping very, very quiet indeed about its plans for the 'ordinary' library users of Birmingham.

Her own branch in Kings Heath closed in December for repairs, and locals fear it may never reopen.

"The publicity for the new library is very much about showcasing cutting-edge technology. There is very little talk about readers, about promoting literacy in the city. So at the moment we have a central library that is looking increasingly decayed because no money is being spent maintaining it, and some very rundown community libraries."

Gambles is braced for a cut in his book-buying budget, and says weeding out the present stock for the move probably means there will be 10% fewer books on the new shelves. But, he argued: "We ought to be judged as having failed if we deliver a fantastic central library, and there's nothing to show for it out there in the communities."

Winner

The Library of Birmingham, scheduled to open summer 2013
• Cost: £188.8m (down from £193m)
• 35,000 sq metres, 4,000 of which are shared with Birmingham Rep theatre
• 10 floors including outdoor amphitheatre, music centre, exhibition gallery, British Film Institute mediatheque, studio theatre, health and business centres, rooftop cafe and gilded 10th-floor Shakespeare pavilion

Losers

481 libraries – 422 buildings and 59 mobile libraries – under threat
• Isle of Wight: nine out of 11 branches proposed for closure
• Oxfordshire: 20 out of 43 branches
• Dorset: 20 out of 34
• Doncaster: 14 out of 26 branches
Source: Public Library News


from: Guardian

Reasearch shows male writers still dominate books world

Statistics from US campaigners Vida confirm dramatic gender imbalance in literary critics and the authors reviewed.
by: Benedicte Page

Gender Bias in books world: Vida's website

The gender imbalance at the heart of the British and American literary establishment has been laid bare by a new study confirming that leading literary magazines focus their review coverage on books written by men, and commission more men than women to write about them.


Statistics compiled by Vida, an American organisation for women in the literary arts, found gender imbalances in every one of the publications cited, including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books.

In the UK, the LRB reviewed 68 books by women and 195 by men in 2010, with men taking up 74% of the attention, and 78% of the reviews written by men. Seventy-five per cent of the books reviewed in the TLS were written by men (1,036 compared to 330) with 72% of its reviewers men.

Meanwhile Granta magazine, which does not review but includes original contributions, featured the work of 26 female and 49 male writers in 2010, with men making up 65% of the total.

In the US, The New York Review of Books shows a stronger bias. Among authors reviewed, 83% are men (306 compared to 59 women and 306 men), and the same statistic is true of reviewers (200 men, 39 women). The New York Times Book Review fares better, with only 60% of reviewers men (438 compared to 295 women). Of the authors with books reviewed, 65% were by men (524 compared to 283 by women).

"The truth is, these numbers don't lie," said Vida. "But that is just the beginning of this story. What, then, are they really telling us? We know women write. We know women read. It's time to begin asking why the 2010 numbers don't reflect those facts with any equity."

Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS, said the gender issue was "not a small matter" for the magazine or its readers. "We take it pretty seriously," he said. "I'm not too appalled by our figure, as I'd be very surprised if the authorship of published books was 50/50. And while women are heavy readers, we know they are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS." The industry source for book data, Nielsen, does not keep records of authors' gender.

"The TLS is only interested in getting the best reviews of the most important books," Stothard continued. "Without making a fetish of having 50/50 contributors, we do have a lot of reviewers of both sexes and from all over the world. You have to keep an eye on it but I suspect we have a better story to tell than others."

John Freeman, the editor of Granta magazine, said he worries about "these gender imbalances a lot", citing the influence of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood on the development of his own literary taste.

"While numbers and graphs like this are helpful," he said, "conspiracy theories are not, because we have to ask a deeper question, which is how gendered are our notions of storytelling? I have been on mostly women-run prize committees which questioned their own feminist bona fides and then voted for the men's books." Granta commissions equally between men and women, he continued, "but somehow [we] end up as we are. In the end, the most important thing, as editors, is the quality of the writing, but it is the deep and persistent nature of this issue, among other things, that made us decide to do an issue this spring called 'The F Word (Feminism)'."

The Guardian and Observer's own literary sections compare favourably with the publications cited by Vida, with the numbers of reviewers approaching gender parity. Over the past four weeks, 55% of the contributors to Guardian Review were male, while the Observer commissioned 57% of its book reviews from men. Sixty-five per cent of the books reviewed in the Guardian were written by men; the books written by men made up 59% of the Observer's coverage.

The Observer's literary editor, William Skidelsky, said that it would be "unduly rigid" to attempt to enforce "a strict 50/50 division of genders on the Observer's books pages", but added that he does "try to ensure each week that there is a decent male-female spread in terms both of the authors we cover and the people we get to review them".

"Obviously, there is some room for improvement here," he added, "but it could have been a lot worse."

Guardian books editor Claire Armitstead said: "We always try to keep an even balance but many more men offer themselves to review books than women, so we have to go out and find them. My own feeling is that there is an issue of confidence among women writers." She added that she was "relieved that our figures for reviewers are not far off 50/50 because that's the place where we've really got control and, as a female commissioning editor, I do think this is a really important issue."

from: Guardian