by: Angela Hickman
E-reading is the way of the future. At least, Michael Serbinis thinks so. The Kobo CEO announced a new e-reading program on Wednesday that will see minutes logged reading turn into dollars for charity.
The Read On program and the One Trillion Minute challenge will work to promote e-reading and provide money for local charities. For every 10 million minutes of reading (up to one trillion minutes) done on a Kobo platform, a Read On kit will be donated to a community or organization nominated by readers. The kits are e-reading packages, consisting of e-readers and e-books, valued between $1,000 and $20,000. Of the $10 million donation fund, Kobo is putting up the first $1 million in support of the e-reading kits, and Serbinis said they are working with sponsors for the remaining $9 million.
Serbinis told The Afterword that he is hoping to encourage people to read for a half hour a day. At that rate, he said, 10 million minutes is probably about a quarter million books. Kobo has nearly 4 million users, he added, and because it’s a cumulative total, he doesn’t think it will take long to get there.
“That first 10 million minutes I expect will be in the next few days,” he said, over the phone from New York, where he is attending Book Expo America.
The Read On program is international and Serbinis said Kobo will work to ensure that not all the donation packages end up in one area. But, banding together to support one cause could help your chances, he said, adding that if a large portion of the overall minutes-read comes from a group supporting one cause, that would be a factor in their decision.
“With Read On, our goal is to bring reading to more people in more places, inspiring people to read more and make a difference in their schools and communities,” Serbinis said in a press release.
Kobo users – whether using the e-reader, the Kobo app, or their computer – can sign-up to track their reading hours and support a specific program through the e-reader’s Reading Life program. The program will continue until one trillion minutes of reading have been logged.
from: National Post
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
Chairman Mao may not be the author of his 'Little Red Book'
by: Clifford Coonan
Mao Tse-Tung's "Little Red Book" is the closest thing to a bible that Marxist-Leninist, materialist and atheist Chinese society can have.
By some estimates, five billion copies of The Thoughts of Chairman Mao were published during its heyday, the Cultural Revolution, that violent period of ideological fervour in the 1960s and 1970s. But questions have now been raised about whether the Great Helmsman actually wrote it himself, or got a ghost writer to do it for him.
The book of quotations from communist China's founding father Chairman Mao Tse-tung, was a must-have in the days when Red Guards roamed the streets looking for any signs of ideological wavering. It was also the revolutionary tome of choice for every western Marxist-Leninist hipster on university campuses. Pithy and strident aphorisms such as, "it is the duty of the cadres and the Party to serve the people. Without the people's interests constantly at heart, their work is useless," helped to establish a cult of personality around Mao Tse-tung so powerful that the current leadership of China is still trying to shake it off.
But lately there has been a flurry of online rumours that some of Mao's writings were not written by Mao himself, but by his secretary Hu Qiaomu and others. Some of those who grew up in the Mao era find it impossible to believe that their idol might not be the true author of the writings that were the doctrine of their upbringing.
"I can't believe it. No, no, no," said one 60-year-old man. "If it is true, then I will be really disappointed. Everyone in my generation loves him, he is like the whole of our soul. This must be mistake, really, he is just too important."
But younger people are more prepared to accept that the musing may not actually have been written by the chairman: "I'm sure it was Mao's ideas originally, but as to the actual writing and putting it together, who knows? Maybe someone helped him sort out his materials, record his speeches, write drafts, that kind of thing," said a 29-year-old woman.
It is rumoured that two reports detailing the ghostwriters' activities were filed with the Central Committee in 1993 and in 1995. So vocal have the sceptics become that a website, which is affiliated to the People's Daily newspaper, ran a statement denying the rumours, quoting a spokesman from China's ideological heavyweights – the Party Literature Research Centre, the Party History Research Centre and the Party School of the Central Committee of Communist Party of China.
The spokesman said Mr Hu had spoken on many occasions of how Mao would help him edit the articles and how he had learnt his poetic style from the Chairman.
Mao is a revered figure in China, and his face gazes impassively at Tiananmen Square from its vantage point above the gate of the Forbidden City.
However, there is acceptance of the malign role he played in organising Stalinesque purges, causing famine with the disastrous agricultural experiment known as the Great Leap Forward in which millions died, and in orchestrating the Cultural Revolution, which began 45 years ago and in which many of today's leadership suffered.
from: Independent
Mao Tse-Tung's "Little Red Book" is the closest thing to a bible that Marxist-Leninist, materialist and atheist Chinese society can have.
By some estimates, five billion copies of The Thoughts of Chairman Mao were published during its heyday, the Cultural Revolution, that violent period of ideological fervour in the 1960s and 1970s. But questions have now been raised about whether the Great Helmsman actually wrote it himself, or got a ghost writer to do it for him.
The book of quotations from communist China's founding father Chairman Mao Tse-tung, was a must-have in the days when Red Guards roamed the streets looking for any signs of ideological wavering. It was also the revolutionary tome of choice for every western Marxist-Leninist hipster on university campuses. Pithy and strident aphorisms such as, "it is the duty of the cadres and the Party to serve the people. Without the people's interests constantly at heart, their work is useless," helped to establish a cult of personality around Mao Tse-tung so powerful that the current leadership of China is still trying to shake it off.
But lately there has been a flurry of online rumours that some of Mao's writings were not written by Mao himself, but by his secretary Hu Qiaomu and others. Some of those who grew up in the Mao era find it impossible to believe that their idol might not be the true author of the writings that were the doctrine of their upbringing.
"I can't believe it. No, no, no," said one 60-year-old man. "If it is true, then I will be really disappointed. Everyone in my generation loves him, he is like the whole of our soul. This must be mistake, really, he is just too important."
But younger people are more prepared to accept that the musing may not actually have been written by the chairman: "I'm sure it was Mao's ideas originally, but as to the actual writing and putting it together, who knows? Maybe someone helped him sort out his materials, record his speeches, write drafts, that kind of thing," said a 29-year-old woman.
It is rumoured that two reports detailing the ghostwriters' activities were filed with the Central Committee in 1993 and in 1995. So vocal have the sceptics become that a website, which is affiliated to the People's Daily newspaper, ran a statement denying the rumours, quoting a spokesman from China's ideological heavyweights – the Party Literature Research Centre, the Party History Research Centre and the Party School of the Central Committee of Communist Party of China.
The spokesman said Mr Hu had spoken on many occasions of how Mao would help him edit the articles and how he had learnt his poetic style from the Chairman.
Mao is a revered figure in China, and his face gazes impassively at Tiananmen Square from its vantage point above the gate of the Forbidden City.
However, there is acceptance of the malign role he played in organising Stalinesque purges, causing famine with the disastrous agricultural experiment known as the Great Leap Forward in which millions died, and in orchestrating the Cultural Revolution, which began 45 years ago and in which many of today's leadership suffered.
from: Independent
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Ebooks and public libraries: Growing demand, confusing rules
by: Janet Steffenhagen
The book-lending business at public libraries used to be a simple affair: Buy books, catalogue them, loan them out and keep them in good repair. But that's all changing with the soaring popularity of ebooks.
While libraries try to provide the same seamless service for ebooks as they do for print copies, they are stymied by an array of rules from publishers that dictate which books will be available in electronic form, how long libraries can hold digital rights to those titles and what borrowing restrictions will apply.
That's confusing for patrons who assume libraries have the same control over ebooks as over print copies, and frustrating for librarians.
Some publishers -including two big ones, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan -don't allow any of their electronic titles into libraries, saying they've not yet found a business model that makes financial sense for them and their authors. Harper Collins, meanwhile, has set a cap of 26 on the number of times its ebooks can be loaned out before the library has to purchase a new licence or forfeit the title.
That's prompted calls for a boycott of Harper Collins and criticisms from those who say the cap is arbitrary and far lower than the number of times a hardcover book can circulate before it's worn out. They fear other publishers may follow suit, punching a hole in library budgets.
These struggles with publishers come at a time when libraries are experiencing surging interest in ebooks.
About 1,800 cardholders with the Vancouver Public Library (VPL) now borrow ebooks, and last month they registered a total of 3,000 such checkouts, said Christina de Castell, the VPL's manager of online information and news. While that's only a tiny fraction of the library's print circulation, it's been growing by about 20 per cent each month this year.
"The use of ebooks at Vancouver Public Library has risen exponentially over the last few months," VPL chief librarian Sandra Singh said in a recent interview. While librarians share the ebook excitement, they know there are still significant issues to be resolved before libraries are able to respond fully to customer demand.
Vancouver offers 5,000 ebook titles through a shared, provincewide service called Library To Go, but publishers have declared that they may be borrowed by only one patron at a time, just like print books. Since not all publishers allow their ebooks into libraries, the selection is limited, with current publications taking priority and few backlist titles available.
The most popular titles feature romance and passion, including Harlequin Romance.
In addition to distribution problems, there are hardware challenges. Library patrons have various ereaders with different downloading protocols -the Kobo, the Sony Reader, the Amazon Kindle as well as tablets and iPads, all of which are subject to upgrades. Although bookseller Amazon does not allow the Kindle ereader to download library books in Canada, it recently relaxed that policy in the U.S. and there's hope its new approach will eventually migrate here.
Libraries try to help book lovers with their assorted ereaders, and de Castell said the inquiries are numerous, especially since first-time borrowing tends to be complicated. Libraries are offering courses in how to find, check out and borrow ebooks, with the next one at VPL slated for today. They also have staff available to help with download protocols.
"The first time, it took me about an hour from getting the ereader out of the box to getting a library book [loaded]," de Castell said. "The second time, it's a lot easier, and once it's routine, it's really easy. But it is difficult that first time. You have to be pretty persistent."
Library patron Einat Stojicevic agreed, but said the technical support from the library was amazing and quickly turned her into an ebook devotee. "I love physical books [and] I'm an English major so this was a huge change of life for me. My friend actually said to me 'so, are you going to curl up with a good tablet tonight?'"
But she said she's hooked, and so are her two children and her husband. All voracious readers, they no longer have to pack a suitcase full of books when they go away on holidays and there are no more late fees. When the three-week lending period expires, ebooks simply disappear.
For now, Stojicevic said she's satisfied with the number of titles available, and pleased with the amount of Canadian content. "They do have a lot of books," she said. "I'm still waiting for Philippa Gregory but probably her publishing company won't give up the rights."
A few public libraries offer ereaders on loan. North Vancouver libraries, for example, have Kobos and Kindles available for patrons and plan to offer the Sony Reader later this year.
The West Vancouver library became the first in Canada to loan Kindles last year and now has 11 in circulation, with waiting lists hitting 100. The Kindles are preloaded with 50 books but can't access other library books.
West Vancouver also has an ereader "petting zoo" where patrons can experiment with the various models before making a purchase, said Jenny Benedict, director of library services, noting many were asking the library for advice about which device they should purchase. West Vancouver also created a YouTube video to guide them through ebook borrowing.
Ebook circulation in West Vancouver has almost doubled since December, Benedict said, with the new format appealing to established clients and drawing new ones, especially people who travel a lot or have long commutes.
But like her counterparts at VPL, she longs for simplicity and wishes publishers would develop one set of parameters for ebook lending that would allow library users easy access to a variety of titles. She also hopes libraries will one day be able to choose their ebooks based on community interests, just as they do with their print collections.
"What's happening now is our customers are coming to us with expectations [but] it's kind of out of our control," she said. "It's going to take more time to get it where we want it to be. But the good news is we're having those conversations and ... the publishing field is very open to hearing our feedback."
De Castell said publishers need to understand that the people who use libraries are also people who buy books. "They are part of a community of book lovers, and I think it's easy for publishers to forget that. Selling to libraries doesn't mean losing sales. It means promoting your authors to a whole group of people who love books."
The availability of ebooks in libraries would also reduce ebook piracy, she suggested.
from: Vancouver Sun
The book-lending business at public libraries used to be a simple affair: Buy books, catalogue them, loan them out and keep them in good repair. But that's all changing with the soaring popularity of ebooks.
While libraries try to provide the same seamless service for ebooks as they do for print copies, they are stymied by an array of rules from publishers that dictate which books will be available in electronic form, how long libraries can hold digital rights to those titles and what borrowing restrictions will apply.
That's confusing for patrons who assume libraries have the same control over ebooks as over print copies, and frustrating for librarians.
Some publishers -including two big ones, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan -don't allow any of their electronic titles into libraries, saying they've not yet found a business model that makes financial sense for them and their authors. Harper Collins, meanwhile, has set a cap of 26 on the number of times its ebooks can be loaned out before the library has to purchase a new licence or forfeit the title.
That's prompted calls for a boycott of Harper Collins and criticisms from those who say the cap is arbitrary and far lower than the number of times a hardcover book can circulate before it's worn out. They fear other publishers may follow suit, punching a hole in library budgets.
These struggles with publishers come at a time when libraries are experiencing surging interest in ebooks.
About 1,800 cardholders with the Vancouver Public Library (VPL) now borrow ebooks, and last month they registered a total of 3,000 such checkouts, said Christina de Castell, the VPL's manager of online information and news. While that's only a tiny fraction of the library's print circulation, it's been growing by about 20 per cent each month this year.
"The use of ebooks at Vancouver Public Library has risen exponentially over the last few months," VPL chief librarian Sandra Singh said in a recent interview. While librarians share the ebook excitement, they know there are still significant issues to be resolved before libraries are able to respond fully to customer demand.
Vancouver offers 5,000 ebook titles through a shared, provincewide service called Library To Go, but publishers have declared that they may be borrowed by only one patron at a time, just like print books. Since not all publishers allow their ebooks into libraries, the selection is limited, with current publications taking priority and few backlist titles available.
The most popular titles feature romance and passion, including Harlequin Romance.
In addition to distribution problems, there are hardware challenges. Library patrons have various ereaders with different downloading protocols -the Kobo, the Sony Reader, the Amazon Kindle as well as tablets and iPads, all of which are subject to upgrades. Although bookseller Amazon does not allow the Kindle ereader to download library books in Canada, it recently relaxed that policy in the U.S. and there's hope its new approach will eventually migrate here.
Libraries try to help book lovers with their assorted ereaders, and de Castell said the inquiries are numerous, especially since first-time borrowing tends to be complicated. Libraries are offering courses in how to find, check out and borrow ebooks, with the next one at VPL slated for today. They also have staff available to help with download protocols.
"The first time, it took me about an hour from getting the ereader out of the box to getting a library book [loaded]," de Castell said. "The second time, it's a lot easier, and once it's routine, it's really easy. But it is difficult that first time. You have to be pretty persistent."
Library patron Einat Stojicevic agreed, but said the technical support from the library was amazing and quickly turned her into an ebook devotee. "I love physical books [and] I'm an English major so this was a huge change of life for me. My friend actually said to me 'so, are you going to curl up with a good tablet tonight?'"
But she said she's hooked, and so are her two children and her husband. All voracious readers, they no longer have to pack a suitcase full of books when they go away on holidays and there are no more late fees. When the three-week lending period expires, ebooks simply disappear.
For now, Stojicevic said she's satisfied with the number of titles available, and pleased with the amount of Canadian content. "They do have a lot of books," she said. "I'm still waiting for Philippa Gregory but probably her publishing company won't give up the rights."
A few public libraries offer ereaders on loan. North Vancouver libraries, for example, have Kobos and Kindles available for patrons and plan to offer the Sony Reader later this year.
The West Vancouver library became the first in Canada to loan Kindles last year and now has 11 in circulation, with waiting lists hitting 100. The Kindles are preloaded with 50 books but can't access other library books.
West Vancouver also has an ereader "petting zoo" where patrons can experiment with the various models before making a purchase, said Jenny Benedict, director of library services, noting many were asking the library for advice about which device they should purchase. West Vancouver also created a YouTube video to guide them through ebook borrowing.
Ebook circulation in West Vancouver has almost doubled since December, Benedict said, with the new format appealing to established clients and drawing new ones, especially people who travel a lot or have long commutes.
But like her counterparts at VPL, she longs for simplicity and wishes publishers would develop one set of parameters for ebook lending that would allow library users easy access to a variety of titles. She also hopes libraries will one day be able to choose their ebooks based on community interests, just as they do with their print collections.
"What's happening now is our customers are coming to us with expectations [but] it's kind of out of our control," she said. "It's going to take more time to get it where we want it to be. But the good news is we're having those conversations and ... the publishing field is very open to hearing our feedback."
De Castell said publishers need to understand that the people who use libraries are also people who buy books. "They are part of a community of book lovers, and I think it's easy for publishers to forget that. Selling to libraries doesn't mean losing sales. It means promoting your authors to a whole group of people who love books."
The availability of ebooks in libraries would also reduce ebook piracy, she suggested.
from: Vancouver Sun
Friday, May 27, 2011
DePaul stocks video games for research
For some students at DePaul University and a few other colleges, video games are now part of the curriculum.
DePaul is one of a growing number of university libraries housing video game collections for student research into game design, the school said. Other universities with collections include Illinois, Stanford and Michigan.
The collection was first proposed by Jose Zagal, assistant professor of computing and digital media, who authored the book, “Ludoliteracy: Designing, Understanding and Supporting Games Education.”
Zagal helped assemble a list of titles for the library, including “Little Big Planet 2,” “Halo: Reach,” “Madden NFL 11” and “God of War III.” DePaul’s collection can be played on the three major platforms: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii.
“I saw an opportunity to better serve our students,” Zagal said. “I believe video games are a form of culture just like books and songs, so it makes sense for us to have them available in our library.”
Zagal and other faculty require students to research video games as part of the curriculum, the school said. While Zagal’s department has two gaming labs, their hours are limited and games cannot be checked out, he said. Students are allowed to check out video games from the library’s collection, which debuted May 9.
The collection is available in DePaul’s Loop Campus library media room, and the library plans to host a game night in the fall to officially launch it, he said.
James Galbraith, associate director of collections, said DePaul hopes to make a video game collection available at the Richardson Library on the Lincoln Park Campus as well.
M Ryan Hess, coordinator of Web Services at DePaul, helped create the collection. He said the titles selected were influenced largely by a list Zagal provided, created from usage statistics and feedback received in the department’s labs.
“There was interest in acquiring some older games, such as old Atari games, but at this time the library is unable to also purchase the consoles,” Hess said.
Galbraith said library officials are hoping the video game collection will be as popular as a graphic novel collection launched in January 2011.
“The graphic novel collection has a 100 percent circulation rate,” Galbraith said. “Every graphic novel has circulated at least once, and many have multiple times.”
from: Chicago Sun-Times
DePaul is one of a growing number of university libraries housing video game collections for student research into game design, the school said. Other universities with collections include Illinois, Stanford and Michigan.
The collection was first proposed by Jose Zagal, assistant professor of computing and digital media, who authored the book, “Ludoliteracy: Designing, Understanding and Supporting Games Education.”
Zagal helped assemble a list of titles for the library, including “Little Big Planet 2,” “Halo: Reach,” “Madden NFL 11” and “God of War III.” DePaul’s collection can be played on the three major platforms: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii.
“I saw an opportunity to better serve our students,” Zagal said. “I believe video games are a form of culture just like books and songs, so it makes sense for us to have them available in our library.”
Zagal and other faculty require students to research video games as part of the curriculum, the school said. While Zagal’s department has two gaming labs, their hours are limited and games cannot be checked out, he said. Students are allowed to check out video games from the library’s collection, which debuted May 9.
The collection is available in DePaul’s Loop Campus library media room, and the library plans to host a game night in the fall to officially launch it, he said.
James Galbraith, associate director of collections, said DePaul hopes to make a video game collection available at the Richardson Library on the Lincoln Park Campus as well.
M Ryan Hess, coordinator of Web Services at DePaul, helped create the collection. He said the titles selected were influenced largely by a list Zagal provided, created from usage statistics and feedback received in the department’s labs.
“There was interest in acquiring some older games, such as old Atari games, but at this time the library is unable to also purchase the consoles,” Hess said.
Galbraith said library officials are hoping the video game collection will be as popular as a graphic novel collection launched in January 2011.
“The graphic novel collection has a 100 percent circulation rate,” Galbraith said. “Every graphic novel has circulated at least once, and many have multiple times.”
from: Chicago Sun-Times
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Ideas We Like: Books for Low-Income Kids
by: Elizabeth Minkel
It’s hardly surprising that literacy rates are low in the poorest American communities, but pinpointing the root of the problem is a trickier prospect. In Monday’s “Fixes” column at the Times’s Opinionator blog, David Bornstein tackled the question by championing First Book, an organization that distributes brand-new children’s books, sometimes for free, sometimes at deeply discounted rates, to nonprofits around the country. A huge number of families can’t afford daily necessities, and Bornstein argues that books aren’t “luxuries, like silk scarves,” but rather an integral part of a child’s development. He concedes that simply handing books to children won’t solve the education crisis in low-income communities, but, after all, books in the hands of children can’t hurt the situation, either.
First Book organized the first national book bank in 1999. Over the past decade, they’ve distributed eighty-five million books to under-served schools and community programs. In 2008, the First Book Marketplace pulled in publishers, buying swaths of children’s books at deeply discounted rates. What the publishers lose in profits they make up for in security: “Because the organization could aggregate sales across its network, it could make bulk purchases and remove the publishers’ biggest risk: returns.” Bornstein is pretty enthusiastic about the program: “The First Book Marketplace is trying to do for publishing what micro-finance did for banking: crack open a vast potential market that is under-served at significant social cost. The organization’s goal is to democratize book access, but along the way, it may end up reinvigorating the book business.”
His readers, though, are a little more ambivalent. First Book secures discounts for its customers—three dollars for a paperback instead of ten dollars—but it still works within the established corporate structure of the publishing industry; many would like to see this side-stepped completely. But then there are the broader social issues at work: placing a book, used or new, in a child’s hands is not necessarily the start of a life of reading, no matter what the cost. “Get real,” wrote one man from Chicago. “Children's books at rummage sales are often $0.10 apiece. That's where we get most of ours. I suspect that the real problem is uneducated parents simply not taking the initiative to spend the time and (minimal) money required on this. Libraries are free and ubiquitous too.” Bornstein does highlight the disparities between libraries in poorer and richer communities, but the commenter has a fair point. But for every child who doesn’t read and won’t, there’s a child who doesn’t read and would like to. Even if First Book can’t solve the systemic problems, there’s nothing wrong with getting books in the hands of the kids who will treasure them.
from: New Yorker
It’s hardly surprising that literacy rates are low in the poorest American communities, but pinpointing the root of the problem is a trickier prospect. In Monday’s “Fixes” column at the Times’s Opinionator blog, David Bornstein tackled the question by championing First Book, an organization that distributes brand-new children’s books, sometimes for free, sometimes at deeply discounted rates, to nonprofits around the country. A huge number of families can’t afford daily necessities, and Bornstein argues that books aren’t “luxuries, like silk scarves,” but rather an integral part of a child’s development. He concedes that simply handing books to children won’t solve the education crisis in low-income communities, but, after all, books in the hands of children can’t hurt the situation, either.
First Book organized the first national book bank in 1999. Over the past decade, they’ve distributed eighty-five million books to under-served schools and community programs. In 2008, the First Book Marketplace pulled in publishers, buying swaths of children’s books at deeply discounted rates. What the publishers lose in profits they make up for in security: “Because the organization could aggregate sales across its network, it could make bulk purchases and remove the publishers’ biggest risk: returns.” Bornstein is pretty enthusiastic about the program: “The First Book Marketplace is trying to do for publishing what micro-finance did for banking: crack open a vast potential market that is under-served at significant social cost. The organization’s goal is to democratize book access, but along the way, it may end up reinvigorating the book business.”
His readers, though, are a little more ambivalent. First Book secures discounts for its customers—three dollars for a paperback instead of ten dollars—but it still works within the established corporate structure of the publishing industry; many would like to see this side-stepped completely. But then there are the broader social issues at work: placing a book, used or new, in a child’s hands is not necessarily the start of a life of reading, no matter what the cost. “Get real,” wrote one man from Chicago. “Children's books at rummage sales are often $0.10 apiece. That's where we get most of ours. I suspect that the real problem is uneducated parents simply not taking the initiative to spend the time and (minimal) money required on this. Libraries are free and ubiquitous too.” Bornstein does highlight the disparities between libraries in poorer and richer communities, but the commenter has a fair point. But for every child who doesn’t read and won’t, there’s a child who doesn’t read and would like to. Even if First Book can’t solve the systemic problems, there’s nothing wrong with getting books in the hands of the kids who will treasure them.
from: New Yorker
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Online ordering makes library a victim of its success
by: Chris McNamara
When Ruth Lednicer recently placed a hold in the Chicago Public Library system for the cookbook "Fix It and Forget It" at the start of the year, she never guessed the book would take nearly a month to arrive.
Of course, Lednicer had a bit more sympathy for those who processed her book request within the Harold Washington Library because she works there as the director of marketing.
For the rest of the Chicago's 1.9 million library cardholders, the extended waits for materials they placed on hold at the start of the year were more of a mysterious hassle.
A major factor behind the delay in cardholders getting their books is the growing numbers of titles ordered online, akin to the Netflix method of reserving DVDs online, that has been in place at the Chicago Public Library since March 2008.
"It was an expected shock," said Lednicer of the surge in hold requests with the advent of online ordering. She notes that 40,000 holds were placed online in the first month of the new system three years ago. These days, as many as 120,000 items are placed on hold each month, 95 percent of which are done via computer.
While nearly 2 million Chicagoans use their tax-funded libraries, it is likely that few fully grasp the logistics of how the holds system works. The Chicago Public Library has 76 branches, served by eight truck routes that move 750,000 items among those branches each month. When a book or CD or movie is placed on hold by a library member, the computerized system searches for the nearest available copy or the one that is due to be returned next.
If a title can be found within a truck route (at a nearby library), it can be processed remotely and transferred from branch to branch. If a title can only be found at a branch outside of the hold-placer's library, it must be sent to the library's headquarters — the Harold Washington Library at State and Congress — then sent back out, which slows the process.
As part of a three-person team, Steve Sposato, the assistant director of collection development,determines what to purchase and in what quantities.
If an author is popular — say "Harry Potter" writer J.K. Rowling — Sposato knows to order dozens of copies of a new release. He also monitors the media, the New York Times best-seller lists, National Public Radio and the "Oprah Winfrey Show" to determine what books will be in high demand. When a title is selected for the One Book, One Chicago program, Sposato places a big order.
Sposato's team also studies a "holds report" produced by the library staff each month that indicates what items cardholders have been requesting.
"We try to maintain a 5 to 1 ratio," he said. "If 100 people are waiting for a title, we want at least 20 copies."
Oftentimes, they do better than that ratio. In early February, there was a waiting list of 50 people for the 60 copies of the newly released Mark Twain autobiography that were rotating through the system.
It's a complicated dance — cardholders and truck drivers, staff within headquarters and librarians at branches — aided (and at times overwhelmed) by a complicated computer system.
Chicago Public Library staff are constantly re-evaluating and tweaking the system, Lednicer said. They recently reconfigured truck routes to better accommodate areas that have more holds. Branches on the North Side, for example, process more holds than other regions' branches.
But backlogs happen. Titles ordered online get mired in transit while staffers sort through mountains of materials trying to match books to readers and CDs to listeners as quickly as possible.
"We use (the library) too," Lednicer said. "We know it can be frustrating."
At the start of the year, everyone on staff — accountants, marketing professionals and even library Commissioner Mary Dempsey — was called away from their desks to empty shipping bins and process books at the dock within the Harold Washington Library. They transformed a small kitchen into a holding area.
That's not surprising, said Audra Caplan, president of the Public Library Association, a division of the American Library Association.
"It is common. You always struggle around the holidays," Caplan said. "January and February are always busy, that's universal. Even the best people sometimes just get inundated."
Despite the delays in getting their books, two cardholders said they enjoy using the Chicago Public Library.
"When a book is not available, that is always a bummer. But my satisfaction (with the library system) is pretty high," said Lakeview resident Cathy Ward, who checks out books to use in her first-grade classroom at The Children's School in Berwyn. "I am getting these books for free, which I otherwise would not be getting."
from: Chicago Tribune
When Ruth Lednicer recently placed a hold in the Chicago Public Library system for the cookbook "Fix It and Forget It" at the start of the year, she never guessed the book would take nearly a month to arrive.
Of course, Lednicer had a bit more sympathy for those who processed her book request within the Harold Washington Library because she works there as the director of marketing.
For the rest of the Chicago's 1.9 million library cardholders, the extended waits for materials they placed on hold at the start of the year were more of a mysterious hassle.
A major factor behind the delay in cardholders getting their books is the growing numbers of titles ordered online, akin to the Netflix method of reserving DVDs online, that has been in place at the Chicago Public Library since March 2008.
"It was an expected shock," said Lednicer of the surge in hold requests with the advent of online ordering. She notes that 40,000 holds were placed online in the first month of the new system three years ago. These days, as many as 120,000 items are placed on hold each month, 95 percent of which are done via computer.
While nearly 2 million Chicagoans use their tax-funded libraries, it is likely that few fully grasp the logistics of how the holds system works. The Chicago Public Library has 76 branches, served by eight truck routes that move 750,000 items among those branches each month. When a book or CD or movie is placed on hold by a library member, the computerized system searches for the nearest available copy or the one that is due to be returned next.
If a title can be found within a truck route (at a nearby library), it can be processed remotely and transferred from branch to branch. If a title can only be found at a branch outside of the hold-placer's library, it must be sent to the library's headquarters — the Harold Washington Library at State and Congress — then sent back out, which slows the process.
As part of a three-person team, Steve Sposato, the assistant director of collection development,determines what to purchase and in what quantities.
If an author is popular — say "Harry Potter" writer J.K. Rowling — Sposato knows to order dozens of copies of a new release. He also monitors the media, the New York Times best-seller lists, National Public Radio and the "Oprah Winfrey Show" to determine what books will be in high demand. When a title is selected for the One Book, One Chicago program, Sposato places a big order.
Sposato's team also studies a "holds report" produced by the library staff each month that indicates what items cardholders have been requesting.
"We try to maintain a 5 to 1 ratio," he said. "If 100 people are waiting for a title, we want at least 20 copies."
Oftentimes, they do better than that ratio. In early February, there was a waiting list of 50 people for the 60 copies of the newly released Mark Twain autobiography that were rotating through the system.
It's a complicated dance — cardholders and truck drivers, staff within headquarters and librarians at branches — aided (and at times overwhelmed) by a complicated computer system.
Chicago Public Library staff are constantly re-evaluating and tweaking the system, Lednicer said. They recently reconfigured truck routes to better accommodate areas that have more holds. Branches on the North Side, for example, process more holds than other regions' branches.
But backlogs happen. Titles ordered online get mired in transit while staffers sort through mountains of materials trying to match books to readers and CDs to listeners as quickly as possible.
"We use (the library) too," Lednicer said. "We know it can be frustrating."
At the start of the year, everyone on staff — accountants, marketing professionals and even library Commissioner Mary Dempsey — was called away from their desks to empty shipping bins and process books at the dock within the Harold Washington Library. They transformed a small kitchen into a holding area.
That's not surprising, said Audra Caplan, president of the Public Library Association, a division of the American Library Association.
"It is common. You always struggle around the holidays," Caplan said. "January and February are always busy, that's universal. Even the best people sometimes just get inundated."
Despite the delays in getting their books, two cardholders said they enjoy using the Chicago Public Library.
"When a book is not available, that is always a bummer. But my satisfaction (with the library system) is pretty high," said Lakeview resident Cathy Ward, who checks out books to use in her first-grade classroom at The Children's School in Berwyn. "I am getting these books for free, which I otherwise would not be getting."
from: Chicago Tribune
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Tlingit book collaboration turns new page in Alaska kids' reading
by: Shannon Haugland
SITKA, Alaska — "The Story of the Town Bear and Forest Bear" will be recognizable to anyone who has read the classic tale about a pair of similarly diverse mice.
But not many will be able to read it — at least at first — because the book is written entirely in the Tlingit language.
The illustrated children's book is the result of a collaboration among contributors living in Sitka, Juneau and Hoonah, including fluent speakers, storytellers and an artist. The book comes with a CD to help with pronunciation and a separate English translation and classroom discussion guide.
Roby Littlefield, of Sitka, says that as far as she knows it's the first of its kind.
"It was something we thought needs to be done," she said. "No one else is doing it."
The children's story was written by Ernestine Hayes, an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, and translated into Tlingit by Ethel Makinen and Littlefield. Wanda Loescher Culp, of Hoonah, illustrated the book.
The book tells the story of a visit by the Town Bear to see his cousin Forest Bear in the wilds, in a variation of "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse." Forest Bear then joins Town Bear for an adventure in town. They compare the food, challenges and dangers of their respective environs. (Spoiler alert: they each go back to their homes in the end.)
The English translation and classroom discussion guide — which is a separate book — points kids to discussions that compare city life to a life in the bears' natural environment. There are also lessons about the bears' behavior, and the benefits to humans from the proper disposal of garbage in order not to attract bears to town.
Hayes came up with the idea for the children's Tlingit book, and talked to publisher Liz Dodd, co-owner of Hazy Island Books.
"The proposal was to make a children's book all in Tlingit," Littlefield said.
But no one was sure it was possible.
Hayes, who is Tlingit and a member of the Wolf House of the Kogwanton, is not a Tlingit speaker, and needed help. Roby's daughter, Kassandra Eubank-Littlefield, a UAS student and intermediate Tlingit speaker, agreed to pass four pages of text around to fluent Tlingit speakers for a trial run to see if the book could be translated.
"We knew it could be done, we have fluent speakers who can do this," Littlefield said.
But Hayes and publisher Liz Dodd agreed that translating the book on paper was not going to be enough, since there is also the issue of pronouncing the Tlingit words correctly, Litttlefield said. The single project grew into three, with the children's book, an audio companion, and the translated text and "classroom discussion guide."
They pitched the idea to the Association of Alaska School Boards, which agreed to fund the project.
Littlefield said the project was a true collaboration.
Tlingit speakers Florence Sheakley and Paul Marks of Juneau recorded the Tlingit story, with sound effects help from Sitka radio producer Steve Johnson, and production help from Jeff Brown at KTOO-FM in Juneau.
For the classroom discussion guide and translation, other Tlingit speakers were consulted, including Keri Eggleston and Helen Sarabia.
Makinen and Littlefield received help with their translation work from Isabelle Chulik, who served as a "backup translator" and was able to add some verbs that others didn't know, Littlefield said.
Dodd, who is a co-owner of Hazy Island Books, comments in the introduction to the classroom discussion guide that finding the right Tlingit expression could be tricky, since the story includes words that basically don't exist in Tlingit.
Littlefield found that in the process of fine-tuning the translation back and forth from Tlingit to English, "You could see the Tlingit world view emerge."
"It was brilliant," she said. "It brought the Tlingit world view into the Tlingit language version of the story."
Littlefield said it took about a year and a half to complete the book and CD package. A reception for the authors, translators and all involved with the book was held earlier May 8 in Juneau.
Littlefield said the process was interesting and challenging. She felt it was a project that promoted an awareness of the need to preserve the Tlingit language.
"I like to feel I'm giving back to my community in a way that's valuable and needed," she said. "I want to give back to the elders, who have given me so much."
Littlefield, who is non-Native, has been studying the Tlingit language since 1975. Her first teacher was her father-in-law, Ed Littlefield. She now teaches two sections of Tlingit at Blatchley Middle School, and two at University of Alaska Southeast, Sitka Campus.
Littlefield said she "played around" with the language until 1981, when she took a class from linguist Michael Krause, a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks at the Alaska Native Language Center. He gave an assessment of the health of the Native language in the state, and assessed the Tlingit language as one "in bad shape, and dead in 20 years.
She said the class, and Krause, changed her life.
"He gave me a clear vision of what I could do, to not let the language evaporate," Littlefield said. "The children have to be learners; if the children aren't learning, the language is dying. If the youngest speakers are 50 or 60, it's dying or it's dead. ... I realized time was getting short. We have to start to get to work or the language will die."
from: The Republic
SITKA, Alaska — "The Story of the Town Bear and Forest Bear" will be recognizable to anyone who has read the classic tale about a pair of similarly diverse mice.
But not many will be able to read it — at least at first — because the book is written entirely in the Tlingit language.
The illustrated children's book is the result of a collaboration among contributors living in Sitka, Juneau and Hoonah, including fluent speakers, storytellers and an artist. The book comes with a CD to help with pronunciation and a separate English translation and classroom discussion guide.
Roby Littlefield, of Sitka, says that as far as she knows it's the first of its kind.
"It was something we thought needs to be done," she said. "No one else is doing it."
The children's story was written by Ernestine Hayes, an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, and translated into Tlingit by Ethel Makinen and Littlefield. Wanda Loescher Culp, of Hoonah, illustrated the book.
The book tells the story of a visit by the Town Bear to see his cousin Forest Bear in the wilds, in a variation of "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse." Forest Bear then joins Town Bear for an adventure in town. They compare the food, challenges and dangers of their respective environs. (Spoiler alert: they each go back to their homes in the end.)
The English translation and classroom discussion guide — which is a separate book — points kids to discussions that compare city life to a life in the bears' natural environment. There are also lessons about the bears' behavior, and the benefits to humans from the proper disposal of garbage in order not to attract bears to town.
Hayes came up with the idea for the children's Tlingit book, and talked to publisher Liz Dodd, co-owner of Hazy Island Books.
"The proposal was to make a children's book all in Tlingit," Littlefield said.
But no one was sure it was possible.
Hayes, who is Tlingit and a member of the Wolf House of the Kogwanton, is not a Tlingit speaker, and needed help. Roby's daughter, Kassandra Eubank-Littlefield, a UAS student and intermediate Tlingit speaker, agreed to pass four pages of text around to fluent Tlingit speakers for a trial run to see if the book could be translated.
"We knew it could be done, we have fluent speakers who can do this," Littlefield said.
But Hayes and publisher Liz Dodd agreed that translating the book on paper was not going to be enough, since there is also the issue of pronouncing the Tlingit words correctly, Litttlefield said. The single project grew into three, with the children's book, an audio companion, and the translated text and "classroom discussion guide."
They pitched the idea to the Association of Alaska School Boards, which agreed to fund the project.
Littlefield said the project was a true collaboration.
Tlingit speakers Florence Sheakley and Paul Marks of Juneau recorded the Tlingit story, with sound effects help from Sitka radio producer Steve Johnson, and production help from Jeff Brown at KTOO-FM in Juneau.
For the classroom discussion guide and translation, other Tlingit speakers were consulted, including Keri Eggleston and Helen Sarabia.
Makinen and Littlefield received help with their translation work from Isabelle Chulik, who served as a "backup translator" and was able to add some verbs that others didn't know, Littlefield said.
Dodd, who is a co-owner of Hazy Island Books, comments in the introduction to the classroom discussion guide that finding the right Tlingit expression could be tricky, since the story includes words that basically don't exist in Tlingit.
Littlefield found that in the process of fine-tuning the translation back and forth from Tlingit to English, "You could see the Tlingit world view emerge."
"It was brilliant," she said. "It brought the Tlingit world view into the Tlingit language version of the story."
Littlefield said it took about a year and a half to complete the book and CD package. A reception for the authors, translators and all involved with the book was held earlier May 8 in Juneau.
Littlefield said the process was interesting and challenging. She felt it was a project that promoted an awareness of the need to preserve the Tlingit language.
"I like to feel I'm giving back to my community in a way that's valuable and needed," she said. "I want to give back to the elders, who have given me so much."
Littlefield, who is non-Native, has been studying the Tlingit language since 1975. Her first teacher was her father-in-law, Ed Littlefield. She now teaches two sections of Tlingit at Blatchley Middle School, and two at University of Alaska Southeast, Sitka Campus.
Littlefield said she "played around" with the language until 1981, when she took a class from linguist Michael Krause, a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks at the Alaska Native Language Center. He gave an assessment of the health of the Native language in the state, and assessed the Tlingit language as one "in bad shape, and dead in 20 years.
She said the class, and Krause, changed her life.
"He gave me a clear vision of what I could do, to not let the language evaporate," Littlefield said. "The children have to be learners; if the children aren't learning, the language is dying. If the youngest speakers are 50 or 60, it's dying or it's dead. ... I realized time was getting short. We have to start to get to work or the language will die."
from: The Republic
Monday, May 23, 2011
High school libraries enter the 21st century
Goodbye card catalogue, hello high-tech
by: Matthew Pearson
The first thing Janice O'Neill did when she became librarian at St. Mark Catholic High School in Manotick was tear up the No Talking sign.
She also ripped up the No Eating sign, stopped charging students for printing stuff off the Internet and said goodbye to the card catalogue.
Now she's clearing the tidy shelves of encyclopedias and other out-of-date reference books jammed with facts that are a click away thanks to Google.
Even the name is changing, from library to learning commons.
"It was all, 'No, no, no,'" O'Neill says of the vibe in the former library, a spacious room on the second floor with an adjacent computer lab. "It wasn't welcoming."
Her efforts are part of a drastic revisioning of school libraries, aimed at giving students the information they need using the tools they're most comfortable with in a space that aims to be as inviting as a Chapters store.
Students will be encouraged to use laptops, tablets, hand-held e-readers, even their personal smartphones, to complement text-based resources, and rectangular tables, hardback chairs and study carrels will largely disappear to make way for comfy couches, pleather chairs and round tables.
Ottawa's Catholic school board, like many boards across the country, is trying to adjust to meet the needs of the 21st-century learner by focusing on collaboration, communication, creativity and problem-solving skills, as opposed to quiet, independent study.
But it's hard to help students learn to work together in a space that has traditionally frowned upon talking.
So bolstered by a report published last year by the Ontario School Library Association -which laid out a roadmap for making the shift to learning commons -the Catholic board decided to change it up.
"This is not eliminating the library and the librarian, this is a transition to a new model that recognizes students' needs have changed," says Tom D'Amico, the superintendent overseeing the change.
It will cost $2 million over the next three years to give each of the board's 80 schools roughly $20,000 to buy new digital tools. Funding will also be available to help schools make any necessary infrastructure changes and buy modern furniture that can be easily shifted around.
But money isn't the hard part - the cultural change is.
D'Amico said the board will help librarians become "cybrarians" by holding boot camps for them to learn the cyber skills they need to help students and fellow teachers adapt to the new reality.
The move reflects what students have been asking for and is intended to make the library a central hub in the school, something it has't been for awhile.
"Many of our students don't use the library because they feel they can do all of their research on Google," he said.
But -perhaps to allay the fears of traditional book lovers -D'Amico added the printed word is far from dead.
"We're not getting rid of books," he said, but rather adding digital materials which will be used to complement what books already offer.
Still, about two-thirds of the books will disappear from shelves. Subject specific ones will be moved to appropriate classrooms, while others, such as encyclopedias, will be recycled.
High-interest books -think, the Harry Potter or Twilight series -will remain.
Meanwhile, new online resources will soon be available through the board's website, giving students 24/7 access.
Back at St. Mark's, the learning commons buzzes with noon-hour activity. Students are eating, reading the newspaper and working on homework. Conversation and laughter fill the room.
Casey Crawford, Erin Higgins and Henry Nguyen are each carrying a Kobo e-reader, which they've signed out of the library to use in their Grade 11 English class.
Crawford and Higgins are reading The Pelican Brief, while Nguyen is plowing through The Scarlet Letter.
They all agree the changes to the library are welcome.
Higgins, who said she does most of her reading from a screen, said the space is more welcoming now. Before, she came here only when it was too cold or rainy to go outside during lunch.
Added Nguyen: "It will promote the use of the library."
from: Ottawa Citizen
by: Matthew Pearson
 |
| Libraries at Ottawa's Catholic high schools, such as Janice O'Neill's at St. Mark Catholic High School in Manotick, are undergoing a major cultural shift to serve students in the digital age. Encyclopedias and some reference books are being replaced by laptops and e-readers. Photograph by: Pat Mcgrath, The Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa Citizen |
She also ripped up the No Eating sign, stopped charging students for printing stuff off the Internet and said goodbye to the card catalogue.
Now she's clearing the tidy shelves of encyclopedias and other out-of-date reference books jammed with facts that are a click away thanks to Google.
Even the name is changing, from library to learning commons.
"It was all, 'No, no, no,'" O'Neill says of the vibe in the former library, a spacious room on the second floor with an adjacent computer lab. "It wasn't welcoming."
Her efforts are part of a drastic revisioning of school libraries, aimed at giving students the information they need using the tools they're most comfortable with in a space that aims to be as inviting as a Chapters store.
Students will be encouraged to use laptops, tablets, hand-held e-readers, even their personal smartphones, to complement text-based resources, and rectangular tables, hardback chairs and study carrels will largely disappear to make way for comfy couches, pleather chairs and round tables.
Ottawa's Catholic school board, like many boards across the country, is trying to adjust to meet the needs of the 21st-century learner by focusing on collaboration, communication, creativity and problem-solving skills, as opposed to quiet, independent study.
But it's hard to help students learn to work together in a space that has traditionally frowned upon talking.
So bolstered by a report published last year by the Ontario School Library Association -which laid out a roadmap for making the shift to learning commons -the Catholic board decided to change it up.
"This is not eliminating the library and the librarian, this is a transition to a new model that recognizes students' needs have changed," says Tom D'Amico, the superintendent overseeing the change.
It will cost $2 million over the next three years to give each of the board's 80 schools roughly $20,000 to buy new digital tools. Funding will also be available to help schools make any necessary infrastructure changes and buy modern furniture that can be easily shifted around.
But money isn't the hard part - the cultural change is.
D'Amico said the board will help librarians become "cybrarians" by holding boot camps for them to learn the cyber skills they need to help students and fellow teachers adapt to the new reality.
The move reflects what students have been asking for and is intended to make the library a central hub in the school, something it has't been for awhile.
"Many of our students don't use the library because they feel they can do all of their research on Google," he said.
But -perhaps to allay the fears of traditional book lovers -D'Amico added the printed word is far from dead.
"We're not getting rid of books," he said, but rather adding digital materials which will be used to complement what books already offer.
Still, about two-thirds of the books will disappear from shelves. Subject specific ones will be moved to appropriate classrooms, while others, such as encyclopedias, will be recycled.
High-interest books -think, the Harry Potter or Twilight series -will remain.
Meanwhile, new online resources will soon be available through the board's website, giving students 24/7 access.
Back at St. Mark's, the learning commons buzzes with noon-hour activity. Students are eating, reading the newspaper and working on homework. Conversation and laughter fill the room.
Casey Crawford, Erin Higgins and Henry Nguyen are each carrying a Kobo e-reader, which they've signed out of the library to use in their Grade 11 English class.
Crawford and Higgins are reading The Pelican Brief, while Nguyen is plowing through The Scarlet Letter.
They all agree the changes to the library are welcome.
Higgins, who said she does most of her reading from a screen, said the space is more welcoming now. Before, she came here only when it was too cold or rainy to go outside during lunch.
Added Nguyen: "It will promote the use of the library."
from: Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, May 21, 2011
NY library: Return this book to a park bench
by: Ula Ilnytzky
NEW YORK (AP) -- The New York Public Library is encouraging bookworms to pass around 25,000 free copies of a new paperback it will distribute in subway stations, on park benches and in other public places.
The book celebrates the library's vast collection - and patrons - by featuring a diverse group of celebrities, including Stephen Colbert, the Harlem Globetrotters and Yoko Ono, posing with or discussing their favorite library treasure. Its distribution is part of the library's centennial celebration.
Starting May 19, the limited-edition paperback, "Know The Past, Find The Future," will be dropped off at park benches and in five subway stations: Grand Central, Times Square, Columbus Circle, Bryant Park and Union Square. Copies will also be distributed in front of the landmark Fifth Avenue library building and all its branches, as well as in some bookstores.
A note inserted in the book will instruct readers to leave it in another part of the city for someone else to enjoy when they're finished.
Colbert selected to highlight a group of J.D. Salinger letters, while Ono chose a book edited and published by composer John Cage.
The Harlem Globetrotters are pictured holding up globes in the library's map room, and the Radio City Rockettes are photographed striking a pose in its ornate reading room.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of 100 luminaries who submitted essays for the book, chose to highlight "Johnny Tremain," a children's story by Esther Forbes about Paul Revere and a daring teenager messenger he said he read a hundred times growing up.
Like the character, Bloomberg writes, it taught him to "stand up for what is right, and make a difference in the world."
Paul LeClerc, the library's president, said the paperback "embodies the thrill of discovery happening every day, in every room at the library."
Poet and essayist Anne Carson is pictured holding up a booklet with a poem by William Wordsworth that fits in the palm of her hands.
"The Little Maid and the Gentleman, or, We are Seven," written in 1798, contains woodcut illustrations of trees, ships and coffins that "are astonishingly simple and beautiful," she says.
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter focuses on the library's collection of 40,000 menus, many produced during the golden ages of typography and illustration. He highlights a charming children's mid-20th century menu for the New Haven Railroad that is die-cut in the shape of a circus elephant and allows "its small diners to order by jungle animal," he writes.
Singer Rosanne Cash talks about being thrilled to find "in my library, my New York, my home," her mother's ancestors on a passenger list of 18th-century ships and to be able to hold the original copy of Walt Whiteman's "Leaves of Grass."
A voucher valued at $400 for 25 Penguin Classics books will be hidden in eight copies of the book.
An online version will be available in about a month.
The library's official celebration of the 100th year of its Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue begins May 20.
from: Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) -- The New York Public Library is encouraging bookworms to pass around 25,000 free copies of a new paperback it will distribute in subway stations, on park benches and in other public places.
The book celebrates the library's vast collection - and patrons - by featuring a diverse group of celebrities, including Stephen Colbert, the Harlem Globetrotters and Yoko Ono, posing with or discussing their favorite library treasure. Its distribution is part of the library's centennial celebration.
Starting May 19, the limited-edition paperback, "Know The Past, Find The Future," will be dropped off at park benches and in five subway stations: Grand Central, Times Square, Columbus Circle, Bryant Park and Union Square. Copies will also be distributed in front of the landmark Fifth Avenue library building and all its branches, as well as in some bookstores.
A note inserted in the book will instruct readers to leave it in another part of the city for someone else to enjoy when they're finished.
Colbert selected to highlight a group of J.D. Salinger letters, while Ono chose a book edited and published by composer John Cage.
The Harlem Globetrotters are pictured holding up globes in the library's map room, and the Radio City Rockettes are photographed striking a pose in its ornate reading room.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of 100 luminaries who submitted essays for the book, chose to highlight "Johnny Tremain," a children's story by Esther Forbes about Paul Revere and a daring teenager messenger he said he read a hundred times growing up.
Like the character, Bloomberg writes, it taught him to "stand up for what is right, and make a difference in the world."
Paul LeClerc, the library's president, said the paperback "embodies the thrill of discovery happening every day, in every room at the library."
Poet and essayist Anne Carson is pictured holding up a booklet with a poem by William Wordsworth that fits in the palm of her hands.
"The Little Maid and the Gentleman, or, We are Seven," written in 1798, contains woodcut illustrations of trees, ships and coffins that "are astonishingly simple and beautiful," she says.
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter focuses on the library's collection of 40,000 menus, many produced during the golden ages of typography and illustration. He highlights a charming children's mid-20th century menu for the New Haven Railroad that is die-cut in the shape of a circus elephant and allows "its small diners to order by jungle animal," he writes.
Singer Rosanne Cash talks about being thrilled to find "in my library, my New York, my home," her mother's ancestors on a passenger list of 18th-century ships and to be able to hold the original copy of Walt Whiteman's "Leaves of Grass."
A voucher valued at $400 for 25 Penguin Classics books will be hidden in eight copies of the book.
An online version will be available in about a month.
The library's official celebration of the 100th year of its Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue begins May 20.
from: Associated Press
Friday, May 20, 2011
How to make school libraries relevant again
Transforming school libraries for the digital age is no small task for financially strapped boards, and so a school board in southwestern Ontario should be encouraged, not condemned, for making the attempt.
At two high schools overseen by the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board, a grand total of three books was checked out last month. That depressing fact is cited by Paul Picard, the board’s director of education, as one reason for a radical change now under way, changing libraries from book-centred and quiet places to noisy digital hubs. In the elementary schools, the books are being taken from the libraries and divvied up among the classrooms (they will still be catalogued and can be shared).
The main reason, though, is that the board faces a loss of 800 to 1,000 students in September, and a budget shortfall of about $10-million. Cutting most of its “learning commons specialists” (technologists, not teacher-librarians) will save $2½-million a year. In their stead, visiting literacy specialists will provide much more useful advice, Mr. Picard says.
Libraries have survived for roughly 5,000 years of human history, but it is fair to insist they adapt to an age in which information is so often floating free – or die. Libraries should not be content to live in the 20th century, as it were. The mantra, as in any service, should be to keep up with what the public wants. Good libraries provide Wi-fi access (an Internet connection for wireless devices), e-books and audio books, electronic databases and, of course, computers. More expertise, not less, is needed to help students navigate.
Actually, most children love books. If they’ve lost that love by high school, let’s not just accept that that’s the way of things now. Let’s ask if they still have a love of the written word, if they can find their way to the information (whether digital or in books or other sources) that they need, if they can tell credible information from the conspiracy theories and other idiotic flotsam available on the Internet.
And let’s please call them libraries – not “learning commons areas,” as the Windsor-Essex Catholic board has been doing for the past several years. (Let’s hope some lucky students find their way to George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” which explains how euphemisms damage truth.)
A great library – say, the New York City main branch, with the two stone lions out front – is a cathedral to the written word. Literacy needs celebrating and nurturing, and schools should experiment to make sure their libraries do not become obsolete.
from: Globe and Mail
At two high schools overseen by the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board, a grand total of three books was checked out last month. That depressing fact is cited by Paul Picard, the board’s director of education, as one reason for a radical change now under way, changing libraries from book-centred and quiet places to noisy digital hubs. In the elementary schools, the books are being taken from the libraries and divvied up among the classrooms (they will still be catalogued and can be shared).
The main reason, though, is that the board faces a loss of 800 to 1,000 students in September, and a budget shortfall of about $10-million. Cutting most of its “learning commons specialists” (technologists, not teacher-librarians) will save $2½-million a year. In their stead, visiting literacy specialists will provide much more useful advice, Mr. Picard says.
Libraries have survived for roughly 5,000 years of human history, but it is fair to insist they adapt to an age in which information is so often floating free – or die. Libraries should not be content to live in the 20th century, as it were. The mantra, as in any service, should be to keep up with what the public wants. Good libraries provide Wi-fi access (an Internet connection for wireless devices), e-books and audio books, electronic databases and, of course, computers. More expertise, not less, is needed to help students navigate.
Actually, most children love books. If they’ve lost that love by high school, let’s not just accept that that’s the way of things now. Let’s ask if they still have a love of the written word, if they can find their way to the information (whether digital or in books or other sources) that they need, if they can tell credible information from the conspiracy theories and other idiotic flotsam available on the Internet.
And let’s please call them libraries – not “learning commons areas,” as the Windsor-Essex Catholic board has been doing for the past several years. (Let’s hope some lucky students find their way to George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” which explains how euphemisms damage truth.)
A great library – say, the New York City main branch, with the two stone lions out front – is a cathedral to the written word. Literacy needs celebrating and nurturing, and schools should experiment to make sure their libraries do not become obsolete.
from: Globe and Mail
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Library Cards on Smartphones, the Next Wave in Customer Service
by: Michael Kelley
Smartphone apps such as CardStar and KeyRing allow consumers to load onto their mobile devices all the plastic reward cards dangling from their key chains, and more of these consumers are now using the same apps to load their library cards onto their phones.
This is presenting a growing challenge for the circulation desk, as library workers have to decide whether library policy acknowledges the virtual card and also whether a scanner can read it.
"It floated to the top at our library because I was using mine to check out material, and the supervisors felt it was something they needed to put in our guidelines," Manya Shorr, the Central Library supervisor at Sacramento Public Library, CA, told LJ.
So far, at Sacramento's 28 branches, smartphone apps have been used only about 40 to 50 times to check out materials, and the library changed its circulation manual in October to make clear that "these are to be accepted as valid library cards." The readers in Sacramento can scan the cards, and they work with most of the self-check machines, too.
"The reality is I always have my phone on me, so to have my card on my phone is fantastic," Shorr said. "I think initially there was some concern about security, but we decided as an institution that...we wanted to make policy based on positive intent rather than expecting the worst."
To create the smartphone card, all users have to do is input or scan the physical card's barcode number.
In the case of CardStar, when a patron from a particular library is the first from that system to use the app, then administrators from CardStar add that library's name to a menu, and the next patron from that system can then select his/her particular system before entering the barcode information. The list of available libraries is growing.
"Collectively, library cards are the seventh most popular card stored in our system," Kristine Lee, a spokesperson for CardStar, told LJ. That is about 50,000 to 75,000 downloads, she said.
Great customer service
Christine Grewcock, a science and technology reference librarian and a self-described gadget person at Greenville County Library System, SC, likes KeyRing and considers it good customer service, but she does have reservations.
"It's easier to use somebody else's card on a phone because you can just type in a number and it creates a barcode for you on the phone," she said. Unlike the store loyalty cards, which only accumulate store credit, a misused library card could pile up fines for the unsuspecting cardholder, she said.
"I like having a PIN as an added layer of security," she said.
CardStar's Lee said the risk for abuse "is equal to, if not a lot less" than what patrons face with their physical cards, which can be just as easily stolen or used by someone other than the rightful owner, since libraries generally do not require any identification when a patron presents a valid card.
Myles Jaeschke, media collections librarian for Tulsa City-County Library, where patrons have been using the apps, also feels the risk is very low.
"You'd have to do some very clever guessing [of a barcode number]," he said. "I think it's a great customer service, and I don't think libraries should be afraid of it, they should probably embrace it."
The Atlanta-Fulton Public Library has not had a large number of patrons using the virtual cards yet, according to Hensley Roberts, the circulations services manager, but, like Sacramento, the library is anticipating the usage and has revised its policy to make clear that the cards are valid. But there is some resistance among staff members when they are presented with a smartphone card, he said.
"To them it's like someone wrote a card number down on a piece of a paper, in which case they would ask for an ID," Roberts said.
Kelly Robinson, the library's marketing and PR director, said that an email has been sent out to all 34 branches making clear that the smartphone cards are valid.
"We definitely accept it and welcome it," she said.
Roberts and others said the bigger issue may be that scanning equipment in the libraries cannot always read the smartphone cards.
"Scanning depends on what type of scanner people are using, but for most libraries it seems to be working," said Lee, of CardStar. "And even if the scan doesn't work, the barcode number will still show up, and it can be entered manually," she said.
Traditional barcode scanners are designed to read laser light reflected off of a solid surface, while smartphone screens are emitting light and have to be read by a charge-coupled device (CCD) scanner, according to Brian Herzog, the author of the Swiss Army Librarian blog, who wrote about this problem.
Herzog, who works as a reference librarian in Massachusetts, bought a CCD scanner for $30 and found it worked perfectly with library card barcodes displayed on a smartphone (as well as regular barcodes).
"Now that I have this scanner, I just have to wait for a patron to come in who needs it-what a strange feeling to be ahead of the curve," he wrote.
from: Library Journal
Smartphone apps such as CardStar and KeyRing allow consumers to load onto their mobile devices all the plastic reward cards dangling from their key chains, and more of these consumers are now using the same apps to load their library cards onto their phones.
This is presenting a growing challenge for the circulation desk, as library workers have to decide whether library policy acknowledges the virtual card and also whether a scanner can read it.
"It floated to the top at our library because I was using mine to check out material, and the supervisors felt it was something they needed to put in our guidelines," Manya Shorr, the Central Library supervisor at Sacramento Public Library, CA, told LJ.
So far, at Sacramento's 28 branches, smartphone apps have been used only about 40 to 50 times to check out materials, and the library changed its circulation manual in October to make clear that "these are to be accepted as valid library cards." The readers in Sacramento can scan the cards, and they work with most of the self-check machines, too.
"The reality is I always have my phone on me, so to have my card on my phone is fantastic," Shorr said. "I think initially there was some concern about security, but we decided as an institution that...we wanted to make policy based on positive intent rather than expecting the worst."
To create the smartphone card, all users have to do is input or scan the physical card's barcode number.
In the case of CardStar, when a patron from a particular library is the first from that system to use the app, then administrators from CardStar add that library's name to a menu, and the next patron from that system can then select his/her particular system before entering the barcode information. The list of available libraries is growing.
"Collectively, library cards are the seventh most popular card stored in our system," Kristine Lee, a spokesperson for CardStar, told LJ. That is about 50,000 to 75,000 downloads, she said.
Great customer service
Christine Grewcock, a science and technology reference librarian and a self-described gadget person at Greenville County Library System, SC, likes KeyRing and considers it good customer service, but she does have reservations.
"It's easier to use somebody else's card on a phone because you can just type in a number and it creates a barcode for you on the phone," she said. Unlike the store loyalty cards, which only accumulate store credit, a misused library card could pile up fines for the unsuspecting cardholder, she said.
"I like having a PIN as an added layer of security," she said.
CardStar's Lee said the risk for abuse "is equal to, if not a lot less" than what patrons face with their physical cards, which can be just as easily stolen or used by someone other than the rightful owner, since libraries generally do not require any identification when a patron presents a valid card.
Myles Jaeschke, media collections librarian for Tulsa City-County Library, where patrons have been using the apps, also feels the risk is very low.
"You'd have to do some very clever guessing [of a barcode number]," he said. "I think it's a great customer service, and I don't think libraries should be afraid of it, they should probably embrace it."
The Atlanta-Fulton Public Library has not had a large number of patrons using the virtual cards yet, according to Hensley Roberts, the circulations services manager, but, like Sacramento, the library is anticipating the usage and has revised its policy to make clear that the cards are valid. But there is some resistance among staff members when they are presented with a smartphone card, he said.
"To them it's like someone wrote a card number down on a piece of a paper, in which case they would ask for an ID," Roberts said.
Kelly Robinson, the library's marketing and PR director, said that an email has been sent out to all 34 branches making clear that the smartphone cards are valid.
"We definitely accept it and welcome it," she said.
Roberts and others said the bigger issue may be that scanning equipment in the libraries cannot always read the smartphone cards.
"Scanning depends on what type of scanner people are using, but for most libraries it seems to be working," said Lee, of CardStar. "And even if the scan doesn't work, the barcode number will still show up, and it can be entered manually," she said.
Traditional barcode scanners are designed to read laser light reflected off of a solid surface, while smartphone screens are emitting light and have to be read by a charge-coupled device (CCD) scanner, according to Brian Herzog, the author of the Swiss Army Librarian blog, who wrote about this problem.
Herzog, who works as a reference librarian in Massachusetts, bought a CCD scanner for $30 and found it worked perfectly with library card barcodes displayed on a smartphone (as well as regular barcodes).
"Now that I have this scanner, I just have to wait for a patron to come in who needs it-what a strange feeling to be ahead of the curve," he wrote.
from: Library Journal
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Summer fiction: around the world in 24 books
Argentinian thrillers, Tuscan farce, love in the Australian outback. Wherever you're jetting off to this summer, there's a story to suit your surroundings.
by: Lucinda Everett
France
If you’re joining the jet set on the Riviera, pick up Tender is the Night, F Scott Fitzgerald’s tale of Twenties’ debauchery, charting the demise of Dick Driver and his hedonistic pals. Fans of Joanne Harris’s Chocolat may like the next title in her “food trilogy”, Blackberry Wine, in which a blocked bestselling author buys a French farmhouse hoping to recreate his childhood summers.
Italy
If a summer romance is looking unlikely, E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, in which Lucy Honeychurch escapes Edwardian England for a Florentine fling, should provide some vicarious titillation. And for a bit of Tuscan farce, pack Cooking with Fernet Branca, James Hamilton-Paterson’s comedy of errors that sees solitude-seeking expatriates Gerald and Marta become begrudgingly close neighbours.
Spain
No suitcase (or Kindle) full of Spanish fiction should be without Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece Don Quixote, which follows the adventures of a chivalry-obsessed knight errant. Those with more contemporary tastes should try Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Barcelona-set The Man of my Life, a gripping instalment in the series centred on Pepe Carvalho, a fiery detective with a penchant for fine food and women.
United States
Those intrigued by the US’s troubled past should read Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which follows Sethe and her daughter Denver as they rebuild their lives after slavery. And if you’re heading to the City of Angels, Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective classic The Big Sleep is a must. The first in the Philip Marlowe series, its grim violence and ingenious twists play out on perfectly depicted LA streets.
Greece
There are few summer novels that can beat Louis de Bernières’s wartime love story, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, for sun-drenched landscapes and good old-fashioned yearning. People-watchers will love Panos Karnezis’s Little Infamies, which peeks gleefully into the lives of one village’s inhabitants. Expect priests, prostitutes and Homer-reciting parrots.
Cuba
Those in search of grit should pack Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Dirty Havana Trilogy, a visceral novel that ventures down Havana’s dark alleys and spotlights its lusty inhabitants. The product of a (slightly) more innocent era, Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana is a classic black comedy about James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman turned secret agent.
Mexico
All the Pretty Horses is the first book in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, a coming-of-age epic, which follows adolescent Texan cowboys John and Lacey into the beautiful, brutal Mexican landscape. Foodies, opt for Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. Each chapter in this story of forbidden love begins with a Mexican recipe that is prepared as the chapter’s events unfold.
Argentina
Set in Buenos Aires, Tomás Eloy Martínez’s hallucinatory thriller The Tango Singer joins student Bruno Cadogan on the hunt for an elusive tango legend. Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch recounts the adventures of a flighty Argentinian writer forced to knuckle down as a salesman before getting jobs in an asylum and a circus
New Zealand and Australia
New Zealand’s South Island beaches are the setting for Keri Hulme’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Bone People, a fable that combines Maori myth with dazzling descriptions. For a rollicking read on an Aussie beach, pack Colleen McCullough’s saga The Thorn Birds, which charts the life of Meggie Cleary as she grows up on a sheep station in the Australian outback.
Thailand
Set in lush Thai landscapes, Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork is a nimble adventure story centred on one journalist’s quest to clear the name of an anthropologist wrongfully accused of murder. A must for any backpacker, Alex Garland’s The Beach follows Richard as he infiltrates a seemingly Utopian community in a secret beach paradise, only to find himself part of a brutal Lord of the Flies-style “democracy”.
India
Those journeying south must pack The God of Small Things, a tragic story of devoted twins in which rural Kerala is brought to life by Arundhati Roy’s exquisite prose. Crowned the Best of 40 Years of the Booker Prize, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a history of Indian independence, as told by Saleem Sinai, a mixed-race boy born at the moment India became its own country.
Turkey
Anyone visiting the historic site of Hisarlik should enjoy The Fall of Troy, Peter Ackroyd’s story of the ancient city’s excavation by obsessive and devious archaeologist Heinrich Obermann (based on the similarly natured real life excavator Heinrich Schliemann). And in Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, a group of unlikely travelling companions journey from Istanbul to Trebizond via a host of oddballs.
from: Telegraph
by: Lucinda Everett
France
If you’re joining the jet set on the Riviera, pick up Tender is the Night, F Scott Fitzgerald’s tale of Twenties’ debauchery, charting the demise of Dick Driver and his hedonistic pals. Fans of Joanne Harris’s Chocolat may like the next title in her “food trilogy”, Blackberry Wine, in which a blocked bestselling author buys a French farmhouse hoping to recreate his childhood summers.
Italy
If a summer romance is looking unlikely, E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, in which Lucy Honeychurch escapes Edwardian England for a Florentine fling, should provide some vicarious titillation. And for a bit of Tuscan farce, pack Cooking with Fernet Branca, James Hamilton-Paterson’s comedy of errors that sees solitude-seeking expatriates Gerald and Marta become begrudgingly close neighbours.
Spain
No suitcase (or Kindle) full of Spanish fiction should be without Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece Don Quixote, which follows the adventures of a chivalry-obsessed knight errant. Those with more contemporary tastes should try Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Barcelona-set The Man of my Life, a gripping instalment in the series centred on Pepe Carvalho, a fiery detective with a penchant for fine food and women.
United States
Those intrigued by the US’s troubled past should read Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which follows Sethe and her daughter Denver as they rebuild their lives after slavery. And if you’re heading to the City of Angels, Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective classic The Big Sleep is a must. The first in the Philip Marlowe series, its grim violence and ingenious twists play out on perfectly depicted LA streets.
Greece
There are few summer novels that can beat Louis de Bernières’s wartime love story, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, for sun-drenched landscapes and good old-fashioned yearning. People-watchers will love Panos Karnezis’s Little Infamies, which peeks gleefully into the lives of one village’s inhabitants. Expect priests, prostitutes and Homer-reciting parrots.
Cuba
Those in search of grit should pack Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Dirty Havana Trilogy, a visceral novel that ventures down Havana’s dark alleys and spotlights its lusty inhabitants. The product of a (slightly) more innocent era, Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana is a classic black comedy about James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman turned secret agent.
Mexico
All the Pretty Horses is the first book in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, a coming-of-age epic, which follows adolescent Texan cowboys John and Lacey into the beautiful, brutal Mexican landscape. Foodies, opt for Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. Each chapter in this story of forbidden love begins with a Mexican recipe that is prepared as the chapter’s events unfold.
Argentina
Set in Buenos Aires, Tomás Eloy Martínez’s hallucinatory thriller The Tango Singer joins student Bruno Cadogan on the hunt for an elusive tango legend. Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch recounts the adventures of a flighty Argentinian writer forced to knuckle down as a salesman before getting jobs in an asylum and a circus
New Zealand and Australia
New Zealand’s South Island beaches are the setting for Keri Hulme’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Bone People, a fable that combines Maori myth with dazzling descriptions. For a rollicking read on an Aussie beach, pack Colleen McCullough’s saga The Thorn Birds, which charts the life of Meggie Cleary as she grows up on a sheep station in the Australian outback.
Thailand
Set in lush Thai landscapes, Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork is a nimble adventure story centred on one journalist’s quest to clear the name of an anthropologist wrongfully accused of murder. A must for any backpacker, Alex Garland’s The Beach follows Richard as he infiltrates a seemingly Utopian community in a secret beach paradise, only to find himself part of a brutal Lord of the Flies-style “democracy”.
India
Those journeying south must pack The God of Small Things, a tragic story of devoted twins in which rural Kerala is brought to life by Arundhati Roy’s exquisite prose. Crowned the Best of 40 Years of the Booker Prize, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a history of Indian independence, as told by Saleem Sinai, a mixed-race boy born at the moment India became its own country.
Turkey
Anyone visiting the historic site of Hisarlik should enjoy The Fall of Troy, Peter Ackroyd’s story of the ancient city’s excavation by obsessive and devious archaeologist Heinrich Obermann (based on the similarly natured real life excavator Heinrich Schliemann). And in Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, a group of unlikely travelling companions journey from Istanbul to Trebizond via a host of oddballs.
from: Telegraph
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Is Worldreader.org’s Gift of E-readers to Africans the Right Precedent?
Is the dependence on expensive devices a Western solution to an African problem?
by: Edward Nawotka
Today’s feature story considers the challenges of digital publishing in sub-Saharan Africa. Amongst the key obstacles preventing further proliferation of digital reading across the continent is a lack of cash, political will…and electricity. Innovative programs such as Worldreader.org, which has distributed some 500 Kindles to communities in Ghana and Kenya, cannot help but be viewed in a positive light. The not-for-profit was founded by, among others, David Risher, a former senior vice president of product and platform development at Amazon.com. It has support from Amazon.com, has solicited donations of e-books from Random House, and is active in helping to digitize African titles — around 40 are now available online at the Kindle store. It is drawing interest from the World Bank; several notable authors have also signed on to help as well.
One author who has made his work available for free to Worldreader.org is Cory Doctorow, a pioneer in the free-to-read e-book market. He told Publishers Weekly last month that participating in WorldReader.org was a “no brainer”:
“It’s the first inkling of the real promise of electronic publishing, the realization of the ancient and noble drive to deliver universal access to all human knowledge…” it’s “a situation in which a writer can do good at no cost to himself, no cost to his publisher.”
Worldreader.org is a role model. But is the focus on e-readers — devices which will be largely out of the price range of the vast majority of Africans — a Western solution to what is an endemic African problem? Or is it the answer? As noted in our feature story, finding a reliable source of electricity can be a problem for many Africans and the general consensus on the continent is that the distribution of PDF files is still the cheapest solution, one that allows greatest access to the material to the widest range of people. Many people also believe that focusing on formatting work for cell phones — particularly on those modest feature phones that run Java — might help publisher reach a broader range of readers.
from: Publishing Perspectives
by: Edward Nawotka
Today’s feature story considers the challenges of digital publishing in sub-Saharan Africa. Amongst the key obstacles preventing further proliferation of digital reading across the continent is a lack of cash, political will…and electricity. Innovative programs such as Worldreader.org, which has distributed some 500 Kindles to communities in Ghana and Kenya, cannot help but be viewed in a positive light. The not-for-profit was founded by, among others, David Risher, a former senior vice president of product and platform development at Amazon.com. It has support from Amazon.com, has solicited donations of e-books from Random House, and is active in helping to digitize African titles — around 40 are now available online at the Kindle store. It is drawing interest from the World Bank; several notable authors have also signed on to help as well.
One author who has made his work available for free to Worldreader.org is Cory Doctorow, a pioneer in the free-to-read e-book market. He told Publishers Weekly last month that participating in WorldReader.org was a “no brainer”:
“It’s the first inkling of the real promise of electronic publishing, the realization of the ancient and noble drive to deliver universal access to all human knowledge…” it’s “a situation in which a writer can do good at no cost to himself, no cost to his publisher.”
Worldreader.org is a role model. But is the focus on e-readers — devices which will be largely out of the price range of the vast majority of Africans — a Western solution to what is an endemic African problem? Or is it the answer? As noted in our feature story, finding a reliable source of electricity can be a problem for many Africans and the general consensus on the continent is that the distribution of PDF files is still the cheapest solution, one that allows greatest access to the material to the widest range of people. Many people also believe that focusing on formatting work for cell phones — particularly on those modest feature phones that run Java — might help publisher reach a broader range of readers.
from: Publishing Perspectives
Monday, May 16, 2011
Digital Publishing in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Good News, The Bad News
Sub-Saharan Africa’s dearth of cash, political will and a reliable supply of electricity are preventing the “digital revolution” from making large-scale changes in the way Africans read.
by: Tolu Ogunlesi
The Namibian government has a goal of installing computers in every school and every community library in the country by 2014. This is one of the key objectives of the country’s Vision 2030 policy, according to Veno Kauaria, Director of the Library and Archive Service in Namibia’s Ministry of Education. But like many African countries, it faces crippling infrastructure challenges: an inadequacy of electricity supply, and of internet connectivity.
Kauaria said this during a panel discussion on “Sub-Saharan Africa in the Age of Digital Publishing” at last month’s London Book Fair. The discussion was chaired by Nigel Newton, President of Book Aid International and Chief Executive of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, and featured Chris Paterson, an International Publishing Consultant; Clive Nettleton, Director of Book Aid International; Liz Kendall-Jones, telecoms industry expert and Director of Goalquest Associates Ltd, a consultancy; and Kauaria.
The Good News
No doubt Africa is experiencing something akin to a digital revolution. J.M. Ledgard, writing in the Spring 2011 issue of the Intelligent Life, a publication of The Economist, noted that Kenyan mobile-phone company Safaricom, with 12 million subscribers, “is the most profitable business in east Africa.”
A broadband revolution is currently sweeping East and West Africa with the arrival in recent years of a swathe of optic-fibre cabling. In Nigeria there are more than 90 million mobile phone lines in the country, up from a negligible number a decade ago. The number of internet users has risen from 100,000 in 1999 to more than 40 million today. Around a tenth of these internet subscribers gain access to the internet via their mobile phones.
However, because of dismal infrastructure and high costs of optimal equipment and connectivity, Nettleton says “there will be a need for [printed] books for the foreseeable future.”
Wanted: Textbooks and Other Books, PDF or Otherwise
Textbooks are certainly very important in the African context. Paterson referred to a World Bank report that highlighted textbooks as the “second most important factor in a good education in Africa”, ahead of teacher training and the number of pupils in a class. Only the “home background” of pupils proved to be more important.
There’s a healthy demand (“desperate need” in the words of Nettleton) for textbooks in Africa. The enrollment figure for the Universal Basic Education scheme launched in 1999 by the Nigerian government stood at 21.7 million in 2009. This excludes the estimated 17 million children who should be in school but are not. Those who are fortunate enough to be in school are grossly underserved. According to a survey, more than 70 percent of enrolled pupils in Nigeria lack textbooks.
There remains a thriving textbook publishing market in Nigeria. In a 1992 paper, Tanzanian publisher Walter Bgoya noted: “Currently, the only really viable type of publishing in Africa is textbook production for primary and secondary schools.” Not much has changed since then. In 2004 Nigerian writer and publishing expert Chukwuemeka Ike noted that primary and secondary school textbooks make up as much as 90 percent of the Nigeria’s annual book output. “Foreign book donations help to fill yawning gaps in the publishing output of Nigerian publishing houses and will continue to do so for quite a while,” he added.
Book Aid International is one of those foreign donors. Depending significantly on donations from publishers, in 2010 it shipped half a million “new books” to more than 2,000 libraries in sub-Saharan Africa. (There is of course the downside to book aid; a reliance on donations jeopardizes the business prospects of indigenous publishers. But the current gulf between supply and demand means that Africa needs all the help it can get).
Turning to digital delivery of educational content would help to further bridge the gap, and reduce the costs involved in distributing books. “The cheapest form of delivery is the PDF form of the printed page,” said Paterson. That basic format (Western countries have since progressed to “interactive design”) would be a good place for Africa to start; in Paterson’s words an “interim solution.” (Newton said Bloomsbury currently belongs to a 13-publisher collective that provides –- by subscription -– PDF copies of books to public libraries around the world).
From the audience, Kunle Sogbein, Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Publishers Association, raised a question about the posiibility of “leapfrogging over PCs to smartphones” for the delivery of educational content. There are an estimated one million Blackberries in use in Nigeria –- only a third of these however subscribe to the Blackberry services offered by mobile phone companies; the rest are used as ordinary mobile phones.
The Bad News
Regardless of whether the focus is on PCs or smartphones, the challenges remain enormous. Electricity is needed to power devices. “When it comes to electricity, Africa remains the dark continent. There are a billion Africans, and they use only 4% of the world’s electricity,” Ledgard writes. “Most of that is round the edges, in Egypt, the Maghreb and South Africa.”
Paterson, who has twenty-five years of publishing experience in Southern Africa, said there are 16,000 schools in South Africa that do not have electricity. Considering that South Africa, with less than a third of Nigeria’s population, generates ten times as much electricity, one can only imagine how dismal the situation is in Nigeria.
Kendall-Jones pointed out other challenges apart from absent or grossly inadequate infrastructure: Equipment capability (many of the tens of millions of phones on the continent are low-end models, lacking the sophistication required for internet access, and for downloading and viewing files); government fiscal policies, and security (copyright and piracy issues). The security issue is a critical one; publishers will remain reluctant to digitize their content if there are no workable models for managing lending rights and ensuring that digital and online content are secure from illegal distribution.
The criticisms that have trailed the attempt to provide $100 laptops to children in developing countries will also have to be taken into consideration in any discussion of a digitization project in Africa.
While Africa continues to grapple with these challenges, the global publishing industry continues to move ahead rapidly. As e-books gain popularity in the West, and the production of printed books drops, organizations like Book Aid will find it more difficult to find to attract book donations from publishers. It is therefore in Africa’s interest to keep up with the rate of technological change in the West. Also, digitized illustrated children’s books by African writers will also find it easier to cross over into Western markets, since they will bypass the poor quality print publishing prevalent on the continent.
Nettleton said he believes that the question of digital publishing in Africa is not so much a “technological question” as it is a “political and financial” one. Truly, without any political will on the part of African governments, the continent will continue to be saddled with not only a dysfunctional public education system, but also with infrastructure inadequate to support a true digital revolution. Namibia seems committed to a transformation; several other African countries would do well to pay serious attention to it.
Tolu Ogunlesi is a poet, essayist and features editor at Timbuktu Media/NEXT Newspapers in Lagos, Nigeria. In 2009 he won the Arts & Culture Award at the CNN African Journalist of the Year Awards. He’s currently finishing his MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in the UK.
from: Publishing Perspectives
by: Tolu Ogunlesi
The Namibian government has a goal of installing computers in every school and every community library in the country by 2014. This is one of the key objectives of the country’s Vision 2030 policy, according to Veno Kauaria, Director of the Library and Archive Service in Namibia’s Ministry of Education. But like many African countries, it faces crippling infrastructure challenges: an inadequacy of electricity supply, and of internet connectivity.
Kauaria said this during a panel discussion on “Sub-Saharan Africa in the Age of Digital Publishing” at last month’s London Book Fair. The discussion was chaired by Nigel Newton, President of Book Aid International and Chief Executive of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, and featured Chris Paterson, an International Publishing Consultant; Clive Nettleton, Director of Book Aid International; Liz Kendall-Jones, telecoms industry expert and Director of Goalquest Associates Ltd, a consultancy; and Kauaria.
The Good News
No doubt Africa is experiencing something akin to a digital revolution. J.M. Ledgard, writing in the Spring 2011 issue of the Intelligent Life, a publication of The Economist, noted that Kenyan mobile-phone company Safaricom, with 12 million subscribers, “is the most profitable business in east Africa.”
A broadband revolution is currently sweeping East and West Africa with the arrival in recent years of a swathe of optic-fibre cabling. In Nigeria there are more than 90 million mobile phone lines in the country, up from a negligible number a decade ago. The number of internet users has risen from 100,000 in 1999 to more than 40 million today. Around a tenth of these internet subscribers gain access to the internet via their mobile phones.
However, because of dismal infrastructure and high costs of optimal equipment and connectivity, Nettleton says “there will be a need for [printed] books for the foreseeable future.”
Wanted: Textbooks and Other Books, PDF or Otherwise
Textbooks are certainly very important in the African context. Paterson referred to a World Bank report that highlighted textbooks as the “second most important factor in a good education in Africa”, ahead of teacher training and the number of pupils in a class. Only the “home background” of pupils proved to be more important.
There’s a healthy demand (“desperate need” in the words of Nettleton) for textbooks in Africa. The enrollment figure for the Universal Basic Education scheme launched in 1999 by the Nigerian government stood at 21.7 million in 2009. This excludes the estimated 17 million children who should be in school but are not. Those who are fortunate enough to be in school are grossly underserved. According to a survey, more than 70 percent of enrolled pupils in Nigeria lack textbooks.
There remains a thriving textbook publishing market in Nigeria. In a 1992 paper, Tanzanian publisher Walter Bgoya noted: “Currently, the only really viable type of publishing in Africa is textbook production for primary and secondary schools.” Not much has changed since then. In 2004 Nigerian writer and publishing expert Chukwuemeka Ike noted that primary and secondary school textbooks make up as much as 90 percent of the Nigeria’s annual book output. “Foreign book donations help to fill yawning gaps in the publishing output of Nigerian publishing houses and will continue to do so for quite a while,” he added.
Book Aid International is one of those foreign donors. Depending significantly on donations from publishers, in 2010 it shipped half a million “new books” to more than 2,000 libraries in sub-Saharan Africa. (There is of course the downside to book aid; a reliance on donations jeopardizes the business prospects of indigenous publishers. But the current gulf between supply and demand means that Africa needs all the help it can get).
Turning to digital delivery of educational content would help to further bridge the gap, and reduce the costs involved in distributing books. “The cheapest form of delivery is the PDF form of the printed page,” said Paterson. That basic format (Western countries have since progressed to “interactive design”) would be a good place for Africa to start; in Paterson’s words an “interim solution.” (Newton said Bloomsbury currently belongs to a 13-publisher collective that provides –- by subscription -– PDF copies of books to public libraries around the world).
From the audience, Kunle Sogbein, Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Publishers Association, raised a question about the posiibility of “leapfrogging over PCs to smartphones” for the delivery of educational content. There are an estimated one million Blackberries in use in Nigeria –- only a third of these however subscribe to the Blackberry services offered by mobile phone companies; the rest are used as ordinary mobile phones.
The Bad News
Regardless of whether the focus is on PCs or smartphones, the challenges remain enormous. Electricity is needed to power devices. “When it comes to electricity, Africa remains the dark continent. There are a billion Africans, and they use only 4% of the world’s electricity,” Ledgard writes. “Most of that is round the edges, in Egypt, the Maghreb and South Africa.”
Paterson, who has twenty-five years of publishing experience in Southern Africa, said there are 16,000 schools in South Africa that do not have electricity. Considering that South Africa, with less than a third of Nigeria’s population, generates ten times as much electricity, one can only imagine how dismal the situation is in Nigeria.
Kendall-Jones pointed out other challenges apart from absent or grossly inadequate infrastructure: Equipment capability (many of the tens of millions of phones on the continent are low-end models, lacking the sophistication required for internet access, and for downloading and viewing files); government fiscal policies, and security (copyright and piracy issues). The security issue is a critical one; publishers will remain reluctant to digitize their content if there are no workable models for managing lending rights and ensuring that digital and online content are secure from illegal distribution.
The criticisms that have trailed the attempt to provide $100 laptops to children in developing countries will also have to be taken into consideration in any discussion of a digitization project in Africa.
While Africa continues to grapple with these challenges, the global publishing industry continues to move ahead rapidly. As e-books gain popularity in the West, and the production of printed books drops, organizations like Book Aid will find it more difficult to find to attract book donations from publishers. It is therefore in Africa’s interest to keep up with the rate of technological change in the West. Also, digitized illustrated children’s books by African writers will also find it easier to cross over into Western markets, since they will bypass the poor quality print publishing prevalent on the continent.
Nettleton said he believes that the question of digital publishing in Africa is not so much a “technological question” as it is a “political and financial” one. Truly, without any political will on the part of African governments, the continent will continue to be saddled with not only a dysfunctional public education system, but also with infrastructure inadequate to support a true digital revolution. Namibia seems committed to a transformation; several other African countries would do well to pay serious attention to it.
Tolu Ogunlesi is a poet, essayist and features editor at Timbuktu Media/NEXT Newspapers in Lagos, Nigeria. In 2009 he won the Arts & Culture Award at the CNN African Journalist of the Year Awards. He’s currently finishing his MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in the UK.
from: Publishing Perspectives
Saturday, May 14, 2011
A Library is Many Things
Early-1971, in an effort to attract as many youngsters to the premises as possible, Marguerite Hart — children's librarian at the newly-opened public library in Troy, Michigan — wrote to a number of notable people with a request: to reply with a congratulatory letter, addressed to the children of Troy, in which the benefits of visiting such a library were explained in some form. It's heartening to know that an impressive 97 people did exactly that, and below are just four of those replies, all from authors: Isaac Asimov; Hardie Gramatky; Theodore Geisel; and E. B. White.
(Although sadly a common situation these days, it's worth noting that Troy Public Library is currently dodging closure. How long it remains open is a mystery.)
Transcripts follow. All images courtesy of Troy Public Library.
(Although sadly a common situation these days, it's worth noting that Troy Public Library is currently dodging closure. How long it remains open is a mystery.)
UPDATE: Philip Kwik of Troy Public Library has been in touch. All 97 letters have now been posted to the library website and can be viewed, as PDFs, by following this link. This is an incredible collection of letters from a whole host of names, and makes for amazing reading. Many thanks Philip.
Transcripts follow. All images courtesy of Troy Public Library.
from: Letters of Note (thanks to Amanda F for the link)
Thursday, May 12, 2011
LA Noire videogame inspires short story collection
Joyce Carol Oates among writers contributing to anthology inspired by much-hyped detective game
by: Alison Flood
A literary glimpse into the world of much-hyped new videogame LA Noire is being provided by authors including Joyce Carol Oates and Lawrence Block, who are contributing to a new anthology of stories set in the world of the game.
Out next week from Rockstar Games, makers of Grand Theft Auto, LA Noire takes place in 1940s Los Angeles and pits gamers against historically-inspired crimes. An unusual collaboration with Mulholland Books will also see the publication in June of a collection of short stories based on the game's characters and cases, with contributors ranging from the award-winning Oates and Block to the bestselling Francine Prose and Edgar-nominated thriller writer Duane Swierczynski.
"Using the game's world as a springboard, we worked with the genre's best writers to create stories that lived up to the finest traditions of crime fiction," said Rockstar founder Sam Houser. "LA Noire draws on a rich history of not just film, but also great crime literature for inspiration."
Oates's story, Black Dahlia and White Rose, centres on the notorious murder of actress Elizabeth Short in 1947, imagining her living in an apartment with a young Marilyn Monroe. It is not the first time the National Book award-winning author has mixed fact with fiction: her novel Black Water was inspired by the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, while My Sister, My Love took inspiration from the murder of JonBenét Ramsey.
To be published on 6 June as an ebook, LA Noire: The Collected Stories also includes Block's See the Woman, in which a retired LA cop tells a story of domestic abuse, and Swierczynski's Hell of an Affair, which follows LA Noire character William Shelton "into a headlong collision with the wrong side of the law".
"I start feeling it in the middle of the afternoon and it gets worse by night, pictures flashing inside my head, that gnawing feeling in my gut like I'm starving, obsession building like steam under the goddamn LA streets, ready to blow," writes Jonathan Santlofer in his contribution, What's In A Name? Santlofer, who edited and curated the project, told Entertainment Weekly that he decided to get involved because "all I could think of is these millions of gamers being introduced to these stories, written stories, and it struck me as this great synergy between these two different kinds of storytelling".
"I think the idea of expanding their readership to include gamers was really appealing to all the writers," said Santlofer. "My story was inspired by the serial killer in the game. I don't name him, but I drew from the game. I wanted to create a psychological backstory for him. It was also fun to play with the iconography and cultural elements of Los Angeles 1947. Musso and Frank's. Hollywood Boulevard. The winds that come in through the basin. I also play with the real-life gangsters that are in the game, like Mickey Cohen and Johnny Stompanato."
Other authors writing stories for the anthology include Megan Abbott, Joe Lansdale and Andrew Vachss. Publisher Michael Pietsch said the move heralded "a new frontier of book publishing possibilities". "The possibilities for cross-promotions of this nature, encouraging gamers to read and readers to play games are huge," he said.
from: Guardian
by: Alison Flood
 |
| LA Noire ... 'the finest traditions of crime fiction' |
A literary glimpse into the world of much-hyped new videogame LA Noire is being provided by authors including Joyce Carol Oates and Lawrence Block, who are contributing to a new anthology of stories set in the world of the game.
Out next week from Rockstar Games, makers of Grand Theft Auto, LA Noire takes place in 1940s Los Angeles and pits gamers against historically-inspired crimes. An unusual collaboration with Mulholland Books will also see the publication in June of a collection of short stories based on the game's characters and cases, with contributors ranging from the award-winning Oates and Block to the bestselling Francine Prose and Edgar-nominated thriller writer Duane Swierczynski.
"Using the game's world as a springboard, we worked with the genre's best writers to create stories that lived up to the finest traditions of crime fiction," said Rockstar founder Sam Houser. "LA Noire draws on a rich history of not just film, but also great crime literature for inspiration."
Oates's story, Black Dahlia and White Rose, centres on the notorious murder of actress Elizabeth Short in 1947, imagining her living in an apartment with a young Marilyn Monroe. It is not the first time the National Book award-winning author has mixed fact with fiction: her novel Black Water was inspired by the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, while My Sister, My Love took inspiration from the murder of JonBenét Ramsey.
To be published on 6 June as an ebook, LA Noire: The Collected Stories also includes Block's See the Woman, in which a retired LA cop tells a story of domestic abuse, and Swierczynski's Hell of an Affair, which follows LA Noire character William Shelton "into a headlong collision with the wrong side of the law".
"I start feeling it in the middle of the afternoon and it gets worse by night, pictures flashing inside my head, that gnawing feeling in my gut like I'm starving, obsession building like steam under the goddamn LA streets, ready to blow," writes Jonathan Santlofer in his contribution, What's In A Name? Santlofer, who edited and curated the project, told Entertainment Weekly that he decided to get involved because "all I could think of is these millions of gamers being introduced to these stories, written stories, and it struck me as this great synergy between these two different kinds of storytelling".
"I think the idea of expanding their readership to include gamers was really appealing to all the writers," said Santlofer. "My story was inspired by the serial killer in the game. I don't name him, but I drew from the game. I wanted to create a psychological backstory for him. It was also fun to play with the iconography and cultural elements of Los Angeles 1947. Musso and Frank's. Hollywood Boulevard. The winds that come in through the basin. I also play with the real-life gangsters that are in the game, like Mickey Cohen and Johnny Stompanato."
Other authors writing stories for the anthology include Megan Abbott, Joe Lansdale and Andrew Vachss. Publisher Michael Pietsch said the move heralded "a new frontier of book publishing possibilities". "The possibilities for cross-promotions of this nature, encouraging gamers to read and readers to play games are huge," he said.
from: Guardian
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Author opens one-book shop to sell his own work
Andrew Kessler sets up 'monobookist' outlet in New York to promote his study of Nasa's Mars probe, Martian Summer
by: Alison Flood
New author? Don't want to compete with the bestselling might of Stephenie Meyer or Stieg Larsson? Then why not try Andrew Kessler's approach, and set up a bookshop that stocks only one title: your own.
Kessler, who calls his project "monobookism", opened his shop on Hudson Street in New York last month. It contains 3,000 copies of his book Martian Summer, displayed in "new and noteworthy" sections, under "new in non-fiction", under "science" – and with a sign for the wary, "We have one book but we're NOT scientologists", sitting outside.
An "armchair astronaut's" account of the 2008 Nasa mission to Mars, Martian Summer was published by Pegasus in April. It sees Kessler, a writer and creative director at an advertising agency, charting the day-to-day dramas of the Phoenix mission that explored the planet's north pole, after he won "the nerd lottery" to spend three months in mission control with 130 scientists.
Kessler said he decided to set the shop up because, given publishing's current difficulties and his own position as "a new, non-famous, scandal-free author", he was "a little worried about how anyone would ever see my book".
"I felt I was just going to send it out in the world, close my eyes and hope for the best (with my two inches of shelf space at the local bookshop). I couldn't do that. I promised Nasa that I was going to tell the world a new kind of space story – for better or worse," he said. "One day after a meatball dinner at a store on the Lower East Side that only sells meatballs, The Meatball Shop. I stumbled outside, looked up and saw a church. And then I realised I could try to sell my book like a meatball. Monobookism was born."
He called in favours, dipped into his savings account and pulled the project together "on a shoestring budget". "You have to take some risk if you're going to dream big," he said. "I do have a solid appreciation for all the commenters who've written me off as a 'stupid hipster trust-fund kid'. But in the end it was the generous support of friends and fans of Martian Summer that really made it happen."
With the shop's run set to come to an end on 16 May, Kessler is gearing up to take an inventory of how many copies he's sold. Reactions to the store, he says, have been varied. "Some people come in and hug whomever happens to be working in the store because they love it. And some people demand to know – aggressively – how we could be so foolish. That makes for a pretty unique work environment."
from: Guardian
by: Alison Flood
 |
| Shelf promotion ... Andrew Kessler opens ‘monobookist’ outlet in New York to sell copies of his own Martian Summer |
Kessler, who calls his project "monobookism", opened his shop on Hudson Street in New York last month. It contains 3,000 copies of his book Martian Summer, displayed in "new and noteworthy" sections, under "new in non-fiction", under "science" – and with a sign for the wary, "We have one book but we're NOT scientologists", sitting outside.
An "armchair astronaut's" account of the 2008 Nasa mission to Mars, Martian Summer was published by Pegasus in April. It sees Kessler, a writer and creative director at an advertising agency, charting the day-to-day dramas of the Phoenix mission that explored the planet's north pole, after he won "the nerd lottery" to spend three months in mission control with 130 scientists.
Kessler said he decided to set the shop up because, given publishing's current difficulties and his own position as "a new, non-famous, scandal-free author", he was "a little worried about how anyone would ever see my book".
"I felt I was just going to send it out in the world, close my eyes and hope for the best (with my two inches of shelf space at the local bookshop). I couldn't do that. I promised Nasa that I was going to tell the world a new kind of space story – for better or worse," he said. "One day after a meatball dinner at a store on the Lower East Side that only sells meatballs, The Meatball Shop. I stumbled outside, looked up and saw a church. And then I realised I could try to sell my book like a meatball. Monobookism was born."
He called in favours, dipped into his savings account and pulled the project together "on a shoestring budget". "You have to take some risk if you're going to dream big," he said. "I do have a solid appreciation for all the commenters who've written me off as a 'stupid hipster trust-fund kid'. But in the end it was the generous support of friends and fans of Martian Summer that really made it happen."
With the shop's run set to come to an end on 16 May, Kessler is gearing up to take an inventory of how many copies he's sold. Reactions to the store, he says, have been varied. "Some people come in and hug whomever happens to be working in the store because they love it. And some people demand to know – aggressively – how we could be so foolish. That makes for a pretty unique work environment."
from: Guardian
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Digital technology rapidly changing the way China reads
While traditional forms are still the norm in China, there has been a massive rise in the use of digital technology for reading purposes.
According to the Eighth National Reading Survey - conducted by the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication - there was a 200 percent rise in the use of e-book readers in 2010, while mobile phones were now the preferred medium for 23 percent of respondents. It also found those aged between 18 and 70 now, on average, spend around 42 minutes per day reading online.
E-book readers may still account for just 3.9 percent of those polled for the survey but a spokesman for the academy said given that China has around 600 million mobile phone users - and that more than half of those users were rural residents with limited access to resources - reading via digital appliances was a trend that was only going to get more and more popular in China.
The survey found that on average Chinese people read 4.25 books per year, 101.16 editions of newspapers, 7.19 editions of magazines and 0.73 e-books.
The Chinese survey polled 19,418 people across 29 of China's provinces during the period of September 2010 through January 2011.
In comparison, the most recent survey held into the reading habits of Hong Kongers - collated during the 2009 edition of the city's end-of-year Book Fair - found that 60 percent of adults spent five hours or more a week reading.
That survey found 73 percent of China's more tech-savvy southern cousins used the internet to read and that 43 percent read e-books. Meanwhile, 16 percent of Hong Kongers said they used their mobile phones to read, while six percent used iPods.
What China reads ...
1. Newspapers 66.8 percent; 2. Books 52.3 percent; 3. Magazines 46.9 percent; 4. Mobile phones 23 percent; 5. Internet 18.1 per cent; 6. E-book readers 3.9 per cent; 7. Personal digital assistant/MP4/Electronic dictionary 2.6 percent; 8. CD/DVD 1.8 percent.
How long China spends reading ...
1. Internet 42.7 minutes per day; 2. Newspapers 23.7 minutes per day; 3. Books 16.8 minutes per day; 4. Magazines 13.7 minutes per day; 5. Mobile phones 10.3 minutes per day.
What China prefers to read ...
1. Paper books 68.3 percent; 2. E-books online 21.4 percent; 3. Mobile phones 10.2 percent; 4. E-book readers 2.8 percent; 5. Printed from the internet 1.7 percent.
Figures from the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication
from: Independent
 |
AFP PHOTO / MIKE CLARKE |
E-book readers may still account for just 3.9 percent of those polled for the survey but a spokesman for the academy said given that China has around 600 million mobile phone users - and that more than half of those users were rural residents with limited access to resources - reading via digital appliances was a trend that was only going to get more and more popular in China.
The survey found that on average Chinese people read 4.25 books per year, 101.16 editions of newspapers, 7.19 editions of magazines and 0.73 e-books.
The Chinese survey polled 19,418 people across 29 of China's provinces during the period of September 2010 through January 2011.
In comparison, the most recent survey held into the reading habits of Hong Kongers - collated during the 2009 edition of the city's end-of-year Book Fair - found that 60 percent of adults spent five hours or more a week reading.
That survey found 73 percent of China's more tech-savvy southern cousins used the internet to read and that 43 percent read e-books. Meanwhile, 16 percent of Hong Kongers said they used their mobile phones to read, while six percent used iPods.
What China reads ...
1. Newspapers 66.8 percent; 2. Books 52.3 percent; 3. Magazines 46.9 percent; 4. Mobile phones 23 percent; 5. Internet 18.1 per cent; 6. E-book readers 3.9 per cent; 7. Personal digital assistant/MP4/Electronic dictionary 2.6 percent; 8. CD/DVD 1.8 percent.
How long China spends reading ...
1. Internet 42.7 minutes per day; 2. Newspapers 23.7 minutes per day; 3. Books 16.8 minutes per day; 4. Magazines 13.7 minutes per day; 5. Mobile phones 10.3 minutes per day.
What China prefers to read ...
1. Paper books 68.3 percent; 2. E-books online 21.4 percent; 3. Mobile phones 10.2 percent; 4. E-book readers 2.8 percent; 5. Printed from the internet 1.7 percent.
Figures from the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication
from: Independent
Monday, May 9, 2011
How do you get teen boys to read? Girls, of course
by: Joe Robertson
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The question wasn’t intended to be such a stumper.
Fourteen-year-old John Miller simply was supposed to name a favorite book he read before the one that changed his life — the one that had "naked girl" right there in the opening paragraph.
It wasn’t like he never read books. But truthfully, he and many of his classmates at Platte City Middle School in Platte City, Mo., were caught in the same malaise that seems to infect so many boys across the nation.
Book reading was a chore.
A time waster.
Said 13-year-old Parker Ward: "Most books don’t fit me."
So goes the back story. This was the conflict that imperiled the teens before the big turnaround that would inspire young-adult fiction writer Don Calame — the very author of the words "naked girl" — to come all the way from his home in British Columbia on Wednesday to visit a school in a small town he’d never heard of.
You’ve got your typical boys. Then bring in Kelly Miller, assuming the role of the relentless eighth-grade English teacher. She’s determined to buck the odds and get all her students — boys and girls — to meet a goal of reading 30 novels this school year.
Miller knew the same general facts that had troubled Calame:
Boys read less than girls. Surveys show they’re more likely to have a negative experience with books. And boys lag behind girls in reading skills.
A 2010 study by the Center on Education Policy found an essentially universal gap between boys and girls performing proficient or better on state reading tests. The average gap in per centage points was seven to eight and persisted from grade school through high school.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress — known as the Nation’s Report Card — showed the same gender gap growing from seven points in fourth grade to nine points in eighth grade and 12 points in high school.
The boys in Miller’s class can explain what the teacher and the author were up against.
A collection of them, talking about reading late last week as their school prepared for Calame’s visit, figured that before this year probably 15 to 20 per cent of the boys were big readers. Most of the remaining 80 to 85 per cent basically didn’t read any more than they had to.
It was "more normal not to read," they agreed.
"It used to be I’d look at the first page," 14-year-old Chris Barngrover said. "I’d look at the size of the print." Small print meant more words, "and I’d throw it back."
This state of affairs troubled Calame, a screenwriter originally from New York’s Long Island, who grew up loving to read.
His response? Write "Swim the Fly," an honest tale of a teenage boy’s character-building summer, and begin it this way:
"Movies don’t count," Cooper says. "The Internet doesn’t count. Magazines don’t count. A real, live naked girl. That’s the deal. That’s our goal for this summer."
It’s an often hilarious novel. Although the obsession of seeing a naked girl drives much of the plot, that’s not really what the story is about. But that and some of the language, and the low-brow humor of boys, not to mention the undercurrent of sexuality that dominates teen lives, prompted Common Sense Media to warn parents by labeling the book as "iffy."
"I sat down to write a book that would speak to the 15-year-old boy I was," Calame said. "Be true. Be honest. Make the kids real. Make their thoughts real. ... If it’s not what they hear, if it’s not how they talk, they’ll put it down. (They will think) it’s like the author is lying to us.
"You want to get books in the hands of kids. You want them to read the next page, then the next chapter. You want to keep them reading."
Kelly Miller came across the book when she searched the Internet for "funny books for boys." At the top of her list: "Swim the Fly." Her copy arrived, "and six hours later," she said, "I’d laughed so hard I knew I had success in my hands."
She added several copies to the more than 2,000 books on shelves lining her classroom. She suggested that a few of her students give it a try, and they took it from there.
"It clicked in my brain," said John Miller, no relation to the teacher.
"It was amazing," said Parker.
Boys who usually took more than a month to read a book were reading this one in a matter of days. Most also read Calame’s second book, "Beat the Band."
The culture around reading shifted dramatically, the boys said. By a show of hands, most were now past 20 books read for the year, and many had gone beyond 30.
The pained answers around what they had read before "Swim" turned to a flood when they were asked what they’ve read since.
"Twisted," by Laurie Halse Anderson. "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," by John Boyne. "I Am Number Four," by Pittacus Lore. "Rot & Ruin," by Jonathan Maberry. "The Hunger Games," by Suzanne Collins. "King of the Screwups," by K.L Going ... and on and on.
Some of the books bear themes that might make some parents nervous — zombies, deadly reality shows, teen sex angst.
But now, the boys figure, there is no longer the imbalanced division between readers and non-readers. There’s a huge middle class, they say, with some 70 per cent of the boys calling themselves readers, right behind the 15 per cent who say they’re heavy readers.
Several boys said their reading levels, based on aptitude tests, had jumped far into the high school range. Miller said there were students in remedial reading programs who had surged toward the 30-book goal.
"That makes a teacher cry," she said.
Kelly Miller dispatched an email to Calame’s website last year, telling him of the reading renaissance his books had done so much to inspire. And Calame and his editor decided he had to come and see for himself. Teens were reading.
"That was the whole goal," he said. "That it is happening is amazing to me."
from: Vancouver Sun
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The question wasn’t intended to be such a stumper.
Fourteen-year-old John Miller simply was supposed to name a favorite book he read before the one that changed his life — the one that had "naked girl" right there in the opening paragraph.
It wasn’t like he never read books. But truthfully, he and many of his classmates at Platte City Middle School in Platte City, Mo., were caught in the same malaise that seems to infect so many boys across the nation.
Book reading was a chore.
A time waster.
Said 13-year-old Parker Ward: "Most books don’t fit me."
So goes the back story. This was the conflict that imperiled the teens before the big turnaround that would inspire young-adult fiction writer Don Calame — the very author of the words "naked girl" — to come all the way from his home in British Columbia on Wednesday to visit a school in a small town he’d never heard of.
You’ve got your typical boys. Then bring in Kelly Miller, assuming the role of the relentless eighth-grade English teacher. She’s determined to buck the odds and get all her students — boys and girls — to meet a goal of reading 30 novels this school year.
Miller knew the same general facts that had troubled Calame:
Boys read less than girls. Surveys show they’re more likely to have a negative experience with books. And boys lag behind girls in reading skills.
A 2010 study by the Center on Education Policy found an essentially universal gap between boys and girls performing proficient or better on state reading tests. The average gap in per centage points was seven to eight and persisted from grade school through high school.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress — known as the Nation’s Report Card — showed the same gender gap growing from seven points in fourth grade to nine points in eighth grade and 12 points in high school.
The boys in Miller’s class can explain what the teacher and the author were up against.
A collection of them, talking about reading late last week as their school prepared for Calame’s visit, figured that before this year probably 15 to 20 per cent of the boys were big readers. Most of the remaining 80 to 85 per cent basically didn’t read any more than they had to.
It was "more normal not to read," they agreed.
"It used to be I’d look at the first page," 14-year-old Chris Barngrover said. "I’d look at the size of the print." Small print meant more words, "and I’d throw it back."
This state of affairs troubled Calame, a screenwriter originally from New York’s Long Island, who grew up loving to read.
His response? Write "Swim the Fly," an honest tale of a teenage boy’s character-building summer, and begin it this way:
"Movies don’t count," Cooper says. "The Internet doesn’t count. Magazines don’t count. A real, live naked girl. That’s the deal. That’s our goal for this summer."
It’s an often hilarious novel. Although the obsession of seeing a naked girl drives much of the plot, that’s not really what the story is about. But that and some of the language, and the low-brow humor of boys, not to mention the undercurrent of sexuality that dominates teen lives, prompted Common Sense Media to warn parents by labeling the book as "iffy."
"I sat down to write a book that would speak to the 15-year-old boy I was," Calame said. "Be true. Be honest. Make the kids real. Make their thoughts real. ... If it’s not what they hear, if it’s not how they talk, they’ll put it down. (They will think) it’s like the author is lying to us.
"You want to get books in the hands of kids. You want them to read the next page, then the next chapter. You want to keep them reading."
Kelly Miller came across the book when she searched the Internet for "funny books for boys." At the top of her list: "Swim the Fly." Her copy arrived, "and six hours later," she said, "I’d laughed so hard I knew I had success in my hands."
She added several copies to the more than 2,000 books on shelves lining her classroom. She suggested that a few of her students give it a try, and they took it from there.
"It clicked in my brain," said John Miller, no relation to the teacher.
"It was amazing," said Parker.
Boys who usually took more than a month to read a book were reading this one in a matter of days. Most also read Calame’s second book, "Beat the Band."
The culture around reading shifted dramatically, the boys said. By a show of hands, most were now past 20 books read for the year, and many had gone beyond 30.
The pained answers around what they had read before "Swim" turned to a flood when they were asked what they’ve read since.
"Twisted," by Laurie Halse Anderson. "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," by John Boyne. "I Am Number Four," by Pittacus Lore. "Rot & Ruin," by Jonathan Maberry. "The Hunger Games," by Suzanne Collins. "King of the Screwups," by K.L Going ... and on and on.
Some of the books bear themes that might make some parents nervous — zombies, deadly reality shows, teen sex angst.
But now, the boys figure, there is no longer the imbalanced division between readers and non-readers. There’s a huge middle class, they say, with some 70 per cent of the boys calling themselves readers, right behind the 15 per cent who say they’re heavy readers.
Several boys said their reading levels, based on aptitude tests, had jumped far into the high school range. Miller said there were students in remedial reading programs who had surged toward the 30-book goal.
"That makes a teacher cry," she said.
Kelly Miller dispatched an email to Calame’s website last year, telling him of the reading renaissance his books had done so much to inspire. And Calame and his editor decided he had to come and see for himself. Teens were reading.
"That was the whole goal," he said. "That it is happening is amazing to me."
from: Vancouver Sun
Saturday, May 7, 2011
It's a Jungle Out There
New study uncovers gender bias in children's books with male characters, including male animals, leading the fictional pack
Tallahassee, FL-- The most comprehensive study of 20th century children's books ever undertaken in the United States has found a bias towards tales that feature men and boys as lead characters. Surprisingly, researchers found that even when the characters are animals, they tend to be male.
The findings, published in the April issue of Gender & Society, are based on a study of nearly 6,000 books published from 1900 to 2000. While previous studies have looked at the representation of male and female characters in children's books, they were often limited in scope. "We looked at a full century of books," says lead author Prof. Janice McCabe, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida State University. "One thing that surprised us is that females' representations did not consistently improve from 1900 to 2000; in the mid part of the century it was actually more unequal. Books became more male-dominated."
The study also found that:
•Males are central characters in 57 percent of children's books published per year, while only 31 percent have female central characters.
•No more than 33 percent of children's books published in any given year contain central characters that are adult women or female animals, but adult men and male animals appear in up to 100 percent of books.
•Male animals are central characters in more than 23 percent of books per year, while female animals are in only 7.5 percent.
•On average, 36.5 percent of books in each year studied include a male in the title, compared to 17.5 percent that include a female.
•Although books published in the 1990s came close to parity for human characters (with a ratio of 0.9:1 for child characters; 1.2:1 for adult characters), a significant disparity of nearly 2 to 1 remains for male animal characters versus female.
Since children's books are a "dominant blueprint of shared cultural values, meanings, and expectations," the authors say the disparity between male and female characters is sending children a message that "women and girls occupy a less important role in society than men or boys." Books contribute to how children understand what is expected of women and men, and shape the way children will think about their own place in the world.
The authors collected information from the full series of three sources: Caldecott award-winning books, (1938-2000); Little Golden Books, (1942-1993) and the Children's Catalog, (1900-2000). They found that Golden Books tended to have the most unbalanced representations.
A closer look at the types of characters with the greatest disparity reveals that only one Caldecott winner has a female animal as a central character without any male central characters. The 1985 book Have You Seen My Duckling? follows Mother Duck asking other pond animals this question as she searches for a missing duckling.
In seeking to answer why there is such persistent inequality among animal characters in books for kids, the authors say some publishers—under pressure to release books that are more gender balanced—use "animal characters in an attempt to avoid the problem of gender representation." However, their findings show that most animal characters are gendered and that inequality among animals is greater—not less—than that among humans.
The tendency of readers to interpret even gender-neutral animal characters as male exaggerates the pattern of female underrepresentation. The authors note that mothers frequently label gender-neutral animal characters as male when reading with their children, and that children assign gender to gender-neutral animal characters. "Together with research on reader interpretations, our findings regarding imbalanced representations among animal characters suggest that these characters could be particularly powerful, and potentially overlooked, conduits for gendered messages…The persistent pattern of disparity among animal characters may reveal a subtle kind of symbolic annihilation of women disguised through animal imagery."
from: EurekaAlert
Tallahassee, FL-- The most comprehensive study of 20th century children's books ever undertaken in the United States has found a bias towards tales that feature men and boys as lead characters. Surprisingly, researchers found that even when the characters are animals, they tend to be male.
The findings, published in the April issue of Gender & Society, are based on a study of nearly 6,000 books published from 1900 to 2000. While previous studies have looked at the representation of male and female characters in children's books, they were often limited in scope. "We looked at a full century of books," says lead author Prof. Janice McCabe, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida State University. "One thing that surprised us is that females' representations did not consistently improve from 1900 to 2000; in the mid part of the century it was actually more unequal. Books became more male-dominated."
The study also found that:
•Males are central characters in 57 percent of children's books published per year, while only 31 percent have female central characters.
•No more than 33 percent of children's books published in any given year contain central characters that are adult women or female animals, but adult men and male animals appear in up to 100 percent of books.
•Male animals are central characters in more than 23 percent of books per year, while female animals are in only 7.5 percent.
•On average, 36.5 percent of books in each year studied include a male in the title, compared to 17.5 percent that include a female.
•Although books published in the 1990s came close to parity for human characters (with a ratio of 0.9:1 for child characters; 1.2:1 for adult characters), a significant disparity of nearly 2 to 1 remains for male animal characters versus female.
Since children's books are a "dominant blueprint of shared cultural values, meanings, and expectations," the authors say the disparity between male and female characters is sending children a message that "women and girls occupy a less important role in society than men or boys." Books contribute to how children understand what is expected of women and men, and shape the way children will think about their own place in the world.
The authors collected information from the full series of three sources: Caldecott award-winning books, (1938-2000); Little Golden Books, (1942-1993) and the Children's Catalog, (1900-2000). They found that Golden Books tended to have the most unbalanced representations.
A closer look at the types of characters with the greatest disparity reveals that only one Caldecott winner has a female animal as a central character without any male central characters. The 1985 book Have You Seen My Duckling? follows Mother Duck asking other pond animals this question as she searches for a missing duckling.
In seeking to answer why there is such persistent inequality among animal characters in books for kids, the authors say some publishers—under pressure to release books that are more gender balanced—use "animal characters in an attempt to avoid the problem of gender representation." However, their findings show that most animal characters are gendered and that inequality among animals is greater—not less—than that among humans.
The tendency of readers to interpret even gender-neutral animal characters as male exaggerates the pattern of female underrepresentation. The authors note that mothers frequently label gender-neutral animal characters as male when reading with their children, and that children assign gender to gender-neutral animal characters. "Together with research on reader interpretations, our findings regarding imbalanced representations among animal characters suggest that these characters could be particularly powerful, and potentially overlooked, conduits for gendered messages…The persistent pattern of disparity among animal characters may reveal a subtle kind of symbolic annihilation of women disguised through animal imagery."
*********************************************
Gender & Society is consistently ranked as one of the top journals in both Women's Studies and Sociology. It is published by Sociologists for Women in Society, a non-profit, scientific and educational organization with more than 1,000 members.from: EurekaAlert
Friday, May 6, 2011
The secret life of libraries
They have always had a dusty image – and never more so than now – but libraries are at the heart of our communities. With the axe about to fall, Bella Bathurst reveals just what we're about to lose
by: Bella Bathurst
You can tell a lot about people from the kind of books they steal. Every year, the public library service brings out a new batch of statistics on their most-pilfered novelists – Martina Cole, James Patterson, Jacqueline Wilson, JK Rowling. But in practice, different parts of Britain favour different books. Worksop likes antiques guides and hip-hop biographies. Brent prefers books on accountancy and nursing, or the driving theory test. Swansea gets through a lot of copies of the UK Citizenship Test. In Barnsley, it's Mig welding and tattoos ("I've still no idea what Mig welding is," says Ian Stringer, retired mobile librarian for the area. "The books always got taken before I could find out.") And Marylebone Library in London has achieved a rare equality. Their most stolen items are The Jewish Chronicle, Arabic newspapers and the Bible.
But the figures show something else as well – that among all communities and in all parts of Britain, our old passion for self-improvement remains vivid. Unlike DVDs or CDs or Xbox games, books removed from public libraries have no resale value. Unless they're very rare or very specialist, even hardbacks aren't worth anything anymore. So the only reason to take books is to read them.
Even so, theft remains a sensitive subject. "If someone suggested the idea of public libraries now, they'd be considered insane," says Peter Collins, library services manager in Worksop. "If you said you were going to take a little bit of money from every taxpayer, buy a whole load of books and music and games, stick them on a shelf and tell everyone, 'These are yours to borrow and all you've got to do is bring them back,' they'd be laughed out of government." But theft – or loss, or forgetting – is not a new thing. During the 1930s, supposedly a far more upright age, 8.8m books vanished from the library system every year.
There are 4,500 public libraries in Britain, as well as almost 1,000 national and academic libraries. As local authority budgets are reduced by the government's cuts, up to 500 libraries around the country will have to close. Librarians – traditionally seen as a mild, herbivorous breed – are up in arms. Partly because public libraries are often seen as a soft target; partly because they say local authorities consistently undervalue the breadth of what they do; and partly because the cutting will be done during a recession, which is exactly when everyone starts going to the library again.
But the cuts also underscore a deeper confusion about what libraries are: what they do, who they serve, and – in an age where the notion of books itself seems mortally flawed – why we still need them. What's the point of buildings filled with print? Isn't all our wisdom electronic now? Shouldn't libraries die at their appointed time, like workhouses and temperance halls?
The old clichés do not help the cause, given that libraries are meant to be austere places smelling of "damp gabardine and luncheon meat", as Victoria Wood put it, and librarians are either diffident, mole-eyed types or disappointed spinsters of limited social skills who spend their time blacking out the racing pages and razoring Page 3.
In Worksop, Peter Collins radiates a love both of libraries and for the infinite variety of people who use them. He's 33 and "always defined myself by being a librarian. I'd say to girls: 'Guess what I do for a living?' Admittedly, they were the kind of girls who might be impressed when I told them I had an MA in librarianship, but I was just so proud of it, so in love with what I did. When I first met my future wife, she got a tirade about the magic of libraries."
Collins believes that libraries are just as vital now as they were during the 40s, when Philip Larkin complained of stamping out so many books in a week that his hand blistered. Even so, he spends much of his time in a ceaseless game of catch-up. "Libraries are always trying to prove themselves because what they provide is so intangible. How do you quantify what someone gets from a book or a magazine?"
Attempts to do so often end up in trouble. "The council once asked us for an assessment of outcomes, not output," says Ian Stringer. "Output was how many books we'd stamped out, and outcome was something that had actually resulted from someone borrowing a book. So say someone took out a book on mending cars and then drove the car back, that's an outcome; or made a batch of scones from a recipe book they had borrowed. It lasted until one of the librarians told the council they'd had someone in borrowing a book on suicide, but that they'd never brought it back. The council stopped asking after that."
The great untold truth of libraries is that people need them not because they're about study and solitude, but because they're about connection. Some sense of their emotional value is given by the writer Mavis Cheek, who ran workshops within both Holloway and Erlestoke prisons. At Erlestoke she had groups of eight men who so enjoyed the freedom and contact of the writing groups they ended up breaking into the prison library when they found it shut one day. Which authors did they like best? "Graham Greene," says Cheek. "All that adventure and penance. His stuff moves fast, it's spare and it's direct."
Greene might seem a surprising choice, but then what people choose to read in extremis often is. In London during the Second World War, some authorities established small collections of books in air-raid shelters. The unused Tube station at Bethnal Green had a library of 4,000 volumes and a nightly clientele of 6,000 people. And what those wartime readers chose were not practical how-to manuals on sewing or home repairs, but philosophy. Plato and his Republic experienced a sudden surge in popularity, as did Schopenhauer, Bertrand Russell, Bunyan and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.
Ian Stringer worked in Barnsley just after the 1980s miners' strike. "Library issues doubled during the strike, they were the highest they've ever been. A lot of ex-miners wanted books on law because they wanted to challenge the legality of what the government was doing. Or they needed practical self-help stuff like books on growing your own, or just pure escapism." The same thing is happening now.
Paul Forrest used to go out with the mobile library around the deprived areas of Edmonton, north London. "It was quite shocking how isolated people are sometimes. At times, books or talking books are the only connection to the world they've got. And the mobile librarians really know their customers' interests – not just that they like romances, for instance, but romances with a bit of spice, not too much sex, a bit of history. Those books are almost a form of medication; I reckon we save the NHS a fortune in antidepressants."
For many years, Ian Stringer worked on Barnsley's mobile libraries. So potent was the South Yorkshire service that at one point during the 1980s, "we had four couples leaving their spouses for each other. We ended up calling it the Mile Out Club." What was going on? "I think it's because you used to have two people going out, usually a man and a woman, in the van sometimes for nine hours at a stretch. Often it would be an older man and a younger woman, and I reckon some of the younger women had married young, and this was the first chance for them to see what an older man could be like. And some of the spots they'd get out to, like the farms, they'd be quite secluded. Not that anyone ever delayed the service, of course." By the time the fourth couple got together, the erotic charge of the vans had grown so great that "all the relatives ended up having a fight on the loading bay, everyone pitching in, all chucking boxes of library tickets at each other".
Inevitably, libraries are also used as a refuge by many who never had any intention of mugging up on the latest literary prize shortlist. It's an odd thing that libraries – by tradition temples to the unfleshly – can sometimes seem such sexy places. Perhaps it's their churchiness or the deep, soft silence produced by so many layers of print, or simply the hiding places provided by the shelves. "There's a big following on the internet for sites on librarians and people with library fetishes," says Kerry Pillai, manager of Swansea library. "I don't know why. But we do have a lot of attractive staff here." Has she ever been approached? "I did get sniffed once," she says. "In the lifts."
"In the 60s, before the Lady Chatterley trial," says Ian Stringer, "you used to get block books – literally, wooden blocks in place of any books the librarians thought were a bit risqué, like Last Exit to Brooklyn. You had to bring the block to the counter and then they'd give you the book from under the desk. So of course you got a certain type of person just going round looking for the wooden blocks."
There are other uses for libraries. In Marylebone they take a lenient view of sleepers. "As long as they're vertical, it's all right," says Nicky Smith, senior librarian. "If they're horizontal or snoring, then we wake them up. Mind you," she adds cheerily, "we were always told to wake people well before closing time, because if they turn out to be dead, then you won't get home before midnight." Marylebone has particular cause to be vigilant; it has the unusual distinction of being one of the few libraries in Britain where someone has actually died. Edgar Lustgarten was well known as a TV personality during the 50s and 60s. He presented an early version of Crimewatch, talking the viewers through the topical murder- mysteries of the day. On 15 December 1978, he went to the library as usual and was found some time later, dead at his desk. What had he been doing? "Reading the Spectator."
Worksop has a resident book-eater. "We kept noticing that pages had been ripped from some of the books," says Peter Collins. "Not whole pages, just little bits. It would always be done really neatly, just the tops of the pages. And then we'd see these little pellets everywhere, little balls of chewed paper cropping up in different parts of the library. Eventually we figured out who it must be. None of us wanted to say we'd noticed him munching away at the books, so I approached him and said something like I'd noticed 'tearing' on some volumes. He said he didn't know anything about it, but we've never seen him back."
"And we had a streaker once," Collins continues. "In Tamworth. He got into the lifts, and somewhere between the first and second floors he managed to take off all his clothes, run naked through Music and Junior, and then vanish out the front doors. The library there is right next to a graveyard, so goodness only knows what happened to him. Still, all part of life's rich tapestry."
He says that reading seems to be becoming an increasingly alien concept for children. "The pace of life is different now, and people expect art to happen to them. Music and film do that, a CD will do that, but you have to make a book happen to you. It's between you and it. People can be changed by books, and that's scary. When I was working in the school library, I'd sometimes put a book in a kid's hands and I'd feel excited for them, because I knew that it might be the book that changed their life. And once in a while, you'd see that happen, you'd see a kind of light come on behind their eyes. Even if it's something like 0.4% of the population that that ever happens to, it's got to be worth it, hasn't it?"
The libraries' most powerful asset is the conversation they provide – between books and readers, between children and parents, between individuals and the collective world. Take them away and those voices turn inwards or vanish. Turns out that libraries have nothing at all to do with silence.
from: Guardian
by: Bella Bathurst
You can tell a lot about people from the kind of books they steal. Every year, the public library service brings out a new batch of statistics on their most-pilfered novelists – Martina Cole, James Patterson, Jacqueline Wilson, JK Rowling. But in practice, different parts of Britain favour different books. Worksop likes antiques guides and hip-hop biographies. Brent prefers books on accountancy and nursing, or the driving theory test. Swansea gets through a lot of copies of the UK Citizenship Test. In Barnsley, it's Mig welding and tattoos ("I've still no idea what Mig welding is," says Ian Stringer, retired mobile librarian for the area. "The books always got taken before I could find out.") And Marylebone Library in London has achieved a rare equality. Their most stolen items are The Jewish Chronicle, Arabic newspapers and the Bible.
But the figures show something else as well – that among all communities and in all parts of Britain, our old passion for self-improvement remains vivid. Unlike DVDs or CDs or Xbox games, books removed from public libraries have no resale value. Unless they're very rare or very specialist, even hardbacks aren't worth anything anymore. So the only reason to take books is to read them.
Even so, theft remains a sensitive subject. "If someone suggested the idea of public libraries now, they'd be considered insane," says Peter Collins, library services manager in Worksop. "If you said you were going to take a little bit of money from every taxpayer, buy a whole load of books and music and games, stick them on a shelf and tell everyone, 'These are yours to borrow and all you've got to do is bring them back,' they'd be laughed out of government." But theft – or loss, or forgetting – is not a new thing. During the 1930s, supposedly a far more upright age, 8.8m books vanished from the library system every year.
There are 4,500 public libraries in Britain, as well as almost 1,000 national and academic libraries. As local authority budgets are reduced by the government's cuts, up to 500 libraries around the country will have to close. Librarians – traditionally seen as a mild, herbivorous breed – are up in arms. Partly because public libraries are often seen as a soft target; partly because they say local authorities consistently undervalue the breadth of what they do; and partly because the cutting will be done during a recession, which is exactly when everyone starts going to the library again.
But the cuts also underscore a deeper confusion about what libraries are: what they do, who they serve, and – in an age where the notion of books itself seems mortally flawed – why we still need them. What's the point of buildings filled with print? Isn't all our wisdom electronic now? Shouldn't libraries die at their appointed time, like workhouses and temperance halls?
The old clichés do not help the cause, given that libraries are meant to be austere places smelling of "damp gabardine and luncheon meat", as Victoria Wood put it, and librarians are either diffident, mole-eyed types or disappointed spinsters of limited social skills who spend their time blacking out the racing pages and razoring Page 3.
In Worksop, Peter Collins radiates a love both of libraries and for the infinite variety of people who use them. He's 33 and "always defined myself by being a librarian. I'd say to girls: 'Guess what I do for a living?' Admittedly, they were the kind of girls who might be impressed when I told them I had an MA in librarianship, but I was just so proud of it, so in love with what I did. When I first met my future wife, she got a tirade about the magic of libraries."
Collins believes that libraries are just as vital now as they were during the 40s, when Philip Larkin complained of stamping out so many books in a week that his hand blistered. Even so, he spends much of his time in a ceaseless game of catch-up. "Libraries are always trying to prove themselves because what they provide is so intangible. How do you quantify what someone gets from a book or a magazine?"
Attempts to do so often end up in trouble. "The council once asked us for an assessment of outcomes, not output," says Ian Stringer. "Output was how many books we'd stamped out, and outcome was something that had actually resulted from someone borrowing a book. So say someone took out a book on mending cars and then drove the car back, that's an outcome; or made a batch of scones from a recipe book they had borrowed. It lasted until one of the librarians told the council they'd had someone in borrowing a book on suicide, but that they'd never brought it back. The council stopped asking after that."
The great untold truth of libraries is that people need them not because they're about study and solitude, but because they're about connection. Some sense of their emotional value is given by the writer Mavis Cheek, who ran workshops within both Holloway and Erlestoke prisons. At Erlestoke she had groups of eight men who so enjoyed the freedom and contact of the writing groups they ended up breaking into the prison library when they found it shut one day. Which authors did they like best? "Graham Greene," says Cheek. "All that adventure and penance. His stuff moves fast, it's spare and it's direct."
Greene might seem a surprising choice, but then what people choose to read in extremis often is. In London during the Second World War, some authorities established small collections of books in air-raid shelters. The unused Tube station at Bethnal Green had a library of 4,000 volumes and a nightly clientele of 6,000 people. And what those wartime readers chose were not practical how-to manuals on sewing or home repairs, but philosophy. Plato and his Republic experienced a sudden surge in popularity, as did Schopenhauer, Bertrand Russell, Bunyan and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.
Ian Stringer worked in Barnsley just after the 1980s miners' strike. "Library issues doubled during the strike, they were the highest they've ever been. A lot of ex-miners wanted books on law because they wanted to challenge the legality of what the government was doing. Or they needed practical self-help stuff like books on growing your own, or just pure escapism." The same thing is happening now.
Paul Forrest used to go out with the mobile library around the deprived areas of Edmonton, north London. "It was quite shocking how isolated people are sometimes. At times, books or talking books are the only connection to the world they've got. And the mobile librarians really know their customers' interests – not just that they like romances, for instance, but romances with a bit of spice, not too much sex, a bit of history. Those books are almost a form of medication; I reckon we save the NHS a fortune in antidepressants."
For many years, Ian Stringer worked on Barnsley's mobile libraries. So potent was the South Yorkshire service that at one point during the 1980s, "we had four couples leaving their spouses for each other. We ended up calling it the Mile Out Club." What was going on? "I think it's because you used to have two people going out, usually a man and a woman, in the van sometimes for nine hours at a stretch. Often it would be an older man and a younger woman, and I reckon some of the younger women had married young, and this was the first chance for them to see what an older man could be like. And some of the spots they'd get out to, like the farms, they'd be quite secluded. Not that anyone ever delayed the service, of course." By the time the fourth couple got together, the erotic charge of the vans had grown so great that "all the relatives ended up having a fight on the loading bay, everyone pitching in, all chucking boxes of library tickets at each other".
Inevitably, libraries are also used as a refuge by many who never had any intention of mugging up on the latest literary prize shortlist. It's an odd thing that libraries – by tradition temples to the unfleshly – can sometimes seem such sexy places. Perhaps it's their churchiness or the deep, soft silence produced by so many layers of print, or simply the hiding places provided by the shelves. "There's a big following on the internet for sites on librarians and people with library fetishes," says Kerry Pillai, manager of Swansea library. "I don't know why. But we do have a lot of attractive staff here." Has she ever been approached? "I did get sniffed once," she says. "In the lifts."
"In the 60s, before the Lady Chatterley trial," says Ian Stringer, "you used to get block books – literally, wooden blocks in place of any books the librarians thought were a bit risqué, like Last Exit to Brooklyn. You had to bring the block to the counter and then they'd give you the book from under the desk. So of course you got a certain type of person just going round looking for the wooden blocks."
There are other uses for libraries. In Marylebone they take a lenient view of sleepers. "As long as they're vertical, it's all right," says Nicky Smith, senior librarian. "If they're horizontal or snoring, then we wake them up. Mind you," she adds cheerily, "we were always told to wake people well before closing time, because if they turn out to be dead, then you won't get home before midnight." Marylebone has particular cause to be vigilant; it has the unusual distinction of being one of the few libraries in Britain where someone has actually died. Edgar Lustgarten was well known as a TV personality during the 50s and 60s. He presented an early version of Crimewatch, talking the viewers through the topical murder- mysteries of the day. On 15 December 1978, he went to the library as usual and was found some time later, dead at his desk. What had he been doing? "Reading the Spectator."
Worksop has a resident book-eater. "We kept noticing that pages had been ripped from some of the books," says Peter Collins. "Not whole pages, just little bits. It would always be done really neatly, just the tops of the pages. And then we'd see these little pellets everywhere, little balls of chewed paper cropping up in different parts of the library. Eventually we figured out who it must be. None of us wanted to say we'd noticed him munching away at the books, so I approached him and said something like I'd noticed 'tearing' on some volumes. He said he didn't know anything about it, but we've never seen him back."
"And we had a streaker once," Collins continues. "In Tamworth. He got into the lifts, and somewhere between the first and second floors he managed to take off all his clothes, run naked through Music and Junior, and then vanish out the front doors. The library there is right next to a graveyard, so goodness only knows what happened to him. Still, all part of life's rich tapestry."
He says that reading seems to be becoming an increasingly alien concept for children. "The pace of life is different now, and people expect art to happen to them. Music and film do that, a CD will do that, but you have to make a book happen to you. It's between you and it. People can be changed by books, and that's scary. When I was working in the school library, I'd sometimes put a book in a kid's hands and I'd feel excited for them, because I knew that it might be the book that changed their life. And once in a while, you'd see that happen, you'd see a kind of light come on behind their eyes. Even if it's something like 0.4% of the population that that ever happens to, it's got to be worth it, hasn't it?"
The libraries' most powerful asset is the conversation they provide – between books and readers, between children and parents, between individuals and the collective world. Take them away and those voices turn inwards or vanish. Turns out that libraries have nothing at all to do with silence.
from: Guardian
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