As hundreds of titles hit the shops tomorrow, publishers hope for a happy ending to 2011
By Rob Sharp, Arts Correspondent
Wednesday, 28 September 2011
Alan Sugar, Steve Coogan, Lee Evans and Jamie Oliver will be among those doing battle from tomorrow, as publishers simultaneously release hundreds of titles in a bid to win a place on customers' Christmas shopping lists.
Dubbed "Super Thursday" by the book trade, this week will see publishers push books by everyone from Robert Harris to fictional teenagers The Inbetweeners using six-figure marketing budgets, newspaper tie-ins and in-store promotions. Over 200 titles will appear in supermarkets, high-street bookshops and online retailers, around three times the number released in an average week.
"I think this year will shape up very well against last year, one of the most high-profile years in recent memory, because there are some very big hitters," said Anna Valentine, editorial director at Harper NonFiction, which will publish Coogan's fictional Alan Partridge autobiography, I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan. "To succeed, the books need to be distinctive and stage a launch which propels them into the bestseller ranks. Many of the titles will have a core readership which will help".
Alan Sugar, Steve Coogan, Lee Evans and Jamie Oliver will be among those doing battle from tomorrow, as publishers simultaneously release hundreds of titles in a bid to win a place on customers' Christmas shopping lists.
Dubbed "Super Thursday" by the book trade, this week will see publishers push books by everyone from Robert Harris to fictional teenagers The Inbetweeners using six-figure marketing budgets, newspaper tie-ins and in-store promotions. Over 200 titles will appear in supermarkets, high-street bookshops and online retailers, around three times the number released in an average week.
"I think this year will shape up very well against last year, one of the most high-profile years in recent memory, because there are some very big hitters," said Anna Valentine, editorial director at Harper NonFiction, which will publish Coogan's fictional Alan Partridge autobiography, I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan. "To succeed, the books need to be distinctive and stage a launch which propels them into the bestseller ranks. Many of the titles will have a core readership which will help".
From, The Independant
Friday, September 30, 2011
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Have we fallen out of love with chick lit?
It was once the frothy genre that spelt big profits for publishers. But the latest sales figures read like a horror story
By Adam Sherwin
A stiletto and a cupcake on a pink jacket used to guarantee that your novel would fly off the shelf. But now publishers are asking if the "chick-lit" genre is exhausted after a spectacular slump in sales.
Sales of the most recent novels by commercial women's authors including Marian Keyes, Jodi Picoult, Veronica Henry, Catherine Alliott, Louise Mensch, MP (née Bagshawe), Dorothy Koomson, Harriet Evans, Jill Mansell and Lesley Pearse are all down by more than 20 per cent on their previous mass-market publications over comparative sales periods, The Bookseller has found.
Victims include Marian Keyes, whose latest novel The Brightest Star in the Sky has sold 260,000 copies since February, down 42 per cent on her previous book. Jodi Picoult's Harvesting the Heart is down almost 50 per cent on her previous novel, with 120,235 copies and Veronica Henry's The Birthday Party recorded a 71 per cent slump to 16,479 copies.
The Bookseller found that women's commercial fiction was underperforming compared to the rest of the book market with the top 20 commercial women's fiction authors down 10 per cent in like-for-like sales for their most recent mass-market title against the previous novel. Overall, the fiction market has fallen by 8 per cent.
The decline has been blamed on a squeeze on supermarket spending, with retailers drastically reducing the number of titles they order and a shift to digital books sales.
But literary experts believe that readers are rejecting the identically-jacketed "sex, shoes and shopping" tales pushed by publishers in favour of more complex, psychologically ambitious novels by women writers.
Kathy Lette, the author who claims to have invented the genre by penning "first person, funny, feminist fiction" 22 years ago, welcomed the apparent demise of "chick lit". She told The Independent: "Men who write first person, social satire, like Nick Hornby and David Nicholls and co, are compared to Chekov. While women authors get pink covers and condescension."
Ms Lette, who would like to rename the genre "clit lit", argued that "the market has been flooded with a lot of second-rate writing." She said: "Many 'chick lit' books are just Mills & Boon with Wonderbras, with the heroines waiting to be rescued by a knight in shining Armani. So, perhaps, in this economic downturn, a creative cull may ensure that only literary lionesses prevail."
Eithne Farry, literary editor of Marie Claire, blamed patronising marketing campaigns. She said: "Chick lit has become a derogatory term. I'm surprised when I see that a lot of books are sold in covers with shoes and cupcakes because often the subject matter of the book inside isn't frothy and frivolous."
Ms Farry believes Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, a dream-like story about competing 19th-century magicians and Daughter Of Smoke and Bone, the first in a hotly-tipped fantasy trilogy by Laini Taylor, will fill up space on women's shelves.
Sheila Crowley, a literary agent at Curtis Brown said: "The move to eBooks and the impact of austerity is having a massive impact on consumer behaviour."
Tastes are evolving. Ms Crowley said: "The culture of the Richard and Judy Book Club has encouraged the reader to be more aspirational and to 'read up'. That's benefited writers like Jojo Moyes and Santa Montefiore."
The backlash against "chick lit" resulted in the author Polly Courtney publicly dropping her publisher, HarperCollins, in protest at the "condescending and fluffy" sleeves they had chosen for her books. "The implication with chick lit is that it's about a girl wanting to meet the man of her dreams," Ms Courtney said. Although acknowledging that her new novel, It's A Man's World, set in a lads' mag, was "page-turning commercial fiction," she said it should not be reduced to "chick lit" because it dealt with social issues.
Maeve Binchy challenged her inclusion in The Bookseller list of mass-market female authors whose sales have fallen. A spokeswoman for Ms Binchy said: "Maeve is by no means 'chick lit' and we don't think her sales are falling. Electronic books have, however, added another dimension."
The history of chick lit
Derided as novels defined by "sex, shoes and shopping", the term "chick lit" was first embraced in the late 1980s by US students seeking a literary equivalent to Hollywood's "chick flicks". The phrase entered popular consciousness with the publication of a 1995 anthology titled Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction.
Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary sparked a wave of novels exploring the conflict between the independence enjoyed by young, professional "singletons" and the emotional security offered by a partner. Fay Weldon led the backlash, complaining that her novels were being sold in misleading "chick-lit" jackets and dismissing most similar books as "instantly forgettable".
Marian Keyes
Irish novelist whose 1995 book Watermelon, about a dumped wife who finds love again, is a key chick lit text. Keyes has sold 22 million copies of darkly comic stories which often trade on her own experiences. Sales down: 42 per cent
Jodi Picoult
American writer who has sold 14 million copies of emotional novels which often deal in struggles to overcome illness. She sidesteps a lack of critical endorsement by touring the world to meet her fans. Sales down: 50 per cent
Veronica Henry
Author and Heartbeat television scriptwriter has twice been listed for the Romantic Novelists' Association prize. Novels such as Marriage And Other Games praised for being "easy to read" and great for the beach. Sales down: 71 per cent
By Adam Sherwin
A stiletto and a cupcake on a pink jacket used to guarantee that your novel would fly off the shelf. But now publishers are asking if the "chick-lit" genre is exhausted after a spectacular slump in sales.
Sales of the most recent novels by commercial women's authors including Marian Keyes, Jodi Picoult, Veronica Henry, Catherine Alliott, Louise Mensch, MP (née Bagshawe), Dorothy Koomson, Harriet Evans, Jill Mansell and Lesley Pearse are all down by more than 20 per cent on their previous mass-market publications over comparative sales periods, The Bookseller has found.
Victims include Marian Keyes, whose latest novel The Brightest Star in the Sky has sold 260,000 copies since February, down 42 per cent on her previous book. Jodi Picoult's Harvesting the Heart is down almost 50 per cent on her previous novel, with 120,235 copies and Veronica Henry's The Birthday Party recorded a 71 per cent slump to 16,479 copies.
The Bookseller found that women's commercial fiction was underperforming compared to the rest of the book market with the top 20 commercial women's fiction authors down 10 per cent in like-for-like sales for their most recent mass-market title against the previous novel. Overall, the fiction market has fallen by 8 per cent.
The decline has been blamed on a squeeze on supermarket spending, with retailers drastically reducing the number of titles they order and a shift to digital books sales.
But literary experts believe that readers are rejecting the identically-jacketed "sex, shoes and shopping" tales pushed by publishers in favour of more complex, psychologically ambitious novels by women writers.
Kathy Lette, the author who claims to have invented the genre by penning "first person, funny, feminist fiction" 22 years ago, welcomed the apparent demise of "chick lit". She told The Independent: "Men who write first person, social satire, like Nick Hornby and David Nicholls and co, are compared to Chekov. While women authors get pink covers and condescension."
Ms Lette, who would like to rename the genre "clit lit", argued that "the market has been flooded with a lot of second-rate writing." She said: "Many 'chick lit' books are just Mills & Boon with Wonderbras, with the heroines waiting to be rescued by a knight in shining Armani. So, perhaps, in this economic downturn, a creative cull may ensure that only literary lionesses prevail."
Eithne Farry, literary editor of Marie Claire, blamed patronising marketing campaigns. She said: "Chick lit has become a derogatory term. I'm surprised when I see that a lot of books are sold in covers with shoes and cupcakes because often the subject matter of the book inside isn't frothy and frivolous."
Ms Farry believes Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, a dream-like story about competing 19th-century magicians and Daughter Of Smoke and Bone, the first in a hotly-tipped fantasy trilogy by Laini Taylor, will fill up space on women's shelves.
Sheila Crowley, a literary agent at Curtis Brown said: "The move to eBooks and the impact of austerity is having a massive impact on consumer behaviour."
Tastes are evolving. Ms Crowley said: "The culture of the Richard and Judy Book Club has encouraged the reader to be more aspirational and to 'read up'. That's benefited writers like Jojo Moyes and Santa Montefiore."
The backlash against "chick lit" resulted in the author Polly Courtney publicly dropping her publisher, HarperCollins, in protest at the "condescending and fluffy" sleeves they had chosen for her books. "The implication with chick lit is that it's about a girl wanting to meet the man of her dreams," Ms Courtney said. Although acknowledging that her new novel, It's A Man's World, set in a lads' mag, was "page-turning commercial fiction," she said it should not be reduced to "chick lit" because it dealt with social issues.
Maeve Binchy challenged her inclusion in The Bookseller list of mass-market female authors whose sales have fallen. A spokeswoman for Ms Binchy said: "Maeve is by no means 'chick lit' and we don't think her sales are falling. Electronic books have, however, added another dimension."
The history of chick lit
Derided as novels defined by "sex, shoes and shopping", the term "chick lit" was first embraced in the late 1980s by US students seeking a literary equivalent to Hollywood's "chick flicks". The phrase entered popular consciousness with the publication of a 1995 anthology titled Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction.
Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary sparked a wave of novels exploring the conflict between the independence enjoyed by young, professional "singletons" and the emotional security offered by a partner. Fay Weldon led the backlash, complaining that her novels were being sold in misleading "chick-lit" jackets and dismissing most similar books as "instantly forgettable".
Marian Keyes
Irish novelist whose 1995 book Watermelon, about a dumped wife who finds love again, is a key chick lit text. Keyes has sold 22 million copies of darkly comic stories which often trade on her own experiences. Sales down: 42 per cent
Jodi Picoult
American writer who has sold 14 million copies of emotional novels which often deal in struggles to overcome illness. She sidesteps a lack of critical endorsement by touring the world to meet her fans. Sales down: 50 per cent
Veronica Henry
Author and Heartbeat television scriptwriter has twice been listed for the Romantic Novelists' Association prize. Novels such as Marriage And Other Games praised for being "easy to read" and great for the beach. Sales down: 71 per cent
Monday, September 26, 2011
The early bird raises the bookworm
Young brains soak up the information around them like tiny, too-cute sponges. That’s the reason, put simply, why it is important to get children interested in reading in the early years of life.
Janette Pelletier, director of the Institute of Child Studies at the University of Toronto, simplifies the science: “The early years provide a unique opportunity for learning,” she says. “Enriched experiences mean more and faster connections in the brain, whereas deprived environments can have the opposite effect.”
Developing the right reading habits can never start too early, Pelletier adds. “These early experiences have cumulative effects that in essence, set children along trajectories that become increasingly stable over time.” She’s not suggesting private preschool, but a nightly Robert Munsch reading will do more good than you think.
Margaret Eaton, president of ABC Life Literacy Canada, says as a parent, the most important thing to do is to create a reading culture around your child.
“When you make reading a social activity that you do aloud together, that really fosters the love of reading,” she says. Eaton suggests participating in literacy activities as a family, many of which can be done around the house. “You can let your child make the grocery list, look at recipes and cook, and you can even search for things on the Internet together,” she says. Pelletier similarly suggests playing word games, such as finding items in the house that start with a particular sound.
ABC Life Literacy Canada runs a yearly Family Literacy Day Jan. 27 to shine a spotlight on the role parents can play in their children acquiring literacy skills. A reading culture can also extend outside of the house, by creating an awareness of print in your child’s outside environment as well as inside. Lisa Heggum, the Children and Youth Advocate for Toronto Public Library Services, says it’s as simple as pointing at signs and reading them along with your child.
Heggum works on the library of Toronto’s year-round Ready for Reading program. The program organizes story-times for parents and children at library branches across Toronto, and produces brochures that offer information on how to encourage a love for reading. The free, half-hour story-time sessions are an interactive way to get young children into reading. “They are full of songs, stories and rhymes — all of which are key ways to make reading fun for kids,” Heggum says. The librarians that lead the sessions also offer parents advice on how to get their children into reading.
Heggum says one of the most important tips they suggest is for parents to be role model readers. “If you take special time yourself to read, and your kids see you doing that, it will have a huge impact.”
By Ania Medrek
National Post, Afterword
Janette Pelletier, director of the Institute of Child Studies at the University of Toronto, simplifies the science: “The early years provide a unique opportunity for learning,” she says. “Enriched experiences mean more and faster connections in the brain, whereas deprived environments can have the opposite effect.”
Developing the right reading habits can never start too early, Pelletier adds. “These early experiences have cumulative effects that in essence, set children along trajectories that become increasingly stable over time.” She’s not suggesting private preschool, but a nightly Robert Munsch reading will do more good than you think.
Margaret Eaton, president of ABC Life Literacy Canada, says as a parent, the most important thing to do is to create a reading culture around your child.
“When you make reading a social activity that you do aloud together, that really fosters the love of reading,” she says. Eaton suggests participating in literacy activities as a family, many of which can be done around the house. “You can let your child make the grocery list, look at recipes and cook, and you can even search for things on the Internet together,” she says. Pelletier similarly suggests playing word games, such as finding items in the house that start with a particular sound.
ABC Life Literacy Canada runs a yearly Family Literacy Day Jan. 27 to shine a spotlight on the role parents can play in their children acquiring literacy skills. A reading culture can also extend outside of the house, by creating an awareness of print in your child’s outside environment as well as inside. Lisa Heggum, the Children and Youth Advocate for Toronto Public Library Services, says it’s as simple as pointing at signs and reading them along with your child.
Heggum works on the library of Toronto’s year-round Ready for Reading program. The program organizes story-times for parents and children at library branches across Toronto, and produces brochures that offer information on how to encourage a love for reading. The free, half-hour story-time sessions are an interactive way to get young children into reading. “They are full of songs, stories and rhymes — all of which are key ways to make reading fun for kids,” Heggum says. The librarians that lead the sessions also offer parents advice on how to get their children into reading.
Heggum says one of the most important tips they suggest is for parents to be role model readers. “If you take special time yourself to read, and your kids see you doing that, it will have a huge impact.”
By Ania Medrek
National Post, Afterword
Monday, September 12, 2011
New York City's spots for book lovers
Bibliophiles can turn to several tourist spots in New York City, including the public library and Book Row, to get a good read on the printed word and its writers.
by: Christopher Reynolds
Reporting from New York— On the third floor of a big, gray building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, silver-haired docent Julie Chelminski recently stepped up to the middle of a hushed room and faced 15 spellbound tourists.
"On the walls of this room there were 9,000 drawers," Chelminski said. "And in those drawers were 10 million cards."
This was in the New York Public Library's catalog room. And these were book people, as happy as pilgrims in the Holy Land, imbibing every detail of how the library switched from cards to computers in 1983. Within minutes, they would stand in a reading room as grand as a cathedral. That same day, they could see Charlotte Brontë's private diary (such tiny lettering!) at the Morgan Library a few blocks away or hear the tale of Dylan Thomas' final binge in the bar where it happened.
These are dire days for old-fashioned books. The 48 bookshops that once lined Manhattan's Book Row on 4th Avenue are gone or relocated. By the end of September, the bankrupt Borders chain's last outlet is expected to close. At Amazon.com, ebooks outsell hardbacks. As those marble lions in front of the New York Public Library celebrate their 100th anniversary, Kindles, Nooks, iPads and their ilk multiply like bunnies in bedrooms and airline cabins around the planet.
So, old-fashioned book people, hit literary Manhattan soon and hard. Even if you have only three days, as I did earlier this year, you can squeeze in an eight-stop tour, complete with thinking, drinking, Bibles, tote bags and a certain pair of municipal mascots. Here's how my circuit went.
First, check into the Library Hotel, a for-profit venture with an irresistible gimmick: It stands at Madison Avenue and 41st Street, about three blocks from the New York Public Library, and its 60 rooms (and the 6,000 books within them) are organized by the topics of the Dewey Decimal System. (I was on the Languages floor, in the Germanic room.) Know, however, that the least-expensive rooms are tiny.
Next, stare at the sidewalk. Not just because the New Yorkers all around you are doing so, but because there are dozens of bronze plaques with literary quotes set in the sidewalk on 41st Street near Madison Avenue. My favorite is from E.B. White: "I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens."
The Algonquin Hotel's Round Table Room, the storied West 44th Street gathering spot where Dorothy Parker and other wits of the '20s and '30s once cracked wise, makes a fine third stop. You can order a bowl of soup (French onion, $13), but don't fuss over the furniture. As a senior waiter acknowledged during my visit, the famous table itself left the building long ago, its destination unknown.
You can, however, see the old gang over the fireplace — gathered in a Natalie Ascencios painting that includes Parker, humorist Robert Benchley, critic Alexander Woollcott, editor Harold Ross, playwright George S. Kaufman and comedian Harpo Marx. (The Algonquin recently updated its rooms and may be better known these days for the cabaret shows in its Oak Room Supper Club.)
Your fourth stop is the White Horse Tavern, which has stood in the West Village since long before Dylan Thomas' time. Sip a beer (cash only) and admire the old tin ceiling and an agreeably spooky portrait of the poet, which hangs in a hallway. In it Thomas is wide-eyed, forever gazing toward the bar.
"He didn't actually die here," bartender Lova Rasoamanana noted.
After staggering back to his room at the Hotel Chelsea one night in November 1953, Thomas bragged of downing 18 whiskeys. He fell into a coma and died days later in a New York hospital. (The Encyclopedia Britannica blames "an overdose of alcohol," but biographer Paul Ferris has counterproposed pneumonia and possible medical malpractice.)
Next up is the Morgan Library & Museum at Madison Avenue and 36th Street, built as the private domain of financier Pierpont Morgan in 1906, later recast as a nonlending public institution. Now we commoners can gawk at the myriad cultural prizes Morgan amassed between 1890 and 1913, including medieval manuscripts, letters by Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, handwritten scores by Mozart and Beethoven and three Gutenberg Bibles. The walnut bookshelves rise three stories. The fireplace is big enough to burn three Christmas trees at once (although we discourage this because it can be dangerous). Next door, in a bright, contemporary space that Renzo Piano designed for the Morgan's 2006 expansion, temporary exhibitions rotate.
Onward to stop No. 6. At East 59th Street you can browse Argosy Old & Rare Books, Prints & Maps, which goes back three generations to 1925. Argosy has its share of $15-$25 volumes near the front, along with all sorts of autographs (Herbert A. Wilson, "corrupt commissioner of the Boston Police Dept.," $35). But much of the six-story building is filled with antiquarian volumes, art, maps and Americana aimed at wealthier customers. A $75 1965 edition of Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano." A $7,500 F. Scott Fitzgerald first edition ("All the Sad Young Men," 1926).
If Argosy is yin among long-standing Manhattan booksellers, Strand Bookstore, our seventh stop, might be yang. Strand, the lone survivor of the old Book Row, opened in 1927 and moved to Broadway (at 12th) in the 1950s.
Still owned by the founding Bass family, Strand stays vital by courting bargain-hunters with staggering variety — an estimated 18 miles of books on several levels. The Basses will sell you a tote bag, buy your old books, rent you books by the foot for a photo shoot, sell you a used paperback "Catch-22" for $8 or a signed Patti Smith "Just Kids" (also a paperback) for $12.80. Most weeks, the store hosts several book signings.
"We've got a challenge ahead of us," co-owner Fred Bass, 82, told me. Not long ago, he added, he was invited to talk about Strand's future with a group of women librarians. "If you people don't buy enough stuff from me," he told them, "I'll turn it into a gentlemen's club."
Your final stop is where we began, the New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, completed in May 1911. Free 50-minute tours start at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. most days, with just a 2 p.m. tour on Sundays.
Start with the lions, designed by Edward Clark Potter, nicknamed Patience and Fortitude during the Great Depression by a desperately cheerleading Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. They've been tidied up for the centennial, but face it, after 100 years of acid rain, noxious exhaust, miscreant kids and pigeon poop, you'd look beleaguered, too.
Inside, you shuffle through grand Astor Hall, check the Gottesman Exhibition Hall, admire the gilt ceiling of the map room and the cityscape paintings in the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room. The Children's Center has the originalWinnie the Pooh, a tattered bear that author A.A. Milne gave his son, Christopher, in 1921.
Upstairs, you pause at the murals and woodwork in the McGraw Rotunda, the chandeliers in that old card catalog room, and finally, the library's main reading room, nearly 300 feet long, dramatically restored and named in 1998 for the Rose family.
Its resources are open to anybody with a library card, and requests are still carried to the seven levels of stacks below by way of an ancient system of pencils, papers, pneumatic tubes and conveyor belts. On 42 long tables, 168 reading lamps glow through gold shades.
"If you want to see New Yorkers intensely at work in one of the most beautiful rooms in the country, go to the Rose Main Reading Room," Paul LeClerc, until recently the chief executive officer of the library, told me. (He has since been succeeded by Anthony W. Marx.) "You walk in there, you see 600 or 700 people. Who knows who they are or what they're doing?"
The room's 52-foot ceiling is the sort of thing you'd expect to see sheltering the head of a 19th century European emperor. Daylight filters down through a procession of arched windows.
Linger here. Maybe you'll spot Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and Nobel Laureate whom staffers have served repeatedly in the last year. Or maybe you'll just tumble to a comforting thought: American civilization isn't an oxymoron after all, and this place is the proof.
from: LA Times
by: Christopher Reynolds
Reporting from New York— On the third floor of a big, gray building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, silver-haired docent Julie Chelminski recently stepped up to the middle of a hushed room and faced 15 spellbound tourists.
"On the walls of this room there were 9,000 drawers," Chelminski said. "And in those drawers were 10 million cards."
This was in the New York Public Library's catalog room. And these were book people, as happy as pilgrims in the Holy Land, imbibing every detail of how the library switched from cards to computers in 1983. Within minutes, they would stand in a reading room as grand as a cathedral. That same day, they could see Charlotte Brontë's private diary (such tiny lettering!) at the Morgan Library a few blocks away or hear the tale of Dylan Thomas' final binge in the bar where it happened.
These are dire days for old-fashioned books. The 48 bookshops that once lined Manhattan's Book Row on 4th Avenue are gone or relocated. By the end of September, the bankrupt Borders chain's last outlet is expected to close. At Amazon.com, ebooks outsell hardbacks. As those marble lions in front of the New York Public Library celebrate their 100th anniversary, Kindles, Nooks, iPads and their ilk multiply like bunnies in bedrooms and airline cabins around the planet.
So, old-fashioned book people, hit literary Manhattan soon and hard. Even if you have only three days, as I did earlier this year, you can squeeze in an eight-stop tour, complete with thinking, drinking, Bibles, tote bags and a certain pair of municipal mascots. Here's how my circuit went.
First, check into the Library Hotel, a for-profit venture with an irresistible gimmick: It stands at Madison Avenue and 41st Street, about three blocks from the New York Public Library, and its 60 rooms (and the 6,000 books within them) are organized by the topics of the Dewey Decimal System. (I was on the Languages floor, in the Germanic room.) Know, however, that the least-expensive rooms are tiny.
Next, stare at the sidewalk. Not just because the New Yorkers all around you are doing so, but because there are dozens of bronze plaques with literary quotes set in the sidewalk on 41st Street near Madison Avenue. My favorite is from E.B. White: "I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens."
The Algonquin Hotel's Round Table Room, the storied West 44th Street gathering spot where Dorothy Parker and other wits of the '20s and '30s once cracked wise, makes a fine third stop. You can order a bowl of soup (French onion, $13), but don't fuss over the furniture. As a senior waiter acknowledged during my visit, the famous table itself left the building long ago, its destination unknown.
You can, however, see the old gang over the fireplace — gathered in a Natalie Ascencios painting that includes Parker, humorist Robert Benchley, critic Alexander Woollcott, editor Harold Ross, playwright George S. Kaufman and comedian Harpo Marx. (The Algonquin recently updated its rooms and may be better known these days for the cabaret shows in its Oak Room Supper Club.)
Your fourth stop is the White Horse Tavern, which has stood in the West Village since long before Dylan Thomas' time. Sip a beer (cash only) and admire the old tin ceiling and an agreeably spooky portrait of the poet, which hangs in a hallway. In it Thomas is wide-eyed, forever gazing toward the bar.
"He didn't actually die here," bartender Lova Rasoamanana noted.
After staggering back to his room at the Hotel Chelsea one night in November 1953, Thomas bragged of downing 18 whiskeys. He fell into a coma and died days later in a New York hospital. (The Encyclopedia Britannica blames "an overdose of alcohol," but biographer Paul Ferris has counterproposed pneumonia and possible medical malpractice.)
Next up is the Morgan Library & Museum at Madison Avenue and 36th Street, built as the private domain of financier Pierpont Morgan in 1906, later recast as a nonlending public institution. Now we commoners can gawk at the myriad cultural prizes Morgan amassed between 1890 and 1913, including medieval manuscripts, letters by Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, handwritten scores by Mozart and Beethoven and three Gutenberg Bibles. The walnut bookshelves rise three stories. The fireplace is big enough to burn three Christmas trees at once (although we discourage this because it can be dangerous). Next door, in a bright, contemporary space that Renzo Piano designed for the Morgan's 2006 expansion, temporary exhibitions rotate.
Onward to stop No. 6. At East 59th Street you can browse Argosy Old & Rare Books, Prints & Maps, which goes back three generations to 1925. Argosy has its share of $15-$25 volumes near the front, along with all sorts of autographs (Herbert A. Wilson, "corrupt commissioner of the Boston Police Dept.," $35). But much of the six-story building is filled with antiquarian volumes, art, maps and Americana aimed at wealthier customers. A $75 1965 edition of Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano." A $7,500 F. Scott Fitzgerald first edition ("All the Sad Young Men," 1926).
If Argosy is yin among long-standing Manhattan booksellers, Strand Bookstore, our seventh stop, might be yang. Strand, the lone survivor of the old Book Row, opened in 1927 and moved to Broadway (at 12th) in the 1950s.
Still owned by the founding Bass family, Strand stays vital by courting bargain-hunters with staggering variety — an estimated 18 miles of books on several levels. The Basses will sell you a tote bag, buy your old books, rent you books by the foot for a photo shoot, sell you a used paperback "Catch-22" for $8 or a signed Patti Smith "Just Kids" (also a paperback) for $12.80. Most weeks, the store hosts several book signings.
"We've got a challenge ahead of us," co-owner Fred Bass, 82, told me. Not long ago, he added, he was invited to talk about Strand's future with a group of women librarians. "If you people don't buy enough stuff from me," he told them, "I'll turn it into a gentlemen's club."
Your final stop is where we began, the New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, completed in May 1911. Free 50-minute tours start at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. most days, with just a 2 p.m. tour on Sundays.
Start with the lions, designed by Edward Clark Potter, nicknamed Patience and Fortitude during the Great Depression by a desperately cheerleading Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. They've been tidied up for the centennial, but face it, after 100 years of acid rain, noxious exhaust, miscreant kids and pigeon poop, you'd look beleaguered, too.
Inside, you shuffle through grand Astor Hall, check the Gottesman Exhibition Hall, admire the gilt ceiling of the map room and the cityscape paintings in the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room. The Children's Center has the originalWinnie the Pooh, a tattered bear that author A.A. Milne gave his son, Christopher, in 1921.
Upstairs, you pause at the murals and woodwork in the McGraw Rotunda, the chandeliers in that old card catalog room, and finally, the library's main reading room, nearly 300 feet long, dramatically restored and named in 1998 for the Rose family.
Its resources are open to anybody with a library card, and requests are still carried to the seven levels of stacks below by way of an ancient system of pencils, papers, pneumatic tubes and conveyor belts. On 42 long tables, 168 reading lamps glow through gold shades.
"If you want to see New Yorkers intensely at work in one of the most beautiful rooms in the country, go to the Rose Main Reading Room," Paul LeClerc, until recently the chief executive officer of the library, told me. (He has since been succeeded by Anthony W. Marx.) "You walk in there, you see 600 or 700 people. Who knows who they are or what they're doing?"
The room's 52-foot ceiling is the sort of thing you'd expect to see sheltering the head of a 19th century European emperor. Daylight filters down through a procession of arched windows.
Linger here. Maybe you'll spot Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and Nobel Laureate whom staffers have served repeatedly in the last year. Or maybe you'll just tumble to a comforting thought: American civilization isn't an oxymoron after all, and this place is the proof.
from: LA Times
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Dictionary compilers create endangered words list
Collins experts remove obsolete words – including aerodrome and wittol – from smaller dictionaries
Aerodrome and charabanc are among the words presumed to have become extinct in the past year, according to lexicographers.
Collins Dictionary experts have compiled a list of words which have fallen out of use by tracking how often they appear.
Other words on the list include "wittol"– a man who tolerates his wife's infidelity, which has not been much used since the 1940s.
The terms "drysalter", a dealer in certain chemical products and foods, and "alienism", the study and treatment of mental illness, have also faded from use.
Some of the vanished words are old-fashioned modes of transport such as the "cyclogiro", a type of aircraft propelled by rotating blades, and charabanc, a motor coach.
The "stauroscope", an optical instrument for studying the crystal structure of minerals under polarized light, is also no longer used.
Dr Ruth O'Donovan, asset development manager at Collins Language Division in Glasgow, said: "We track words using a very large database of language which is a very large collection of various texts from spoken and written language, including books, newspapers and magazines so we can track language change over time.
"We track new words but we can also track for the frequency of existing words and when they get below a certain threshold we see them as being obsolete, though they may be used in very specialist circumstances.
"Such words are in our largest dictionary but we've categorised them as obsolete, as although they go out of general use they are still of interest to historians so it's useful to have them in the dictionary. But we would exclude them from our smaller dictionaries."
Other words which have passed out of use include 'supererogate' which means to do or perform more than is required.
While 'succedaneum', meaning something used as a substitute also no longer trips off the modern tongue.
Neither does 'woolfell'. the skin of a sheep or similar animal with the fleece still attached.
The dictionary experts have also identified a word still commonly used in the 21st century, though its meaning has changed.
While 'fun fur' now means synthetic fur, up until the 1960s it meant cheap fur from animals such as rabbit, which was often dyed various colours.
The data was discovered as part of research for the publication of the next Collins English Dictionary in October this year.
from: Guardian
Aerodrome and charabanc are among the words presumed to have become extinct in the past year, according to lexicographers.
Collins Dictionary experts have compiled a list of words which have fallen out of use by tracking how often they appear.
Other words on the list include "wittol"– a man who tolerates his wife's infidelity, which has not been much used since the 1940s.
The terms "drysalter", a dealer in certain chemical products and foods, and "alienism", the study and treatment of mental illness, have also faded from use.
Some of the vanished words are old-fashioned modes of transport such as the "cyclogiro", a type of aircraft propelled by rotating blades, and charabanc, a motor coach.
The "stauroscope", an optical instrument for studying the crystal structure of minerals under polarized light, is also no longer used.
Dr Ruth O'Donovan, asset development manager at Collins Language Division in Glasgow, said: "We track words using a very large database of language which is a very large collection of various texts from spoken and written language, including books, newspapers and magazines so we can track language change over time.
"We track new words but we can also track for the frequency of existing words and when they get below a certain threshold we see them as being obsolete, though they may be used in very specialist circumstances.
"Such words are in our largest dictionary but we've categorised them as obsolete, as although they go out of general use they are still of interest to historians so it's useful to have them in the dictionary. But we would exclude them from our smaller dictionaries."
Other words which have passed out of use include 'supererogate' which means to do or perform more than is required.
While 'succedaneum', meaning something used as a substitute also no longer trips off the modern tongue.
Neither does 'woolfell'. the skin of a sheep or similar animal with the fleece still attached.
The dictionary experts have also identified a word still commonly used in the 21st century, though its meaning has changed.
While 'fun fur' now means synthetic fur, up until the 1960s it meant cheap fur from animals such as rabbit, which was often dyed various colours.
The data was discovered as part of research for the publication of the next Collins English Dictionary in October this year.
from: Guardian
Friday, September 9, 2011
'No, we shouldn’t just Google it': John Walsh laments the death of the reference book
Sales of reference books are sinking fast as we turn online for the answers to life's big – and small – questions. But our civilisation would be infinitely poorer if Roget's, Brewer's and Fowler's go out of print, argues John Walsh
by: John Walsh
Here come the new words, rolling and tumbling towards us in their shiny, multi-hued novelty like those thousands of coloured balls that cascaded down a street in that television commercial. These are the words that have just joined the language, and have been included in the 12th edition of The Chambers Dictionary, out this week.
You won't be surprised to learn that "retweet" and "vuvuzela" have been admitted to the language, along with over-used terms such as "national treasure" and recessional clichés such as "double dip" and "quantitative easing". Other new entries take a moment for their meaning to become clear. There's "crowdsourcing" (meaning to canvass suggestions from the general public before adopting a course of action), "freegan" (someone who finds all their food, gratis, in supermarket bins), "upcycle" (to transform waste products into better-quality products) and "globesity" (the worldwide outbreak of morbid fatness in civilised countries).
Sceptics might wonder if words such as "globesity", far from being authentic popular slang on the streets of Dagenham or Detroit, were invented by a smart young lexicographer working at Chambers HQ, or were tweeted to the dictionary publishers by a smart alec in Tooting. But we have no time to worry about their status as echt English words, because there'll be more arriving in a few months, as Oxford University Press and its Cambridge equivalent and the other dictionary publishers bring out new editions with their own cargo of neologisms, and the publicity departments manufacture another flap over the admission of "metrosexual" or "rehab" to the hallowed temple of English.
You may detect a note of desperation in their pronouncements. But then they have much to despair about. Bluntly put, dictionaries are in trouble, and have been for years. The big, dusty, 2,000-page family dictionary has become surplus to requirements, as potential users have turned to the internet for their definitions. The figures for 2010 show that spending on dictionaries fell for the seventh consecutive year, to a record low of £9.2m. Single-language and bilingual dictionaries dropped 13 per cent. Other reference books, including atlases and home-learning titles, sank by 10 per cent. But as early as 2007 some publishers were predicting that paper dictionaries will die out completely, as the word-curious turn wholly online. And if they go the way of reel-to-reel tape recorders, vinyl records and camera film, we'll have lost a substantial source of intellectual delight: the reference shelf.
The reference shelf used to be something no professional writer or scrupulous journalist would be without: the books represented a small army of helpers in the fight to express oneself in writing or to understand obscure words or references in someone's work.
The volumes jostling for shelf space would be The Chambers Dictionary (or the Concise Oxford English), Roget's Thesaurus, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Fowler's Modern English Usage, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Some of these may be unfamiliar to 21st-century readers; they were once considered essential. Roget's Thesaurus was the work you consulted when the word you were looking for was on the tip of your tongue but refused to come out. At least you knew the flipping word was to be found somewhere in the pages of Roget. If you were writing an article about translation and you'd already used the word "translation" four times and were searching for a word that meant something like "translation", you looked up Roget and found "version, rendering, crib, paraphrase, précis, abridgement, adaptation, decoding, decipherment..." along with several other semi-synonyms.
Fowler's Modern English Usage, which first appeared in 1926, was the 20th century's most influential style guide for writers – its author, Henry Watson Fowler, was anti-pretension, anti-pedantry, suspicious of old-fashioned rules of grammar and impatient with archaic terms and fancy foreign words. He was a sleek and witty writer, and it sometimes felt morally beneficial to be in his company.
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable dates back to 1870, when the Rev E Cobham Brewer set out to explain to a new generation of autodidacts – aspiring readers without a university education – the literary allusions or learned phrases they met when reading classic authors or Times leaders. If you were puzzled by a mention, in a Victorian novel, of "Phalaris's bull", Brewer would tell you about the hapless brass sculptor Perillos, who proposed a new torture method to Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum. He offered to cast a bronze bull with a door in its side; the victim would be locked in and roasted to death, while his wails and scream would issue from the bull's throat like a thrilling bovine bellow. The tyrant agreed to the commission – but said it should be tried out first on Perillos himself.
Don't you feel better for knowing that, for having it confirmed that you should never propose to a tyrant any scheme involving pain? Dipping into Brewer was always fun. Nowhere else would you be likely to stumble on the information that "hocus-pocus" – the word used by a magician to hoodwink his audience – is a satirical corruption of "hoc est corpus meum", the words said while the host is raised at the climax of the Catholic mass. Dipping into Fowler, you always came away knowing a lot more than when you opened it. There's a serendipitous joy in finding arcane information when turning the pages in search of something else.
Discovering the evolution of words is a constant pleasure. I once asked Magnus Magnusson, the late television quizmaster, if he'd managed to retain any of the million-odd pieces of information that had whizzed past him over the years on Mastermind. Very few, he said; but one was the derivation of the word "shibboleth". It means, of course, a slogan, catchphrase or "password" beloved of a certain group, sect or political party. He'd been delighted to find (in The Oxford English Dictionary) that it was the old Hebrew word for an ear of corn; and that, according to the Bible, during the war between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites, it was used as a lethal password – Ephraimites pronounced it "skibboleth" rather than "shibboleth" and any hapless soldier who couldn't say it properly was promptly executed.
Again – how pleasing to know this. It's precisely the kind of detail you'll find in a dictionary – and only in a paper dictionary with words on pages. There's shibboleth, and its fascinating etymology, in the current OED, and in my 10th-edition Chambers. But if I look it up online, on www.dictionary.cambridge.org, I'm given only the definition.
Traditional dictionaries are being gradually overtaken by a number of shrill online sites. Press the "search" key and, four times out of five, you'll get a curt, one-line definition. If you're lucky, you'll be given several shades of meaning (www.thefreedictionary.com makes a fair stab at being semantically comprehensive) – but of that word only, with no sense of its derivation or associations. Ask for a definition of "declare" and you'll get seven definitions of "declare" – but no helpful peripheral nods to "declaration", "declarative" or "declaredly". When online, you are never encouraged to browse, or stray, or graze around the word-meadow above and below the definition you've sought.
Those who suspect that online dictionaries are, to an alarming extent, callow, partial, crass and academically threadbare enterprises should read a recent blog on www.dictionary.com, which reported that several words have been deemed "obsolete" by Collins lexicographers (they include "charabanc" and "aerodrome") and won't be used in future Collins print dictionaries. "An argument could be made that, if a word is rarely used or searched for, it may not matter if it is in the dictionary or not," the website ruminated. This argument has been seen before – in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where The Party deems that language has become too sprawling and unwieldy, and invents Newspeak to keep it under greater control. Instead of having 40 or 50 terms for "wicked" or "wrong", they say, let us agree to say "ungood" to mean all of them – and, if emphasis is needed, "doubleplusungood".
And if you want to see where democratic lexicography is heading online, check out the Urban Dictionary (at www.urbandictionary.com). It will acquaint you with more sexual terms than you dreamt existed, will amaze you with the ironclad illiteracy and vulgarity of the contributors, and will make your head spin with its vast lexicon of racist abuse (such as the thousand-odd phrases containing the word "nigger"). It's put together by online users for the edification of others. And they sure aren't going to listen to the chaps from the Chambers and Oxford lexicographical departments deliberating about whether some of the words should be admitted to the English language some day. Online, they're here already...
It's easy to feel a nostalgic throb for the old reference library on your desk. As the dictionary market steadily declines, and sales of thesauruses plummet by a shocking 24 per cent, the very word "thesaurus" has never sounded more like a dinosaur. But we should not be downhearted. We could be seeing the start of something, rather than the end. I predict a retro-revolution in writers' vocabularies. Faced with the internet's fascination with street language and lack of interest in old words, I can see us taking a perverse delight in embracing stridently Baroque, efflorescent English words from the lexicon of Dickens, Milton, Dr Johnson, Shakespeare himself, until our paragraphs are full of "slubberdegullion" and "tatterdemalion", "dundreary" and "mulligrubs", "snoozle" and "wallydrag". We will drive readers mad with inkhorn terminology. We will send them rushing to old-fashioned dictionaries to learn what on earth is meant by "absquatulate" and "jobbernowl". We shall not rest until every Independent reader is saying to him or herself, "I wonder what 'humdudgeon' means. I must just go and look it up..."
from: Independent
by: John Walsh
Here come the new words, rolling and tumbling towards us in their shiny, multi-hued novelty like those thousands of coloured balls that cascaded down a street in that television commercial. These are the words that have just joined the language, and have been included in the 12th edition of The Chambers Dictionary, out this week.
You won't be surprised to learn that "retweet" and "vuvuzela" have been admitted to the language, along with over-used terms such as "national treasure" and recessional clichés such as "double dip" and "quantitative easing". Other new entries take a moment for their meaning to become clear. There's "crowdsourcing" (meaning to canvass suggestions from the general public before adopting a course of action), "freegan" (someone who finds all their food, gratis, in supermarket bins), "upcycle" (to transform waste products into better-quality products) and "globesity" (the worldwide outbreak of morbid fatness in civilised countries).
Sceptics might wonder if words such as "globesity", far from being authentic popular slang on the streets of Dagenham or Detroit, were invented by a smart young lexicographer working at Chambers HQ, or were tweeted to the dictionary publishers by a smart alec in Tooting. But we have no time to worry about their status as echt English words, because there'll be more arriving in a few months, as Oxford University Press and its Cambridge equivalent and the other dictionary publishers bring out new editions with their own cargo of neologisms, and the publicity departments manufacture another flap over the admission of "metrosexual" or "rehab" to the hallowed temple of English.
You may detect a note of desperation in their pronouncements. But then they have much to despair about. Bluntly put, dictionaries are in trouble, and have been for years. The big, dusty, 2,000-page family dictionary has become surplus to requirements, as potential users have turned to the internet for their definitions. The figures for 2010 show that spending on dictionaries fell for the seventh consecutive year, to a record low of £9.2m. Single-language and bilingual dictionaries dropped 13 per cent. Other reference books, including atlases and home-learning titles, sank by 10 per cent. But as early as 2007 some publishers were predicting that paper dictionaries will die out completely, as the word-curious turn wholly online. And if they go the way of reel-to-reel tape recorders, vinyl records and camera film, we'll have lost a substantial source of intellectual delight: the reference shelf.
The reference shelf used to be something no professional writer or scrupulous journalist would be without: the books represented a small army of helpers in the fight to express oneself in writing or to understand obscure words or references in someone's work.
The volumes jostling for shelf space would be The Chambers Dictionary (or the Concise Oxford English), Roget's Thesaurus, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Fowler's Modern English Usage, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Some of these may be unfamiliar to 21st-century readers; they were once considered essential. Roget's Thesaurus was the work you consulted when the word you were looking for was on the tip of your tongue but refused to come out. At least you knew the flipping word was to be found somewhere in the pages of Roget. If you were writing an article about translation and you'd already used the word "translation" four times and were searching for a word that meant something like "translation", you looked up Roget and found "version, rendering, crib, paraphrase, précis, abridgement, adaptation, decoding, decipherment..." along with several other semi-synonyms.
Fowler's Modern English Usage, which first appeared in 1926, was the 20th century's most influential style guide for writers – its author, Henry Watson Fowler, was anti-pretension, anti-pedantry, suspicious of old-fashioned rules of grammar and impatient with archaic terms and fancy foreign words. He was a sleek and witty writer, and it sometimes felt morally beneficial to be in his company.
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable dates back to 1870, when the Rev E Cobham Brewer set out to explain to a new generation of autodidacts – aspiring readers without a university education – the literary allusions or learned phrases they met when reading classic authors or Times leaders. If you were puzzled by a mention, in a Victorian novel, of "Phalaris's bull", Brewer would tell you about the hapless brass sculptor Perillos, who proposed a new torture method to Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum. He offered to cast a bronze bull with a door in its side; the victim would be locked in and roasted to death, while his wails and scream would issue from the bull's throat like a thrilling bovine bellow. The tyrant agreed to the commission – but said it should be tried out first on Perillos himself.
Don't you feel better for knowing that, for having it confirmed that you should never propose to a tyrant any scheme involving pain? Dipping into Brewer was always fun. Nowhere else would you be likely to stumble on the information that "hocus-pocus" – the word used by a magician to hoodwink his audience – is a satirical corruption of "hoc est corpus meum", the words said while the host is raised at the climax of the Catholic mass. Dipping into Fowler, you always came away knowing a lot more than when you opened it. There's a serendipitous joy in finding arcane information when turning the pages in search of something else.
Discovering the evolution of words is a constant pleasure. I once asked Magnus Magnusson, the late television quizmaster, if he'd managed to retain any of the million-odd pieces of information that had whizzed past him over the years on Mastermind. Very few, he said; but one was the derivation of the word "shibboleth". It means, of course, a slogan, catchphrase or "password" beloved of a certain group, sect or political party. He'd been delighted to find (in The Oxford English Dictionary) that it was the old Hebrew word for an ear of corn; and that, according to the Bible, during the war between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites, it was used as a lethal password – Ephraimites pronounced it "skibboleth" rather than "shibboleth" and any hapless soldier who couldn't say it properly was promptly executed.
Again – how pleasing to know this. It's precisely the kind of detail you'll find in a dictionary – and only in a paper dictionary with words on pages. There's shibboleth, and its fascinating etymology, in the current OED, and in my 10th-edition Chambers. But if I look it up online, on www.dictionary.cambridge.org, I'm given only the definition.
Traditional dictionaries are being gradually overtaken by a number of shrill online sites. Press the "search" key and, four times out of five, you'll get a curt, one-line definition. If you're lucky, you'll be given several shades of meaning (www.thefreedictionary.com makes a fair stab at being semantically comprehensive) – but of that word only, with no sense of its derivation or associations. Ask for a definition of "declare" and you'll get seven definitions of "declare" – but no helpful peripheral nods to "declaration", "declarative" or "declaredly". When online, you are never encouraged to browse, or stray, or graze around the word-meadow above and below the definition you've sought.
Those who suspect that online dictionaries are, to an alarming extent, callow, partial, crass and academically threadbare enterprises should read a recent blog on www.dictionary.com, which reported that several words have been deemed "obsolete" by Collins lexicographers (they include "charabanc" and "aerodrome") and won't be used in future Collins print dictionaries. "An argument could be made that, if a word is rarely used or searched for, it may not matter if it is in the dictionary or not," the website ruminated. This argument has been seen before – in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where The Party deems that language has become too sprawling and unwieldy, and invents Newspeak to keep it under greater control. Instead of having 40 or 50 terms for "wicked" or "wrong", they say, let us agree to say "ungood" to mean all of them – and, if emphasis is needed, "doubleplusungood".
And if you want to see where democratic lexicography is heading online, check out the Urban Dictionary (at www.urbandictionary.com). It will acquaint you with more sexual terms than you dreamt existed, will amaze you with the ironclad illiteracy and vulgarity of the contributors, and will make your head spin with its vast lexicon of racist abuse (such as the thousand-odd phrases containing the word "nigger"). It's put together by online users for the edification of others. And they sure aren't going to listen to the chaps from the Chambers and Oxford lexicographical departments deliberating about whether some of the words should be admitted to the English language some day. Online, they're here already...
It's easy to feel a nostalgic throb for the old reference library on your desk. As the dictionary market steadily declines, and sales of thesauruses plummet by a shocking 24 per cent, the very word "thesaurus" has never sounded more like a dinosaur. But we should not be downhearted. We could be seeing the start of something, rather than the end. I predict a retro-revolution in writers' vocabularies. Faced with the internet's fascination with street language and lack of interest in old words, I can see us taking a perverse delight in embracing stridently Baroque, efflorescent English words from the lexicon of Dickens, Milton, Dr Johnson, Shakespeare himself, until our paragraphs are full of "slubberdegullion" and "tatterdemalion", "dundreary" and "mulligrubs", "snoozle" and "wallydrag". We will drive readers mad with inkhorn terminology. We will send them rushing to old-fashioned dictionaries to learn what on earth is meant by "absquatulate" and "jobbernowl". We shall not rest until every Independent reader is saying to him or herself, "I wonder what 'humdudgeon' means. I must just go and look it up..."
from: Independent
Thursday, September 8, 2011
What We Do to Books
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Illustration by Stephen Doyle
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There has always been a lot of discussion about the effect that reading books has on us. Far less attention has been paid to the effect that we (the readers) have on them (the books). I don’t mean on the reputations or royalties of the authors who wrote the books but on the actual physical objects themselves.
As a kid I borrowed books from libraries. When I was a student I often bought used books, some with other people’s annotations in pencil. These could be erased, but I occasionally settled for a book with the previous owner’s name and notes in ink. Either way, such tags make us feel as if we are walking in someone else’s footsteps (if the notes have been made with a pen, the footprints are set in concrete). These days, unless I find myself in very unusual circumstances, I’m reluctant to read a book that shows any sign of prior occupancy. Mainly but not exclusively cosmetic, this aversion has proceeded in tandem with an increasing unwillingness to take other people’s readings — their opinions of what they have read — at face value. Back in the 1970s I submitted to the joyless experience of wading through my secondhand Penguin Modern Classics edition of Conrad’s “Nostromo” (the cover shows an image of Zapata by Alfredo Zalce) partly because Walter Allen, according to a quote on the back, considered it “the greatest novel in English of this century” — which makes me glad we’re no longer living in what must have been a truly wretched century for literature if that was as good as it got. Perhaps the desire to read books before they start trailing clouds of reputed glory is what leads people to become publishers or agents.
Personally, I’m content to wait until they have been published — and, ideally, remaindered. I don’t mind the ink blots or lines used to indicate a book’s status as commercial outcast — a widespread though not universal practice — but I always choose a copy with the mark on the bottom of the page rather than the top, so that once shelved the book effectively conceals its unwanted origins. That way I’m not reminded it’s a remainder.
Other than that mark the book should be in near-mint condition when I start reading it, but I am not obsessive about keeping it that way. On the contrary, I like the way it gradually and subtly shows signs of wear and tear, of having been lived in (by me), like a pair of favorite jeans.
It’s time to get specific. I bought a remaindered copy of the British edition of Richard Overy’s “Why the Allies Won” (Pimlico) for £4.95 at Judd Books in London on Dec. 11, 2010 — I always write the date and place of purchase on the flyleaf, in pencil. A large-format paperback, it has a color-manipulated photo of a bloated German corpse on the cover, thereby suggesting that the Allies won because the Axis powers lost. It’s a dense work of analysis, lacking the propulsion we associate with the narrative histories of Antony Beevor or John Keegan, so even when immersed in the book — after a purchase-to-start-it lag of several months — I was unable to concentrate on it for more than an hour at a time. As a result it was lugged around to many places, in various bags, on planes and trains. In the process the corners became curled and the spine wrinkled. Spreading in direct proportion to the amount of the book’s contents that were being loaded into my brain, those creases became the external embodiment of the furrow-browed effort that reading it required. After a while, as these grooves deepened, the book refused to close completely when I laid it down. I love this. In the biblio equivalent of the corner of a bed being turned down, inviting you to get in, it’s as if the book were encouraging you not to abandon it, to keep at it. Which I did. I made notes, put pencil marks by passages that strikingly revised my understanding of the war: “For most of the Second World War Britain and the United States fought a predominantly naval conflict. . . . ” Hmmm. In addition to these annotations a couple of pages are marked by blotches of brown dried blood. George Steiner wrote somewhere that an intellectual is someone who can’t read a book without a pencil in his or her hand. My version of this compulsion is that I can’t seem to read without picking my nose — hence the blood stains.
Eventually, I finished this impressive volume. It went from being a new and unread book to one that was very evidently used and read. I left it lying around for a few days, enjoyed looking at the transformation it had undergone, struck by the mysterious transfusion of knowledge in which this object had played such an important — and historically tried-and-tested — role. The changes wrought upon the book were fairly discreet but, at the risk of projecting my own feelings of satisfaction at having made it to the end, I am tempted to say that it looked fulfilled. Like the youth in “The Red Badge of Courage” (bought Dec. 28, 1987, Cheltenham), it had, after an ignominious beginning (cowardice/remaindering), accomplished its purpose. Together, it and I earned a Read Badge of Shared Achievement.
Finally, I crammed the book into the military history section of my shelves between two other books by Overy — jeez, the guy is prolific! — to flatten it out properly. If I take it down, now it lies quite flat, but unlike the dead German on the cover, it has plenty of life left in it. The creases, the annotations and the appropriate blood stains all imprint it with the fact of my having read it. The difference, of course, is that they are there for keeps whereas my understanding of the book’s contents began fading almost as soon as they were being (temporarily) installed in my head. In the short term this is quite normal. The long term is described by John Updike in his memoir, “Self-Consciousness” (Sept. 16, 1991, Paris): “I own many books full of my annotations, proving that once I read them, though I have no memory of it.” I’ll never be able to explain to you why the Allies won, but at some incommunicable level I promise I know (more than I did six months ago). And besides, the book is ready and able to try again — if you can live with the pencil marks, curled corners and blood spots.
from: NY Times
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
BookFinder.com Report Fall 2011
Out-of-print and in demand
BookFinder.com tracks the most sought-after out-of-print titles in America. This ninth annual edition is based on BookFinder.com searches from the past 12 months. On this year's list there are a fair share of out-of-print mainstays such as Madonna's nearly perennial number one Sex, but also a host of interesting newcomers; here are a few examples.
New to the BookFinder Report
Tudor Roses by Alice Starmore
Alice Starmore is a superstar in the knitting world but publishers have only just begun to take notice. Last year her immensely popular book Aran Knitting was brought back into print (after perpetually being listed on the BookFinder.com Report) and now her fans are looking for more. In this book Starmore creates a number of sweater designs inspired by the Tudor royals (eg. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I) and their over-the-top gold embroidery, velvet, jewels and lace. The book goes through the history of Tudor fashion and includes reproductions of artwork from the era.
The Reluctant King by Sarah Bradford
This biography of King George VI was published in 1989-1990 by St. Martin’s Press and suddenly shot into steady demand after the mammoth success of the movie The King’s Speech. Colin Firth’s amazing performance portraying George VI piqued the interest in The Reluctant King and made readers eager to learn more.
The House Without Windows by Barbara Newhall Follet
Barbara Newhall Follet was a child prodigy novelist who published this first novel in 1927. At the time she was destined to become the next great American writer but in 1939 she became depressed about her marriage and walked out of her apartment with just $30 in her pocket. The 25-year-old was never seen again. In December 2010 Follet's life story was broadcast on NPR and featured in Lapham’s Quarterly, reigniting interest in her work.
Other interesting out-of-print books
A Payroll to Meet: A Story of Greed, Corruption, and Football at SMU by David Whitford
In A Payroll to Meet, David Whitford discusses the incidents surrounding Southern Methodist University's (SMU) receiving the "death penalty" from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA); which involves banning the school from competing in a sport for a year or more (two in SMU's case). This book has been out-of-print since 1989 but scandal in college football has never been more in vogue. The recent rash of cheating, bribing and recruitment scandals to hit Ohio State, Southern Cal, Auburn, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, LSU, and the Hurricanes in Miami have renewed the interest in the grandfather of college football scandal.
The Magic Talisman by John Blaine
This was the final novel in the 24-title Rick Brant series of self-described science-adventure stories. This series was written by Harold (Hal) Goodwin and Peter J. Harkins who collectively worked under the pseudonym John Blaine. The series was published by Grosset & Dunlap in the 1940s-1960s but The Magic Talisman was rejected owing to the inclusion of extra sensory perception elements in the story (the publishers wanted a science-based series). The Magic Talisman was finally published independently (by Manuscript Press) in 1990 as a limited edition run of 500 copies.
William Burges and the High Victorian Dream by J. Mordaunt Crook
Today Burges is considered a genius and one of the greatest architects to come out of the Victorian era; however this was not always so. Most of his life and for decades after, his work was unappreciated and precious little was written about his incredibly short career (which did not begin until he was 35 and endedwith his death at 53). Crook's study of Burges' work (which included St. Finbarre's Cathedral in Cork, the renovation of Cardiff Castle in 1868, and the reconstruction of Castle Coch) was published in 1981 and is generally considered to be the best biographical work on Burges to date.
Gather Yourselves Together by Philip K. Dick
Gather Yourselves Together was one of PKD's early works but the novel was not released until after his death (The first and only printing being printed in 1994). Unlike much of Dick’s later work, Gather Yourselves Together is not science fiction but rather straight literary fiction. The plot is set in China shortly after Mao Zedong’s revolution and centers around the affairs of three employees from an American company which is shutting its Chinese operations. Gather Yourselves Together is set to be reprinted by Houghton Mifflin in July 2012.
Top 100 most sought after out-of-print books in 2011
1. Madonna - Sex
2. Nora Roberts - Promise Me Tomorrow
3. Stephen King (as Richard Bachman) - Rage
4. Stephen King - My Pretty Pony
5. Ray Garton - In a Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting
6. Luigi Serafini - Codex Seraphinianus
7. Johnny Cash - Man in Black
8. Norman Mailer - Marilyn: A Biography
9. H.Henry Thomas - Arithmetic Progress Papers
10. Kyle Onstott - Mandingo
11. Allan D. Richter - Eve of the End
12. Ray Bradbury - Dark Carnival
13. Associated Press - The Torch is Passed: The Associated Press Story of The Death of a President
14. Jean Larteguy - The Centurions
15. Carl Sagan - Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record
16. Cameron Crowe - Fast Times at Ridgemont High
17. J.R. Hartley - Fly Fishing: Memories of Angling Days
18. Dennis Potter - Ticket To Ride
19. Mary and Vincent Price - A Treasury of Great Recipes
20. Anne Alexander - The Pink Dress
21. Lynne Cheney - Sisters
22. Stuart Chase - The Road We Are Traveling, 1914-1942, Guide Lines to America's Future as Reported to the Twentieth Century Fund
23. Andrew Loomis - Creative Illustration
24. David Williams - Second Sight
25. Anna Elizabeth Bennett - Little Witch
26. Nan Gilbert - 365 Bedtime Stories
27. Allen Drury - Advise and Consent
28. C.S. Lewis - The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition
29. Alex Angos - Endgame Artillery
30. Philip K. Dick - Gather Yourselves Together
31. A.C.H. Smith - Labyrinth: A Novel
32. Salvador Dali, illustrator - The Jerusalem Bible
33. Elmer Keith - Hell, I Was There!
34. Ricky Jay - Cards As Weapons
35. Madeleine L'Engle - Ilsa
36. Norman Denny - The Casket and the Sword
37. Charles Eric Maine - World Without Men
38. Paul Gallico - Jennie
39. Robert Nathan - The Bishop's Wife
40. Ben Bova - The Star Conquerors
41. Walt Kelly - I Go Pogo
42. Curtis Richards - Halloween
43. S.O. Pidhainy - The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book
44. Clancy Holling - The Book of Indians
45. Tom Lea - The King Ranch
46. John Blaine - The Magic Talisman
47. José Garcia Villa - Footnote to Youth
48. Harry Twyford Peters - Currier & Ives: Printmakers to the American People
49. Rasiel Suarez - ERIC : The Encyclopedia of Roman Imperial Coins
50. Alice Starmore - Tudor Roses
51. Kate Holmes - Too Good to be Threw
52. Nicholas Guild - The Blood Star
53. Charles M. Russell - Good Medicine; The Illustrated Letters of Charles M. Russell
54. Donald Hamilton - The Big Country
55. J. Mordaunt Crook - William Burges and the High Victorian Dream
56. David Whitford - A Payroll to Meet: A Story of Greed, Corruption, and Football at SMU
57. Leo S. Figiel - On Damascus Steel
58. Marie Simmons - Pancakes A to Z
59. W. Somerset Maugham - Tellers of Tales: 100 Short Stories From the United States, England, France, Russia and Germany
60. Arthur Koestler - The Act of Creation
61. Charles Thomson - The Septuagint Bible
62. Henry W. Simon - A Treasury of Grand Opera
63. Jack S Levy - War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495-1975
64. Jack Howell - The Lovely Reed : An Enthusiasts Guide to Building Bamboo Fly Rods
65. John Harris - Covenant With Death
66. Charles Luk (Translator) - Empty Cloud: The Autobiography of the Chinese Zen Master, Hsu Yun
67. Jan Wolkers - Turkish Delight
68. Watt Piper - The Bumper Book; a Harvest of Stories and Verses
69. John Burnet - Platonism
70. David Miller - The Nature of Political Theory
71. Laura Bannon - The Wonderful Fashion Doll
72. John D. Green - Birds of Britain
73. Glen Cook - She Is The Darkness
74. Sarah Bradford - The Reluctant King
75. Charles Flato - The Golden Book of the Civil War
76. James Virgil Howe - The Modern Gunsmith : a guide for the amateur and professional gunsmith in the design and construction of firearms, with practical suggestions for all who like guns
77. Ernest Cole - House of Bondage
78. Patricia C. Barry - ABCs of Long Arm Quilting
79. Ferdinand Pecora - Wall St. Under Oath; The Story of our Modern Money Changers
80. A.E. Gutnov and A. Baburov - The Ideal Communist City
81. Arthur Upfield - The Lure of the Bush aka The Barrakee Mystery
82. Polan Banks - Carriage Entrance
83. Barbara Newhall Follett - The House Without Windows
84. R.P. Hunnicutt - Stuart: A History of the American Light Tank
85. John Cage - Notations
86. M.J. Whitley - German Coastal Forces of World War Two
87. Roland Pierrot - Chemical and determinative tables of mineralogy
88. Arthur Watt - VLF Radio Engineering
89. John Atlee Kouwenhoven - The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York: An Essay in Graphic History
90. Cecil Beaton - The Glass of Fashion
91. David Sokol - Pleased, But Not Satisfied
92. Steve Wiper - USS New Jersey BB-62
93. Laura London - The Windflower
94. Edward Matunas - Practical Gunsmithing
95. Thomas Craven - A Treasury of American Prints - A Selection of One Hundred Etchings and Lithogrphas by the Foremost Living American Artists
96. Paul Hoffman - To Drop a Dime
97. Nicholas Brawer - British Campaign Furniture: Elegance Under Canvas, 1740-1914
98. Sam Dalal - Swami and Mantra
99. Alan Raven and John Roberts - British Battleships of World War Two
100. Don Graf - Basic Building Data: 10,000 Timeless Construction Facts
from: BookFinder
BookFinder.com tracks the most sought-after out-of-print titles in America. This ninth annual edition is based on BookFinder.com searches from the past 12 months. On this year's list there are a fair share of out-of-print mainstays such as Madonna's nearly perennial number one Sex, but also a host of interesting newcomers; here are a few examples.
New to the BookFinder Report
Tudor Roses by Alice Starmore
Alice Starmore is a superstar in the knitting world but publishers have only just begun to take notice. Last year her immensely popular book Aran Knitting was brought back into print (after perpetually being listed on the BookFinder.com Report) and now her fans are looking for more. In this book Starmore creates a number of sweater designs inspired by the Tudor royals (eg. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I) and their over-the-top gold embroidery, velvet, jewels and lace. The book goes through the history of Tudor fashion and includes reproductions of artwork from the era.
The Reluctant King by Sarah Bradford
This biography of King George VI was published in 1989-1990 by St. Martin’s Press and suddenly shot into steady demand after the mammoth success of the movie The King’s Speech. Colin Firth’s amazing performance portraying George VI piqued the interest in The Reluctant King and made readers eager to learn more.
The House Without Windows by Barbara Newhall Follet
Barbara Newhall Follet was a child prodigy novelist who published this first novel in 1927. At the time she was destined to become the next great American writer but in 1939 she became depressed about her marriage and walked out of her apartment with just $30 in her pocket. The 25-year-old was never seen again. In December 2010 Follet's life story was broadcast on NPR and featured in Lapham’s Quarterly, reigniting interest in her work.
Other interesting out-of-print books
A Payroll to Meet: A Story of Greed, Corruption, and Football at SMU by David Whitford
In A Payroll to Meet, David Whitford discusses the incidents surrounding Southern Methodist University's (SMU) receiving the "death penalty" from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA); which involves banning the school from competing in a sport for a year or more (two in SMU's case). This book has been out-of-print since 1989 but scandal in college football has never been more in vogue. The recent rash of cheating, bribing and recruitment scandals to hit Ohio State, Southern Cal, Auburn, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, LSU, and the Hurricanes in Miami have renewed the interest in the grandfather of college football scandal.
The Magic Talisman by John Blaine
This was the final novel in the 24-title Rick Brant series of self-described science-adventure stories. This series was written by Harold (Hal) Goodwin and Peter J. Harkins who collectively worked under the pseudonym John Blaine. The series was published by Grosset & Dunlap in the 1940s-1960s but The Magic Talisman was rejected owing to the inclusion of extra sensory perception elements in the story (the publishers wanted a science-based series). The Magic Talisman was finally published independently (by Manuscript Press) in 1990 as a limited edition run of 500 copies.
William Burges and the High Victorian Dream by J. Mordaunt Crook
Today Burges is considered a genius and one of the greatest architects to come out of the Victorian era; however this was not always so. Most of his life and for decades after, his work was unappreciated and precious little was written about his incredibly short career (which did not begin until he was 35 and endedwith his death at 53). Crook's study of Burges' work (which included St. Finbarre's Cathedral in Cork, the renovation of Cardiff Castle in 1868, and the reconstruction of Castle Coch) was published in 1981 and is generally considered to be the best biographical work on Burges to date.
Gather Yourselves Together by Philip K. Dick
Gather Yourselves Together was one of PKD's early works but the novel was not released until after his death (The first and only printing being printed in 1994). Unlike much of Dick’s later work, Gather Yourselves Together is not science fiction but rather straight literary fiction. The plot is set in China shortly after Mao Zedong’s revolution and centers around the affairs of three employees from an American company which is shutting its Chinese operations. Gather Yourselves Together is set to be reprinted by Houghton Mifflin in July 2012.
Top 100 most sought after out-of-print books in 2011
1. Madonna - Sex
2. Nora Roberts - Promise Me Tomorrow
3. Stephen King (as Richard Bachman) - Rage
4. Stephen King - My Pretty Pony
5. Ray Garton - In a Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting
6. Luigi Serafini - Codex Seraphinianus
7. Johnny Cash - Man in Black
8. Norman Mailer - Marilyn: A Biography
9. H.Henry Thomas - Arithmetic Progress Papers
10. Kyle Onstott - Mandingo
11. Allan D. Richter - Eve of the End
12. Ray Bradbury - Dark Carnival
13. Associated Press - The Torch is Passed: The Associated Press Story of The Death of a President
14. Jean Larteguy - The Centurions
15. Carl Sagan - Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record
16. Cameron Crowe - Fast Times at Ridgemont High
17. J.R. Hartley - Fly Fishing: Memories of Angling Days
18. Dennis Potter - Ticket To Ride
19. Mary and Vincent Price - A Treasury of Great Recipes
20. Anne Alexander - The Pink Dress
21. Lynne Cheney - Sisters
22. Stuart Chase - The Road We Are Traveling, 1914-1942, Guide Lines to America's Future as Reported to the Twentieth Century Fund
23. Andrew Loomis - Creative Illustration
24. David Williams - Second Sight
25. Anna Elizabeth Bennett - Little Witch
26. Nan Gilbert - 365 Bedtime Stories
27. Allen Drury - Advise and Consent
28. C.S. Lewis - The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition
29. Alex Angos - Endgame Artillery
30. Philip K. Dick - Gather Yourselves Together
31. A.C.H. Smith - Labyrinth: A Novel
32. Salvador Dali, illustrator - The Jerusalem Bible
33. Elmer Keith - Hell, I Was There!
34. Ricky Jay - Cards As Weapons
35. Madeleine L'Engle - Ilsa
36. Norman Denny - The Casket and the Sword
37. Charles Eric Maine - World Without Men
38. Paul Gallico - Jennie
39. Robert Nathan - The Bishop's Wife
40. Ben Bova - The Star Conquerors
41. Walt Kelly - I Go Pogo
42. Curtis Richards - Halloween
43. S.O. Pidhainy - The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book
44. Clancy Holling - The Book of Indians
45. Tom Lea - The King Ranch
46. John Blaine - The Magic Talisman
47. José Garcia Villa - Footnote to Youth
48. Harry Twyford Peters - Currier & Ives: Printmakers to the American People
49. Rasiel Suarez - ERIC : The Encyclopedia of Roman Imperial Coins
50. Alice Starmore - Tudor Roses
51. Kate Holmes - Too Good to be Threw
52. Nicholas Guild - The Blood Star
53. Charles M. Russell - Good Medicine; The Illustrated Letters of Charles M. Russell
54. Donald Hamilton - The Big Country
55. J. Mordaunt Crook - William Burges and the High Victorian Dream
56. David Whitford - A Payroll to Meet: A Story of Greed, Corruption, and Football at SMU
57. Leo S. Figiel - On Damascus Steel
58. Marie Simmons - Pancakes A to Z
59. W. Somerset Maugham - Tellers of Tales: 100 Short Stories From the United States, England, France, Russia and Germany
60. Arthur Koestler - The Act of Creation
61. Charles Thomson - The Septuagint Bible
62. Henry W. Simon - A Treasury of Grand Opera
63. Jack S Levy - War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495-1975
64. Jack Howell - The Lovely Reed : An Enthusiasts Guide to Building Bamboo Fly Rods
65. John Harris - Covenant With Death
66. Charles Luk (Translator) - Empty Cloud: The Autobiography of the Chinese Zen Master, Hsu Yun
67. Jan Wolkers - Turkish Delight
68. Watt Piper - The Bumper Book; a Harvest of Stories and Verses
69. John Burnet - Platonism
70. David Miller - The Nature of Political Theory
71. Laura Bannon - The Wonderful Fashion Doll
72. John D. Green - Birds of Britain
73. Glen Cook - She Is The Darkness
74. Sarah Bradford - The Reluctant King
75. Charles Flato - The Golden Book of the Civil War
76. James Virgil Howe - The Modern Gunsmith : a guide for the amateur and professional gunsmith in the design and construction of firearms, with practical suggestions for all who like guns
77. Ernest Cole - House of Bondage
78. Patricia C. Barry - ABCs of Long Arm Quilting
79. Ferdinand Pecora - Wall St. Under Oath; The Story of our Modern Money Changers
80. A.E. Gutnov and A. Baburov - The Ideal Communist City
81. Arthur Upfield - The Lure of the Bush aka The Barrakee Mystery
82. Polan Banks - Carriage Entrance
83. Barbara Newhall Follett - The House Without Windows
84. R.P. Hunnicutt - Stuart: A History of the American Light Tank
85. John Cage - Notations
86. M.J. Whitley - German Coastal Forces of World War Two
87. Roland Pierrot - Chemical and determinative tables of mineralogy
88. Arthur Watt - VLF Radio Engineering
89. John Atlee Kouwenhoven - The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York: An Essay in Graphic History
90. Cecil Beaton - The Glass of Fashion
91. David Sokol - Pleased, But Not Satisfied
92. Steve Wiper - USS New Jersey BB-62
93. Laura London - The Windflower
94. Edward Matunas - Practical Gunsmithing
95. Thomas Craven - A Treasury of American Prints - A Selection of One Hundred Etchings and Lithogrphas by the Foremost Living American Artists
96. Paul Hoffman - To Drop a Dime
97. Nicholas Brawer - British Campaign Furniture: Elegance Under Canvas, 1740-1914
98. Sam Dalal - Swami and Mantra
99. Alan Raven and John Roberts - British Battleships of World War Two
100. Don Graf - Basic Building Data: 10,000 Timeless Construction Facts
from: BookFinder
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Booktrack Thinks E-Books Need Sound Effects and Soundtracks
by: Brennon Slattery
Have you ever wanted to listen along to the music of Beethoven as you finger-swipe through the pages of A Clockwork Orange on your iPad, or "enjoy" the novel's grisly action as audio sound effects? New York startup Booktrack is gunning for exactly this by adding musical scores and ambient noises to e-books.
Booktrack, which is partially funded by PayPal founder Peter Thiel of utopian island fame, adds synchronized soundtracks to ordinary e-books to "dramatically boost the reader's imagination and engagement," according to the Web site. Readers personalize their reading speeds on their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch (and later, the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy Tab), and -- at least theoretically -- Booktrack's soundtrack keeps pace with story progression, adding ambient music and sound effects such as footsteps and ominously creaking doors.
Booktrack's bookshelf is sparse at the moment, but features some young adult novels like The Power of Six and The Ugly Duckling, with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for mystery lovers. According to The New York Times, Booktrack plans on adding short stories by Salman Rushdie and Jay McInerney in the coming months.
Sound distracting? Well, even previewing 30 seconds of a YouTube preview made me immediately want to shut my speakers off. Like Wired's Charlie Sorrel, I can't imagine enjoying a whole Booktrack novel without snapping an iDevice in half.
Still, the concept behind Booktrack is a novel one (pun possibly intended), and correlates to other evolutions in the e-book world, which before now has been mostly limited to e-ink readers and mobile devices. Push Pop Press, a company that created highly-interactive digital books, made headlines recently when Facebook (for some reason) acquired it. Before the acquisition, Push Pop Press created an interactive version of Al Gore's Our Choice that included text, audio, video, interactive graphics, and Gore's own audio commentary.
E-books with added interactive features and soundtracks may be the format's next step. And though many traditionalists will balk at the technology -- just as many have, and still do, condemn Kindles -- there could be some instances, such as Gore's book, where the addition is less an unwanted distraction and more a new way to explore a centuries-old storytelling platform.
from: PC World
Have you ever wanted to listen along to the music of Beethoven as you finger-swipe through the pages of A Clockwork Orange on your iPad, or "enjoy" the novel's grisly action as audio sound effects? New York startup Booktrack is gunning for exactly this by adding musical scores and ambient noises to e-books.
Booktrack, which is partially funded by PayPal founder Peter Thiel of utopian island fame, adds synchronized soundtracks to ordinary e-books to "dramatically boost the reader's imagination and engagement," according to the Web site. Readers personalize their reading speeds on their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch (and later, the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy Tab), and -- at least theoretically -- Booktrack's soundtrack keeps pace with story progression, adding ambient music and sound effects such as footsteps and ominously creaking doors.
Booktrack's bookshelf is sparse at the moment, but features some young adult novels like The Power of Six and The Ugly Duckling, with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for mystery lovers. According to The New York Times, Booktrack plans on adding short stories by Salman Rushdie and Jay McInerney in the coming months.
Sound distracting? Well, even previewing 30 seconds of a YouTube preview made me immediately want to shut my speakers off. Like Wired's Charlie Sorrel, I can't imagine enjoying a whole Booktrack novel without snapping an iDevice in half.
Still, the concept behind Booktrack is a novel one (pun possibly intended), and correlates to other evolutions in the e-book world, which before now has been mostly limited to e-ink readers and mobile devices. Push Pop Press, a company that created highly-interactive digital books, made headlines recently when Facebook (for some reason) acquired it. Before the acquisition, Push Pop Press created an interactive version of Al Gore's Our Choice that included text, audio, video, interactive graphics, and Gore's own audio commentary.
E-books with added interactive features and soundtracks may be the format's next step. And though many traditionalists will balk at the technology -- just as many have, and still do, condemn Kindles -- there could be some instances, such as Gore's book, where the addition is less an unwanted distraction and more a new way to explore a centuries-old storytelling platform.
from: PC World
Saturday, September 3, 2011
In a Race to Out-Rave, 5-Star Web Reviews Go for $5
by: David Streitfeld
In tens of millions of reviews on Web sites like Amazon.com, Citysearch, TripAdvisor and Yelp, new books are better than Tolstoy, restaurants are undiscovered gems and hotels surpass the Ritz.
Or so the reviewers say. As online retailers increasingly depend on reviews as a sales tool, an industry of fibbers and promoters has sprung up to buy and sell raves for a pittance.
“For $5, I will submit two great reviews for your business,” offered one entrepreneur on the help-for-hire site Fiverr, one of a multitude of similar pitches. On another forum, Digital Point, a poster wrote, “I will pay for positive feedback on TripAdvisor.” A Craigslist post proposed this: “If you have an active Yelp account and would like to make very easy money please respond.”
The boundless demand for positive reviews has made the review system an arms race of sorts. As more five-star reviews are handed out, even more five-star reviews are needed. Few want to risk being left behind.
Sandra Parker, a freelance writer who was hired by a review factory this spring to pump out Amazon reviews for $10 each, said her instructions were simple. “We were not asked to provide a five-star review, but would be asked to turn down an assignment if we could not give one,” said Ms. Parker, whose brief notices for a dozen memoirs are stuffed with superlatives like “a must-read” and “a lifetime’s worth of wisdom.”
Determining the number of fake reviews on the Web is difficult. But it is enough of a problem to attract a team of Cornell researchers, who recently published a paper about creating a computer algorithm for detecting fake reviewers. They were instantly approached by a dozen companies, including Amazon, Hilton, TripAdvisor and several specialist travel sites, all of which have a strong interest in limiting the spread of bogus reviews.
“The whole system falls apart if made-up reviews are given the same weight as honest ones,” said one of the researchers, Myle Ott. Among those seeking out Mr. Ott, a 22-year-old Ph.D. candidate in computer science, after the study was published was Google, which asked for his résumé, he said.
Linchi Kwok, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who is researching social media and the hospitality industry, explained that as Internet shopping has become more “social,” with customer reviews an essential part of the sales pitch, marketers are realizing they must watch over those opinions as much as they manage any other marketing campaign.
“Everyone’s trying to do something to make themselves look better,” he said. “Some of them, if they cannot generate authentic reviews, may hire somebody to do it.”
Web retailers are aware of the widespread mood of celebration among their reviewers, even if they are reluctant to discuss it. Amazon, like other review sites, says it has a preponderance of positive reviews because of a feedback loop: Products with high-star ratings sell more, so they get more reviews than products with poor ratings.
But they are concerned about the integrity of those reviews. “Any one review could be someone’s best friend, and it’s impossible to tell that in every case,” said Russell Dicker, Amazon’s director of community. “We are continuing to invest in our ability to detect these problems.”
The Cornell researchers tackled what they call deceptive opinion spam by commissioning freelance writers on Mechanical Turk, an Amazon-owned marketplace for workers, to produce 400 positive but fake reviews of Chicago hotels. Then they mixed in 400 positive TripAdvisor reviews that they believed were genuine, and asked three human judges to tell them apart. They could not.
“We evolved over 60,000 years by talking to each other face to face,” said Jeffrey T. Hancock, a Cornell professor of communication and information science who worked on the project. “Now we’re communicating in these virtual ways. It feels like it is much harder to pick up clues about deception.”
So the team developed an algorithm to distinguish fake from real, which worked about 90 percent of the time. The fakes tended to be a narrative talking about their experience at the hotel using a lot of superlatives, but they were not very good on description. Naturally: They had never been there. Instead, they talked about why they were in Chicago. They also used words like “I” and “me” more frequently, as if to underline their own credibility.
How far a business can go to get a good review is a blurry line. A high-end English hotel, The Cove in Cornwall, was recently accused in the British media of soliciting guests to post an “honest but positive review” on TripAdvisor in exchange for a future discount of 10 percent. Nearly all the recent reviews of the Cove are glowing except for the one headlined, “Sadly let down by overhyped reviews.”
The hotel said it was a loyalty scheme that was being misconstrued. TripAdvisor, though, posted a warning about the Cove’s favorable notices on its page for the hotel. The site declined to say how often it has had to post such caveats.
Founded 11 years ago, TripAdvisor never expected to see so many positive reviews. “We were worried it was going to be a gripe site,” said the chief executive, Stephen Kaufer. “Who the heck would bother to write a review except to complain?” Instead, the average of the 50 million reviews is 3.7 stars out of five, bordering on exceptional but typical of review sites.
Negative reviews also abound on the Web; they are often posted on restaurant and hotel sites by business rivals. But as Trevor J. Pinch, a sociologist at Cornell who has just published a study of Amazon reviewers, said, “There is definitely a bias toward positive comments.”
Mr. Pinch’s interviews with more than a hundred of Amazon’s highest-ranked reviewers found that only a few ever wrote anything critical. As one reviewer put it, “I prefer to praise the ones I love, not damn the ones I did not!”
The fact that just about all the top reviewers in his study said they got free books and other material from publishers and others soliciting good notices may have also had something to do with it.
Even if you get a failing grade or two, all is not lost. Dot-coms like Main Street Hub manage the reputations of small businesses for a fixed fee.
“A courteous response to a negative review can persuade the reviewer to change their reviews from two to three or four stars,” said Main Street’s chief executive, Andrew Allison. “That’s one of the highest victories a local business can aspire to with respect to their critics.”
The result, he said: “It’s like Lake Wobegon. Everyone is above average.”
from: NY Times
In tens of millions of reviews on Web sites like Amazon.com, Citysearch, TripAdvisor and Yelp, new books are better than Tolstoy, restaurants are undiscovered gems and hotels surpass the Ritz.
Or so the reviewers say. As online retailers increasingly depend on reviews as a sales tool, an industry of fibbers and promoters has sprung up to buy and sell raves for a pittance.
“For $5, I will submit two great reviews for your business,” offered one entrepreneur on the help-for-hire site Fiverr, one of a multitude of similar pitches. On another forum, Digital Point, a poster wrote, “I will pay for positive feedback on TripAdvisor.” A Craigslist post proposed this: “If you have an active Yelp account and would like to make very easy money please respond.”
The boundless demand for positive reviews has made the review system an arms race of sorts. As more five-star reviews are handed out, even more five-star reviews are needed. Few want to risk being left behind.
Sandra Parker, a freelance writer who was hired by a review factory this spring to pump out Amazon reviews for $10 each, said her instructions were simple. “We were not asked to provide a five-star review, but would be asked to turn down an assignment if we could not give one,” said Ms. Parker, whose brief notices for a dozen memoirs are stuffed with superlatives like “a must-read” and “a lifetime’s worth of wisdom.”
Determining the number of fake reviews on the Web is difficult. But it is enough of a problem to attract a team of Cornell researchers, who recently published a paper about creating a computer algorithm for detecting fake reviewers. They were instantly approached by a dozen companies, including Amazon, Hilton, TripAdvisor and several specialist travel sites, all of which have a strong interest in limiting the spread of bogus reviews.
“The whole system falls apart if made-up reviews are given the same weight as honest ones,” said one of the researchers, Myle Ott. Among those seeking out Mr. Ott, a 22-year-old Ph.D. candidate in computer science, after the study was published was Google, which asked for his résumé, he said.
Linchi Kwok, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who is researching social media and the hospitality industry, explained that as Internet shopping has become more “social,” with customer reviews an essential part of the sales pitch, marketers are realizing they must watch over those opinions as much as they manage any other marketing campaign.
“Everyone’s trying to do something to make themselves look better,” he said. “Some of them, if they cannot generate authentic reviews, may hire somebody to do it.”
Web retailers are aware of the widespread mood of celebration among their reviewers, even if they are reluctant to discuss it. Amazon, like other review sites, says it has a preponderance of positive reviews because of a feedback loop: Products with high-star ratings sell more, so they get more reviews than products with poor ratings.
But they are concerned about the integrity of those reviews. “Any one review could be someone’s best friend, and it’s impossible to tell that in every case,” said Russell Dicker, Amazon’s director of community. “We are continuing to invest in our ability to detect these problems.”
The Cornell researchers tackled what they call deceptive opinion spam by commissioning freelance writers on Mechanical Turk, an Amazon-owned marketplace for workers, to produce 400 positive but fake reviews of Chicago hotels. Then they mixed in 400 positive TripAdvisor reviews that they believed were genuine, and asked three human judges to tell them apart. They could not.
“We evolved over 60,000 years by talking to each other face to face,” said Jeffrey T. Hancock, a Cornell professor of communication and information science who worked on the project. “Now we’re communicating in these virtual ways. It feels like it is much harder to pick up clues about deception.”
So the team developed an algorithm to distinguish fake from real, which worked about 90 percent of the time. The fakes tended to be a narrative talking about their experience at the hotel using a lot of superlatives, but they were not very good on description. Naturally: They had never been there. Instead, they talked about why they were in Chicago. They also used words like “I” and “me” more frequently, as if to underline their own credibility.
How far a business can go to get a good review is a blurry line. A high-end English hotel, The Cove in Cornwall, was recently accused in the British media of soliciting guests to post an “honest but positive review” on TripAdvisor in exchange for a future discount of 10 percent. Nearly all the recent reviews of the Cove are glowing except for the one headlined, “Sadly let down by overhyped reviews.”
The hotel said it was a loyalty scheme that was being misconstrued. TripAdvisor, though, posted a warning about the Cove’s favorable notices on its page for the hotel. The site declined to say how often it has had to post such caveats.
Founded 11 years ago, TripAdvisor never expected to see so many positive reviews. “We were worried it was going to be a gripe site,” said the chief executive, Stephen Kaufer. “Who the heck would bother to write a review except to complain?” Instead, the average of the 50 million reviews is 3.7 stars out of five, bordering on exceptional but typical of review sites.
Negative reviews also abound on the Web; they are often posted on restaurant and hotel sites by business rivals. But as Trevor J. Pinch, a sociologist at Cornell who has just published a study of Amazon reviewers, said, “There is definitely a bias toward positive comments.”
Mr. Pinch’s interviews with more than a hundred of Amazon’s highest-ranked reviewers found that only a few ever wrote anything critical. As one reviewer put it, “I prefer to praise the ones I love, not damn the ones I did not!”
The fact that just about all the top reviewers in his study said they got free books and other material from publishers and others soliciting good notices may have also had something to do with it.
Even if you get a failing grade or two, all is not lost. Dot-coms like Main Street Hub manage the reputations of small businesses for a fixed fee.
“A courteous response to a negative review can persuade the reviewer to change their reviews from two to three or four stars,” said Main Street’s chief executive, Andrew Allison. “That’s one of the highest victories a local business can aspire to with respect to their critics.”
The result, he said: “It’s like Lake Wobegon. Everyone is above average.”
from: NY Times
Friday, September 2, 2011
Library Of The Future
EPL Increases Circulation By Embracing The Electronic Revolution
Four-year-old Tiffany watches uncertainly in the darkened room. Peering from behind her older sister’s legs, she quietly observes three boisterous boys swing their arms toward a giant screen, with egg-white remote controls in hand. A game of Wii Sports bowling is underway at the Whitemud Crossing Branch of the Edmonton Public Library (EPL).
Now it’s Tiffany’s turn. She cautiously moves her remote, watching wide-eyed as her simulated bowling ball rolls slowly toward the pins — strike! Her eyes light up. “My first time ever and I got them all,” she whispers.
It’s charming to watch, but it leaves an obvious question: Why is this happening in a library?
“It is a bit of a stretch,” admits the library’s executive director of public services, Pilar Martinez, “but we’ve offered Wii Sports to children and teams of seniors at various branches since 2007. It engages them, making technology fun and non-intimidating. It’s a great tool for increasing digital literacy and our focus includes all kinds of literacy.”
Remember when literacy meant the ability to read and write? Today that definition is as restrictive as dial-up Internet. An LED sign at the Stanley A. Milner branch flashes today’s more expansive meaning in little white bulbs: “Literacy is more than just reading and writing. It’s also the way we make sense of all kinds of information.”
We’re still reading to understand the world around us, but the words we absorb are increasingly on high-tech screens rather than between covers. In tech talk, reading has gone “multi-platform.” This summer, we’ll enjoy the pleasures of reading — under a shady tree in the park, at the beach, on lunch breaks or in deck chairs during long twilights — but we might “turn” those pages on a Kobo or Kindle, iPad or iPhone.
E-readers are moving from novelty gadgets to common possessions enjoyed by teens, parents or grandparents. A May report from a leading market research company The NPD Group showed six per cent of Canadians own e-readers, the same percentage who own electronic tablets like iPads, which also function as e-readers. And in May, Amazon’s e-book sales beat all print sales.
The trend is not limited to Internet sales either. An Association of American Publishers report from January/February 2011 sales shows that, for the first time ever, e-books outsold every other category of trade publishing, including adult paperbacks and hardcovers.
(However, when combined, print-book sales for those months were $441.7 million, nearly three times more than e-books, but down nearly 25 per cent from the year before.)
Libraries recognize the challenges of connecting with readers in a digital world, and just as Martinez — a fashionably dressed young woman — looks nothing like outmoded stereotypes of bespectacled, bun-headed librarians, the EPL has redefined itself, too. It’s reaching beyond traditional images of buildings filled with books to embrace the new literacy needs of our information age. Whether that’s Wii Sports or the latest app to download e-books to your iPhone, the library is also turning a digital page through creative approaches to technology.
Technology has been a game changer for libraries. For better or for worse, a generation that’s grown up Googling is more likely to turn to Wikipedia and other online sources when researching than pull an encyclopedia off the local library shelf. Across North America, budgets were cut, staff were laid off and hours reduced.
The EPL is among a minority of libraries reversing that trend. Two years away from its 100th anniversary, this near-centenarian has renewed vigour. Expansion and renovations are in progress at existing locations; construction is underway or planned for brand-new branches; and there is talk of giving the core Stanley A. Milner branch a makeover, inside and out. This year, city council approved funding to keep library doors open Sundays at all 17 branches, except in summer months. And in 2010, circulation — resources borrowed or downloaded — soared to the highest levels in its history, rising 23 per cent in the past two years alone.
Part of its success story lies in its multi-media rebranding campaign launched in 2010, so well-executed that it won 11 international marketing awards, including highest honours from the American Library Association. But is there more to the library's new energy than T-Shirts, mugs and cards proclaiming “We Make Geek Chic” and “Chicks Dig Big Brains?” Is the library actually doing what its catchy new slogan, “Spread the Words,” claims?
The EPL is one of a handful of Canadian libraries backed by a marketing team with business-world expertise.
When marketing and fund development director Tina Thomas, who joined the EPL from Nortel in 2009, took stock of the library’s resources, she thought it was undervalued. “Like many people, I used the library as a child, then drifted away,” says Thomas. “I came back when I had children and was amazed at what’s now available. I’m passionate about sharing the value of what I’ve rediscovered.”
Paperbacks and hardcover books still account for the vast majority of the library’s circulation, but digital options (and usage) are accelerating. “EPL has offered e-books on loan since 2008, but there wasn’t much user activity,” says Peter Schoenberg, director of Eservices. “Last Christmas was a tipping point. So many people got e-readers as gifts that interest spiked. Because we’d already laid the groundwork, we were ready to respond to the new demand.”
Schoenberg is constantly searching for new ways to expand EPL’s electronic options, acknowledging that library members still love books. This year, though, he predicts the rate of growth for electronic content will outpace the growth in “physical objects” (i.e. books, magazines and DVDs). He also dispels the assumption that interest in e-books is limited to the under-30 set. “It’s coming from every demographic. Staff told me about a 92-year-old who came into a branch asking for help with her new e-reader. There are lots of seniors like her.”
Schoenberg is candid about the quirks and limitations that e-book borrowers might encounter. “We’re in a transitional time,” he explains. “To some extent we’re still hamstrung by vendor restrictions and copyright limitations that are carry-overs from traditional publishing, which is trying to apply print rules to the digital world. It doesn’t really work, but they haven’t found a better model yet.”
For example, most digital books purchased by the library come with a “one-book, one-user” policy. After a user downloads a book to his or her device, it becomes unavailable to others until it “expires” after three weeks, even if the person polishes it off in three days and wants to return it. Other members have to put “holds” on digital books, not for logistical reasons, but because of licensing. Still, EPL’s cyber-shelves are busy and the number of e-books downloaded tripled in 2010.
Schoenberg says e-books are only the start of non-conventional offerings. Audiobooks in mp3-format are also in-demand, especially with those who have long commutes. The PressDisplay service offers free, same-day electronic access to more than 800 international newspapers that look exactly like their print versions. As well, card-holding members can live-stream everything from Handel to Hedley on the three digital music libraries, or download free non-expiring song files from Sony Music’s Freegal service — without worrying about copyright violations.
Since accessing electronic content is a new skill for many borrowers, the EPL is also working hard to ease the experience. Schoenberg says that it was one of the first Canadian libraries to create an iPhone app which gives mobile access to the entire catalogue and smoothes the download process. The EPL has also launched “travelling tech roadshows” where staff discuss pros and cons of various e-readers and give the curious a hands-on experience with each. For teens, there’s Tech Boot Camp, which demonstrates how to use social media, develop their own stop-motion animation videos and create their own on-line songs. One-on-one instruction is also available at most branches for all ages.
Schoenberg believes traditional books will still be around in 10 years, although they may no longer be the library’s core business. “Ten years ago Facebook didn’t exist, so who knows what’s coming? CDs and DVDs appear headed for extinction, but the book still has a long life. The book was, and continues to be, a brilliant invention.”
Schoenberg predicts that bricks-and-mortar libraries will also change as readers transition to digital libraries. “I see a shift to buildings designed for more community meeting-space and less shelf-space,” he says. To stay on top of that trend, the EPL is looking at how libraries around the world use their interior space beyond the library’s original function as a book repository.
That thinking is already evident in the design of the new Jasper Place branch. “There’s not a pillar in the place,” says Schoenberg. “It’s a totally open layout that will make it easy to reconfigure for gatherings and events. All the wiring is in the floor so we can easily move or add digital connections to accommodate new technology.”
Gutenberg may not recognize the book of the future, or the places we keep them, but both are here to stay. “The library of the future will not have as many shelves of books, but it will still be very involved with literacy of all kinds,” Schoenberg says. “How we borrow and share information may change, but the reason libraries exist won’t. Virtual or actual, libraries remain places to share knowledge. That’s not going away.”
How the EPL Stacks Up
— 34% more materials borrowed or downloaded per citizen than the national average
— 42% more visits, both in person and by the Web, than the average Canadian library.
— 82% more questions answered per citizen than other Canadian libraries
— It costs EPL 16% less than the average Canadian library to make its materials available to customers
source: Edmonton Public Library
from: Avenue Edmonton
Four-year-old Tiffany watches uncertainly in the darkened room. Peering from behind her older sister’s legs, she quietly observes three boisterous boys swing their arms toward a giant screen, with egg-white remote controls in hand. A game of Wii Sports bowling is underway at the Whitemud Crossing Branch of the Edmonton Public Library (EPL).
Now it’s Tiffany’s turn. She cautiously moves her remote, watching wide-eyed as her simulated bowling ball rolls slowly toward the pins — strike! Her eyes light up. “My first time ever and I got them all,” she whispers.
It’s charming to watch, but it leaves an obvious question: Why is this happening in a library?
“It is a bit of a stretch,” admits the library’s executive director of public services, Pilar Martinez, “but we’ve offered Wii Sports to children and teams of seniors at various branches since 2007. It engages them, making technology fun and non-intimidating. It’s a great tool for increasing digital literacy and our focus includes all kinds of literacy.”
Remember when literacy meant the ability to read and write? Today that definition is as restrictive as dial-up Internet. An LED sign at the Stanley A. Milner branch flashes today’s more expansive meaning in little white bulbs: “Literacy is more than just reading and writing. It’s also the way we make sense of all kinds of information.”
We’re still reading to understand the world around us, but the words we absorb are increasingly on high-tech screens rather than between covers. In tech talk, reading has gone “multi-platform.” This summer, we’ll enjoy the pleasures of reading — under a shady tree in the park, at the beach, on lunch breaks or in deck chairs during long twilights — but we might “turn” those pages on a Kobo or Kindle, iPad or iPhone.
E-readers are moving from novelty gadgets to common possessions enjoyed by teens, parents or grandparents. A May report from a leading market research company The NPD Group showed six per cent of Canadians own e-readers, the same percentage who own electronic tablets like iPads, which also function as e-readers. And in May, Amazon’s e-book sales beat all print sales.
The trend is not limited to Internet sales either. An Association of American Publishers report from January/February 2011 sales shows that, for the first time ever, e-books outsold every other category of trade publishing, including adult paperbacks and hardcovers.
(However, when combined, print-book sales for those months were $441.7 million, nearly three times more than e-books, but down nearly 25 per cent from the year before.)
Libraries recognize the challenges of connecting with readers in a digital world, and just as Martinez — a fashionably dressed young woman — looks nothing like outmoded stereotypes of bespectacled, bun-headed librarians, the EPL has redefined itself, too. It’s reaching beyond traditional images of buildings filled with books to embrace the new literacy needs of our information age. Whether that’s Wii Sports or the latest app to download e-books to your iPhone, the library is also turning a digital page through creative approaches to technology.
Technology has been a game changer for libraries. For better or for worse, a generation that’s grown up Googling is more likely to turn to Wikipedia and other online sources when researching than pull an encyclopedia off the local library shelf. Across North America, budgets were cut, staff were laid off and hours reduced.
The EPL is among a minority of libraries reversing that trend. Two years away from its 100th anniversary, this near-centenarian has renewed vigour. Expansion and renovations are in progress at existing locations; construction is underway or planned for brand-new branches; and there is talk of giving the core Stanley A. Milner branch a makeover, inside and out. This year, city council approved funding to keep library doors open Sundays at all 17 branches, except in summer months. And in 2010, circulation — resources borrowed or downloaded — soared to the highest levels in its history, rising 23 per cent in the past two years alone.
Part of its success story lies in its multi-media rebranding campaign launched in 2010, so well-executed that it won 11 international marketing awards, including highest honours from the American Library Association. But is there more to the library's new energy than T-Shirts, mugs and cards proclaiming “We Make Geek Chic” and “Chicks Dig Big Brains?” Is the library actually doing what its catchy new slogan, “Spread the Words,” claims?
The EPL is one of a handful of Canadian libraries backed by a marketing team with business-world expertise.
When marketing and fund development director Tina Thomas, who joined the EPL from Nortel in 2009, took stock of the library’s resources, she thought it was undervalued. “Like many people, I used the library as a child, then drifted away,” says Thomas. “I came back when I had children and was amazed at what’s now available. I’m passionate about sharing the value of what I’ve rediscovered.”
Paperbacks and hardcover books still account for the vast majority of the library’s circulation, but digital options (and usage) are accelerating. “EPL has offered e-books on loan since 2008, but there wasn’t much user activity,” says Peter Schoenberg, director of Eservices. “Last Christmas was a tipping point. So many people got e-readers as gifts that interest spiked. Because we’d already laid the groundwork, we were ready to respond to the new demand.”
Schoenberg is constantly searching for new ways to expand EPL’s electronic options, acknowledging that library members still love books. This year, though, he predicts the rate of growth for electronic content will outpace the growth in “physical objects” (i.e. books, magazines and DVDs). He also dispels the assumption that interest in e-books is limited to the under-30 set. “It’s coming from every demographic. Staff told me about a 92-year-old who came into a branch asking for help with her new e-reader. There are lots of seniors like her.”
Schoenberg is candid about the quirks and limitations that e-book borrowers might encounter. “We’re in a transitional time,” he explains. “To some extent we’re still hamstrung by vendor restrictions and copyright limitations that are carry-overs from traditional publishing, which is trying to apply print rules to the digital world. It doesn’t really work, but they haven’t found a better model yet.”
For example, most digital books purchased by the library come with a “one-book, one-user” policy. After a user downloads a book to his or her device, it becomes unavailable to others until it “expires” after three weeks, even if the person polishes it off in three days and wants to return it. Other members have to put “holds” on digital books, not for logistical reasons, but because of licensing. Still, EPL’s cyber-shelves are busy and the number of e-books downloaded tripled in 2010.
Schoenberg says e-books are only the start of non-conventional offerings. Audiobooks in mp3-format are also in-demand, especially with those who have long commutes. The PressDisplay service offers free, same-day electronic access to more than 800 international newspapers that look exactly like their print versions. As well, card-holding members can live-stream everything from Handel to Hedley on the three digital music libraries, or download free non-expiring song files from Sony Music’s Freegal service — without worrying about copyright violations.
Since accessing electronic content is a new skill for many borrowers, the EPL is also working hard to ease the experience. Schoenberg says that it was one of the first Canadian libraries to create an iPhone app which gives mobile access to the entire catalogue and smoothes the download process. The EPL has also launched “travelling tech roadshows” where staff discuss pros and cons of various e-readers and give the curious a hands-on experience with each. For teens, there’s Tech Boot Camp, which demonstrates how to use social media, develop their own stop-motion animation videos and create their own on-line songs. One-on-one instruction is also available at most branches for all ages.
Schoenberg believes traditional books will still be around in 10 years, although they may no longer be the library’s core business. “Ten years ago Facebook didn’t exist, so who knows what’s coming? CDs and DVDs appear headed for extinction, but the book still has a long life. The book was, and continues to be, a brilliant invention.”
Schoenberg predicts that bricks-and-mortar libraries will also change as readers transition to digital libraries. “I see a shift to buildings designed for more community meeting-space and less shelf-space,” he says. To stay on top of that trend, the EPL is looking at how libraries around the world use their interior space beyond the library’s original function as a book repository.
That thinking is already evident in the design of the new Jasper Place branch. “There’s not a pillar in the place,” says Schoenberg. “It’s a totally open layout that will make it easy to reconfigure for gatherings and events. All the wiring is in the floor so we can easily move or add digital connections to accommodate new technology.”
Gutenberg may not recognize the book of the future, or the places we keep them, but both are here to stay. “The library of the future will not have as many shelves of books, but it will still be very involved with literacy of all kinds,” Schoenberg says. “How we borrow and share information may change, but the reason libraries exist won’t. Virtual or actual, libraries remain places to share knowledge. That’s not going away.”
How the EPL Stacks Up
— 34% more materials borrowed or downloaded per citizen than the national average
— 42% more visits, both in person and by the Web, than the average Canadian library.
— 82% more questions answered per citizen than other Canadian libraries
— It costs EPL 16% less than the average Canadian library to make its materials available to customers
source: Edmonton Public Library
from: Avenue Edmonton
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Why that book changed your life
by: Angela Hickman
The claim that a book can change someone’s life is one that’s made over and over again. Usually, we brush it aside as a cliché, but what if it was actually possible?
The question of the psychology of fiction is one that Keith Oatley, professor emeritus in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, has been working on for 20 years. He and some colleagues started the website On Fiction in 2008 to track work related to the psychology of fiction.
“The idea was to say, ‘OK, now what really are the psychological effects of reading?’ ” Oatley says. To try and work out an answer, he and Maja Djikic put together a study to measure how personalities can be changed by literature. Participants were given either Anton Chekhov’s story “The Lady with the Little Dog” or a version of the story rewritten in a nonfiction style by Djikic, which included all the same information, was the same length and at the same reading level. Participants did personality tests before and after reading.
“The people who read the Chekhov story, their personalities all changed a bit,” Oatley says.
But what sets literature, and especially narrative fiction, apart from other genres is that everyone’s personality changed a different way.
“With things like persuasion, as in a political message, everybody’s all supposed to think the same way, and they do,” Oatley says. “The reason we’re very excited by this result is that people all changed in their own way. So we were able to measure the amount of change that each individual had and everybody changed in a different way.”
Reading narrative fiction (and potentially narrative non-fiction such as memoirs as well) is like a form of meditation, Oatley says, because it opens you up to emptying your mind of real-life concerns in favour of focusing on a fictional world.
“You go sit somewhere quietly, or you go lie on a couch, or go to bed, you put aside your own concerns and now you take on the concerns of Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary, or whoever it happens to be. So you then start to experience what life was like from within a different mind.”
That experience, although guided by the story, is entirely individual, Oatley says, which is why it affects everyone differently. This kind of individual response to a book is something most readers have experienced at some point, whether by crying over certain circumstances or applying a character’s lesson to their own life.
That kind of transferal, says Raymond Mar, assistant professor of psychology at York University and a former student of Oatley’s, happens because the tools we use to understand fiction and reality aren’t that different.
“There are similar cognitive processes associated with understanding the real world and understanding the fictional world, so when we try to understand what’s going on in a piece of fiction – reading a book and trying to figure out what characters are thinking and feeling – it’s analogous to people trying to figure out how real people are thinking and feeling,” he says, adding that literature can therefore help bolster social interaction and understanding.
“We’ve talked a lot about the importance of reading with respect to language – increasing vocabulary, verbal ability, that sort of thing,” he says. “I think it’s possible that reading could also have important consequences for other realms of our life, like the social realm, our ability to understand other people, our ability to think in abstract terms, imagination, these sorts of things.”
Although these are all positive traits, it stands to reason that just as literature can have a positive effect on personality, it could have a negative one as well. That’s the kind of argument people use when trying to ban books, but Mar says he isn’t worried that this research fuels the censorship fire.
“It’s not the case that books can have such powerful, unilateral changes in attitude,” he says. “So, it’s not the case that if you have a certain belief and then you read a book against your will, your belief will change. That’s not the way that literature works; it’s not a direct injection of ideas or propaganda. Literature tends to open up your mind to potentials.”
Having an open mind is essential for personality change, Mar says. But even the most open of minds probably won’t be completely altered by just one experience with fiction.
“The effects can be moderate even if they are real,” he says. Nonetheless, he adds, “What you’re reading definitely matters.”
• For more information on the psychology of fiction, visit onfiction.ca.
from: National Post
The question of the psychology of fiction is one that Keith Oatley, professor emeritus in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, has been working on for 20 years. He and some colleagues started the website On Fiction in 2008 to track work related to the psychology of fiction.
“The idea was to say, ‘OK, now what really are the psychological effects of reading?’ ” Oatley says. To try and work out an answer, he and Maja Djikic put together a study to measure how personalities can be changed by literature. Participants were given either Anton Chekhov’s story “The Lady with the Little Dog” or a version of the story rewritten in a nonfiction style by Djikic, which included all the same information, was the same length and at the same reading level. Participants did personality tests before and after reading.
“The people who read the Chekhov story, their personalities all changed a bit,” Oatley says.
But what sets literature, and especially narrative fiction, apart from other genres is that everyone’s personality changed a different way.
“With things like persuasion, as in a political message, everybody’s all supposed to think the same way, and they do,” Oatley says. “The reason we’re very excited by this result is that people all changed in their own way. So we were able to measure the amount of change that each individual had and everybody changed in a different way.”
Reading narrative fiction (and potentially narrative non-fiction such as memoirs as well) is like a form of meditation, Oatley says, because it opens you up to emptying your mind of real-life concerns in favour of focusing on a fictional world.
“You go sit somewhere quietly, or you go lie on a couch, or go to bed, you put aside your own concerns and now you take on the concerns of Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary, or whoever it happens to be. So you then start to experience what life was like from within a different mind.”
That experience, although guided by the story, is entirely individual, Oatley says, which is why it affects everyone differently. This kind of individual response to a book is something most readers have experienced at some point, whether by crying over certain circumstances or applying a character’s lesson to their own life.
That kind of transferal, says Raymond Mar, assistant professor of psychology at York University and a former student of Oatley’s, happens because the tools we use to understand fiction and reality aren’t that different.
“There are similar cognitive processes associated with understanding the real world and understanding the fictional world, so when we try to understand what’s going on in a piece of fiction – reading a book and trying to figure out what characters are thinking and feeling – it’s analogous to people trying to figure out how real people are thinking and feeling,” he says, adding that literature can therefore help bolster social interaction and understanding.
“We’ve talked a lot about the importance of reading with respect to language – increasing vocabulary, verbal ability, that sort of thing,” he says. “I think it’s possible that reading could also have important consequences for other realms of our life, like the social realm, our ability to understand other people, our ability to think in abstract terms, imagination, these sorts of things.”
Although these are all positive traits, it stands to reason that just as literature can have a positive effect on personality, it could have a negative one as well. That’s the kind of argument people use when trying to ban books, but Mar says he isn’t worried that this research fuels the censorship fire.
“It’s not the case that books can have such powerful, unilateral changes in attitude,” he says. “So, it’s not the case that if you have a certain belief and then you read a book against your will, your belief will change. That’s not the way that literature works; it’s not a direct injection of ideas or propaganda. Literature tends to open up your mind to potentials.”
Having an open mind is essential for personality change, Mar says. But even the most open of minds probably won’t be completely altered by just one experience with fiction.
“The effects can be moderate even if they are real,” he says. Nonetheless, he adds, “What you’re reading definitely matters.”
• For more information on the psychology of fiction, visit onfiction.ca.
from: National Post
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