26 October 2011
The Royal Society has today announced that its world-famous historical journal archive – which includes the first ever peer-reviewed scientific journal – has been made permanently free to access online.
Around 60,000 historical scientific papers are accessible via a fully searchable online archive, with papers published more than 70 years ago now becoming freely available.
The Royal Society is the world’s oldest scientific publisher, with the first edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society appearing in 1665. Henry Oldenburg – Secretary of the Royal Society and first Editor of the publication – ensured that it was “licensed by the council of the society, being first reviewed by some of the members of the same”, thus making it the first ever peer-reviewed journal.
Philosophical Transactions had to overcome early setbacks including plague, the Great Fire of London and even the imprisonment of Oldenburg, but against the odds the publication survived to the present day. Its foundation would eventually be recognised as one of the most pivotal moments of the scientific revolution.
Professor Uta Frith FRS, Chair of the Royal Society library committee, said: “I’m delighted that the Royal Society is continuing to increase access to its wonderful resources by opening up its publishing archives. The release of these papers opens a fascinating window on the history of scientific progress over the last few centuries and will be of interest to anybody who wants to understand how science has evolved since the days of the Royal Society’s foundation.”
Treasures in the archive include Isaac Newton’s first published scientific paper, geological work by a young Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated account of his electrical kite experiment. And nestling amongst these illustrious papers, readers willing to delve a little deeper into the archive may find some undiscovered gems from the dawn of the scientific revolution – including accounts of monstrous calves, grisly tales of students being struck by lightning, and early experiments on to how to cool drinks “without the Help of Snow, Ice, Haile, Wind or Niter, and That at Any Time of the Year.”
Henry Oldenburg writes in his introduction to the first edition: “...it is therefore thought fit to employ the Press, as the most proper way to gratify those, whose...delight in the advancement of Learning and profitable Discoveries, doth entitle them to the knowledge of what this Kingdom, or other parts of the World, do, from time to time, afford...”, going on to state that potential contributors are: “...invited and encouraged to search, try, and find out new things, impart their knowledge to one another, and contribute what they can to the Grand design of improving natural knowledge, and perfecting all Philosophical Arts, and Sciences.”
Thomas Huxley FRS wrote in 1870: “If all the books in the world, except the Philosophical Transactions, were to be destroyed, it is safe to say that the foundations of physical science would remain unshaken, and that the vast intellectual progress of the last two centuries would be largely, though incompletely, recorded.”
The move is being made as part of the Royal Society’s ongoing commitment to open access in scientific publishing. Opening of the archive is being timed to coincide with Open Access Week, and also comes soon after the Royal Society announced its first ever fully open access journal, Open Biology.
From: Inside Science Magazine, The Royal Society
Friday, October 28, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Battlefield 3: Andy McNab on how he brought realism to shooting games
The ex-SAS soldier and best-selling author on what he told EA Dice about the nature of combat
Famed for his explosive SAS memoir Bravo Two Zero, and now the author of dozens of fictional military thrillers, Andy McNab is a pretty good person to go to if you're concerned with creating an authentic combat game. The decorated ex-soldier worked with EA Dice through the last year of development on Battlefield 3, helping with mission design, dialogue and motion capture sessions. He has also written a tie-in novel, Battlefield 3: The Russian, which explores the activities of special forces operator Dima, who appears as a non-playable character in the game.
But what has he really been able to draw from his covert missions in hotspots around the world? And has his work as a security adviser helped in the task of describing war to a bunch of coders and artists? We spoke to him last week, to find out.
You haven't been heavily involved with a video game before. What drew you to Battlefield 3?
The story. It's as simple as that. Normally, when you're approached by a games company, they just want you to jump on at the end as a marketing tool, or do a bit of motion capture. But when the call came from EA Dice, I went out to Stockholm and the guys there just seemed to get it – they wanted to progress the story-side. You've got to have a lot more than just shooting in games now, you've got to have that sense of engagement.
The first things EA Dice showed me were the scripts – and they had a sense of character, of emotion, of connection. That was what did it for me. And my first job was helping with the writing, coming up with plausible bridges between missions, doing some of the dialogue. Military speak is very progressive and positive. No one says, "Well, we'll try to get to X by 9am", it's all about you will do this, I will do that, this will happen. The point of that is, if you start with a moment of doubt, when things get worse, doubt becomes failure. It's got to be positive from the start. And it's all about brevity – military language is not as formal as we think it is.
And I spent time with the designers and artists, looking at the aesthetics – the right use of weapons, different ranges of fire, operations in urban and desert environments. I worked with the stuntmen and actors in the motion capture studios, showing them how to hold their guns. The team just wanted everything to look right.
This may sound like a stupid question, but are there moments in Battlefield that have reminded you of genuine missions you've been on?
Oh yes, certainly some of the urban stuff. There's quite a lot of action in Tehran, and through the Middle Eastern architecture, it does look very similar to Iraq. The tank section of the game is based on the earthworks that were built along the Iran/Iraq borders during their war. There were huge infantry battalions based around these earthworks. Four or five years ago, I was flying along the border with the Americans – I was working for a private security company at the time – and I saw these almost medieval constructions.
So I took a couple of pictures and when we were going through the tank levels in the game, I dug out them out, sent them over and Dice produced exact replicas in the game. There's an American tank commander who served out in Fallujah and now works for EA Dice in the US – he said the tank level is better than a military simulator.
A lot of people aren't comfortable with the idea of gamers indulging in war simulations for fun. Are you completely OK with it?
Yes! People have always been fascinated by war – games are just another medium for that. There have been war films since the beginning of cinema – you could go along to the Saturday morning pictures and watch John Wayne kill 100 Japanese soldiers in 10 minutes. It's all part of the same thing. And the big arguments about games inducing violence – they're a load of nonsense; violence has always been there. And possibly, the reason the crime rate is declining in the US is that people are now staying in and exploring violence through games rather than going out and beating people up.
It's the same with films and books. I've been blamed for a bank robbery in America somewhere; I've been blamed for a couple of murders. But look… take Chicago and Toronto: they're separated by two lakes, nothing more, the TV is the same, their influences are the same, but Chicago's crime rate is up here and Toronto's is way down there. How can that be? Is it a cultural thing? I don't know.
Are the emotions that you experience in shooter anywhere near the emotions you genuinely face in real-life missions? Are there any similarities at all?
Yes, there are. Once you're engaged with the character, you're part of it. You get fear, anxiety, you get the same rush of endorphins if you're successful; obviously it's all at different levels because it's just entertainment. You don't get wet, cold and hungry! Also, some people have gamers down as solitary and geeky, but that's not the case. It's very social, you're in touch with 16 other gamers in Japan, the US, all over the world.
And soldiers tend to be very good at shooters don't they?
Absolutely. The military uses games to as a teaching tool; soldiers in training have always used games. Conflict is progressing, it's becoming more about stand-off attack – you don't want to face the enemy, because people get killed. So war is becoming much more technical and soldiers do play a lot of games. They get it.
Which are some of the key weapons in Battlefield, do you think? Which are the most authentic?
The RPG works very well, certainly in the urban environments. We spent a lot of time working on that, getting it right, especially the signature left by the back blast. Everyone always expects a big explosion from an RPG, but you don't get that – it's designed to penetrate armour.
And with RPGs in shooting games you'll often get a guy who'll just stand right up and fire. Well, in real-life, sometimes you see them sometimes you don't; what you're looking for is the signature of the back blast, which is quite distinctive, it's a noisy signature. That's in the game, and it should help players find where the fire is coming from.
The M4 carbine is in a lot of games, but it works very well here. The animation in BF3 captures the way that soldiers manipulate these weapons, the different fixtures on the safety catch, whether it's on single shot or auto, all that sort of stuff. Even down to the moments where you have stoppage and you'll just tip the gun to see what's going on – if the working parts are back, you need a new magazine. So you'll just tip and look. That's in the game animation. Geeky things like that.
We spent a lot of time talking about the helicopter gunships, the 40mm cannons, the way that bullet casings come down like rain – that really does happen. So we played with that. Also, they asked me if the gunship would just stay still and hover over the battlefield. I said of course it will; the crew are like, "We've got a big gun, we're heavily armoured, what are you going to do about it?" There's this attitude, "we will go forward" and we've got to get that in the game.
It's about changing people's perceptions. If you have a line of machine guns pointing one in one direction, you think they're going to stitch the wall in a nice line – it doesn't work that way. When rounds fall, they fall in an oval shape, so instead of having the guns facing outwards, you have two slightly turned to each other – that way you have a bigger Beaten Zone. So often you'll get players asking, what's that machine gun doing up there? And actually, it's doing its job because you want the fire to be coming in from the flank, so the Beaten Zones cross. The Germans worked it out in the first world war. That's why we lost so many soldiers at battles like Passchendaele.
You've also talked a lot about ensuring a lived-in look for the vehicles, and about how tanks end up being heavily customised by their crews…
Yeah, I mean, people live in them! They customise them as much as possible. If they can get hold of a barbecue, they'll stick it on there. Some crews, certainly in Iraq, they were nicking air conditioning units and trying to rig them up in the tanks. They plug in their iPods. That's their home. Even in mechanised battalions, in Warriors and all that, they'll get as much of their equipment as they can on the outside, to make sure they can make the inside more comfortable. Everyone wants chargers for their phones in there! And there are mugs everywhere because they're continually getting brews on….
There's a lot of cynicism among the soldiers in Battlefield 3 – they're often very sceptical, even sarcastic, about their mission objectives. Is that realistic?
Yes, I think it's in every soldier's job description! They've always got to moan, they've always got to be saying, 'what the fuck's he on about… oh well, we'll get on and do it'. It's not all, 'yeah, let's go!'. It's not like that, people aren't like that. Everyone just takes the piss out of each other all the time. When they're not taking the piss is when you've got to worry.
The multiplayer element of Battlefield 3 really highlights the importance of good communications between infantry and air force. Is that realistic?
There are occasions where infantry just talk directly to the pilots. There are voice procedures, but if you've got a guy on the ground screaming for support, the pilot can just say "Shut up, where are you, what can you see? Mark it for me." Then they come in and say "Right. I've got it."
But there is a lot of chaos and confusion?
Yes, and I've explained that to the team. With the night mission in Tehran, when you're coming in to the city, I spent ages talking to them about the light flares and what they do as they descend – the shadows they cast, the usual confusion… we've played around with that a lot.
Can I ask you quickly, as a security adviser, what do you think about the current situation in the Middle East and North Africa? Did anyone see the Arab spring and the fall of Gaddafi coming?
No. There's this thing called "the future character of conflict", and both in the commercial military world and the state military world missed all this, it didn't hit anyone's radar. If anything, people were getting more concerned about central Asia. It remains to be seen whether this is all a good thing. I think everyone is relieved that Gaddafi is dead rather than going to the ICC – no one wanted him there. Why would they? It would give him a voice. Now it's cut, it's done, he's dead.
Now it's about keeping out of the way of the NTC, because there's that void to fill – they have to manage themselves. As soon as it was over, they were saying, "OK Nato, out!." That's the right way to do it. It's been about mentoring the NTC. They've got to be in charge of their own destiny. You don't want the Europeans stomping around out there.
If you were still in active service with the SAS, where do you think you would be now?
In Afghanistan probably, in a task force there. Since November, most of the Nato special forces have been all about malleting the leadership of the Taliban. The process of transition has begun in the country; the Afghan national army control Kabul now and have actually been quite successful. So the plan is to remove the hardcore leadership of the Taliban so you're left with people who you can negotiate with. I was out there just before Cameron in November last year and I got a brief that the task forces had malleted about 1,400 Taliban in a 90-day period. It was a huge operation. That's what it's all about – the run up to the point at which combat troops are withdrawn; they're going no matter what – late 2014, probably 2015. They will go, because it will be election time.
So where do you think the next conflict hotspots will be for western powers?
There are many of them – and again it's about assessing the future character of conflict. What all military forces do is assess energy and food security and the routes to and from trade partners. Food and water, we're all right on, so it'll be energy and trade routes – conflicts on the east and west coasts of Africa, possibly. The Americans, I think, still have an aircraft carrier fleet off the west coast protecting that flank. Our energy out of north Africa seems pretty secure now, it's the east and west coast that might be problem…
Battlefield 3 is released on Friday for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.
From: The Guardian
Famed for his explosive SAS memoir Bravo Two Zero, and now the author of dozens of fictional military thrillers, Andy McNab is a pretty good person to go to if you're concerned with creating an authentic combat game. The decorated ex-soldier worked with EA Dice through the last year of development on Battlefield 3, helping with mission design, dialogue and motion capture sessions. He has also written a tie-in novel, Battlefield 3: The Russian, which explores the activities of special forces operator Dima, who appears as a non-playable character in the game.
But what has he really been able to draw from his covert missions in hotspots around the world? And has his work as a security adviser helped in the task of describing war to a bunch of coders and artists? We spoke to him last week, to find out.
You haven't been heavily involved with a video game before. What drew you to Battlefield 3?
The story. It's as simple as that. Normally, when you're approached by a games company, they just want you to jump on at the end as a marketing tool, or do a bit of motion capture. But when the call came from EA Dice, I went out to Stockholm and the guys there just seemed to get it – they wanted to progress the story-side. You've got to have a lot more than just shooting in games now, you've got to have that sense of engagement.
The first things EA Dice showed me were the scripts – and they had a sense of character, of emotion, of connection. That was what did it for me. And my first job was helping with the writing, coming up with plausible bridges between missions, doing some of the dialogue. Military speak is very progressive and positive. No one says, "Well, we'll try to get to X by 9am", it's all about you will do this, I will do that, this will happen. The point of that is, if you start with a moment of doubt, when things get worse, doubt becomes failure. It's got to be positive from the start. And it's all about brevity – military language is not as formal as we think it is.
And I spent time with the designers and artists, looking at the aesthetics – the right use of weapons, different ranges of fire, operations in urban and desert environments. I worked with the stuntmen and actors in the motion capture studios, showing them how to hold their guns. The team just wanted everything to look right.
This may sound like a stupid question, but are there moments in Battlefield that have reminded you of genuine missions you've been on?
Oh yes, certainly some of the urban stuff. There's quite a lot of action in Tehran, and through the Middle Eastern architecture, it does look very similar to Iraq. The tank section of the game is based on the earthworks that were built along the Iran/Iraq borders during their war. There were huge infantry battalions based around these earthworks. Four or five years ago, I was flying along the border with the Americans – I was working for a private security company at the time – and I saw these almost medieval constructions.
So I took a couple of pictures and when we were going through the tank levels in the game, I dug out them out, sent them over and Dice produced exact replicas in the game. There's an American tank commander who served out in Fallujah and now works for EA Dice in the US – he said the tank level is better than a military simulator.
A lot of people aren't comfortable with the idea of gamers indulging in war simulations for fun. Are you completely OK with it?
Yes! People have always been fascinated by war – games are just another medium for that. There have been war films since the beginning of cinema – you could go along to the Saturday morning pictures and watch John Wayne kill 100 Japanese soldiers in 10 minutes. It's all part of the same thing. And the big arguments about games inducing violence – they're a load of nonsense; violence has always been there. And possibly, the reason the crime rate is declining in the US is that people are now staying in and exploring violence through games rather than going out and beating people up.
It's the same with films and books. I've been blamed for a bank robbery in America somewhere; I've been blamed for a couple of murders. But look… take Chicago and Toronto: they're separated by two lakes, nothing more, the TV is the same, their influences are the same, but Chicago's crime rate is up here and Toronto's is way down there. How can that be? Is it a cultural thing? I don't know.
Are the emotions that you experience in shooter anywhere near the emotions you genuinely face in real-life missions? Are there any similarities at all?
Yes, there are. Once you're engaged with the character, you're part of it. You get fear, anxiety, you get the same rush of endorphins if you're successful; obviously it's all at different levels because it's just entertainment. You don't get wet, cold and hungry! Also, some people have gamers down as solitary and geeky, but that's not the case. It's very social, you're in touch with 16 other gamers in Japan, the US, all over the world.
And soldiers tend to be very good at shooters don't they?
Absolutely. The military uses games to as a teaching tool; soldiers in training have always used games. Conflict is progressing, it's becoming more about stand-off attack – you don't want to face the enemy, because people get killed. So war is becoming much more technical and soldiers do play a lot of games. They get it.
Which are some of the key weapons in Battlefield, do you think? Which are the most authentic?
The RPG works very well, certainly in the urban environments. We spent a lot of time working on that, getting it right, especially the signature left by the back blast. Everyone always expects a big explosion from an RPG, but you don't get that – it's designed to penetrate armour.
And with RPGs in shooting games you'll often get a guy who'll just stand right up and fire. Well, in real-life, sometimes you see them sometimes you don't; what you're looking for is the signature of the back blast, which is quite distinctive, it's a noisy signature. That's in the game, and it should help players find where the fire is coming from.
The M4 carbine is in a lot of games, but it works very well here. The animation in BF3 captures the way that soldiers manipulate these weapons, the different fixtures on the safety catch, whether it's on single shot or auto, all that sort of stuff. Even down to the moments where you have stoppage and you'll just tip the gun to see what's going on – if the working parts are back, you need a new magazine. So you'll just tip and look. That's in the game animation. Geeky things like that.
We spent a lot of time talking about the helicopter gunships, the 40mm cannons, the way that bullet casings come down like rain – that really does happen. So we played with that. Also, they asked me if the gunship would just stay still and hover over the battlefield. I said of course it will; the crew are like, "We've got a big gun, we're heavily armoured, what are you going to do about it?" There's this attitude, "we will go forward" and we've got to get that in the game.
It's about changing people's perceptions. If you have a line of machine guns pointing one in one direction, you think they're going to stitch the wall in a nice line – it doesn't work that way. When rounds fall, they fall in an oval shape, so instead of having the guns facing outwards, you have two slightly turned to each other – that way you have a bigger Beaten Zone. So often you'll get players asking, what's that machine gun doing up there? And actually, it's doing its job because you want the fire to be coming in from the flank, so the Beaten Zones cross. The Germans worked it out in the first world war. That's why we lost so many soldiers at battles like Passchendaele.
You've also talked a lot about ensuring a lived-in look for the vehicles, and about how tanks end up being heavily customised by their crews…
Yeah, I mean, people live in them! They customise them as much as possible. If they can get hold of a barbecue, they'll stick it on there. Some crews, certainly in Iraq, they were nicking air conditioning units and trying to rig them up in the tanks. They plug in their iPods. That's their home. Even in mechanised battalions, in Warriors and all that, they'll get as much of their equipment as they can on the outside, to make sure they can make the inside more comfortable. Everyone wants chargers for their phones in there! And there are mugs everywhere because they're continually getting brews on….
There's a lot of cynicism among the soldiers in Battlefield 3 – they're often very sceptical, even sarcastic, about their mission objectives. Is that realistic?
Yes, I think it's in every soldier's job description! They've always got to moan, they've always got to be saying, 'what the fuck's he on about… oh well, we'll get on and do it'. It's not all, 'yeah, let's go!'. It's not like that, people aren't like that. Everyone just takes the piss out of each other all the time. When they're not taking the piss is when you've got to worry.
The multiplayer element of Battlefield 3 really highlights the importance of good communications between infantry and air force. Is that realistic?
There are occasions where infantry just talk directly to the pilots. There are voice procedures, but if you've got a guy on the ground screaming for support, the pilot can just say "Shut up, where are you, what can you see? Mark it for me." Then they come in and say "Right. I've got it."
But there is a lot of chaos and confusion?
Yes, and I've explained that to the team. With the night mission in Tehran, when you're coming in to the city, I spent ages talking to them about the light flares and what they do as they descend – the shadows they cast, the usual confusion… we've played around with that a lot.
Can I ask you quickly, as a security adviser, what do you think about the current situation in the Middle East and North Africa? Did anyone see the Arab spring and the fall of Gaddafi coming?
No. There's this thing called "the future character of conflict", and both in the commercial military world and the state military world missed all this, it didn't hit anyone's radar. If anything, people were getting more concerned about central Asia. It remains to be seen whether this is all a good thing. I think everyone is relieved that Gaddafi is dead rather than going to the ICC – no one wanted him there. Why would they? It would give him a voice. Now it's cut, it's done, he's dead.
Now it's about keeping out of the way of the NTC, because there's that void to fill – they have to manage themselves. As soon as it was over, they were saying, "OK Nato, out!." That's the right way to do it. It's been about mentoring the NTC. They've got to be in charge of their own destiny. You don't want the Europeans stomping around out there.
If you were still in active service with the SAS, where do you think you would be now?
In Afghanistan probably, in a task force there. Since November, most of the Nato special forces have been all about malleting the leadership of the Taliban. The process of transition has begun in the country; the Afghan national army control Kabul now and have actually been quite successful. So the plan is to remove the hardcore leadership of the Taliban so you're left with people who you can negotiate with. I was out there just before Cameron in November last year and I got a brief that the task forces had malleted about 1,400 Taliban in a 90-day period. It was a huge operation. That's what it's all about – the run up to the point at which combat troops are withdrawn; they're going no matter what – late 2014, probably 2015. They will go, because it will be election time.
So where do you think the next conflict hotspots will be for western powers?
There are many of them – and again it's about assessing the future character of conflict. What all military forces do is assess energy and food security and the routes to and from trade partners. Food and water, we're all right on, so it'll be energy and trade routes – conflicts on the east and west coasts of Africa, possibly. The Americans, I think, still have an aircraft carrier fleet off the west coast protecting that flank. Our energy out of north Africa seems pretty secure now, it's the east and west coast that might be problem…
Battlefield 3 is released on Friday for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.
From: The Guardian
Monday, October 17, 2011
The Storyteller Who Returned From the Cold
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY
THE Englishman David Cornwell, who writes under the name John le Carré, has been a best-selling novelist for nearly five decades, and he has been, right from the start, an unusually perverse member of that select class: he writes books that practically beg not to be turned into movies. Of his 22 novels nearly all of them about the perennially popular and movie-friendly subject of espionage, a mere 7 have made the perilous border crossing to the big screen. (Three others have been adapted as television mini-series and one more as a stand-alone television movie.)
An eighth le Carré feature film, Tomas Alfredson’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” will be released on Dec. 9, and it’s a fair illustration of the fiendish difficulties this sly, subtle storyteller’s work presents to moviemakers. Mr. le Carré’s tales always take place in a kind of no man’s land, in the disputed territories of reason, morality and even simple truth. That’s a terrain that major-studio films are almost entirely unfamiliar with these days: it’s too dangerous, too unpredictable, like the wilder reaches of Afghanistan.
The world of “Tinker, Tailor,” which was originally published in 1974, is, though fearsomely murky, at least one with recognizable coordinates. The action takes place during the cold war, when East was East and West was West, and the point of intersection was a wall in the divided city of Berlin. That wall is the scene of the melancholy climax of the first movie made from a le Carré novel, Martin Ritt’s “Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1965), in which a British intelligence agent named Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) is asked by his masters to pretend to defect to the other side.
The novel, Mr. le Carré’s third, had been a publishing sensation; it was on The New York Times’s best-seller list for over a year, much of that time at No. 1. Part of the book’s appeal was its apparent realism about the sordid details of international espionage. Mr. le Carré’s rumpled, depressed-looking spies didn’t much resemble Ian Fleming’s impossibly suave James Bond. (David Cornwell, before he became John le Carré, had worked in British intelligence, where he seems not to have encountered any 007s.)
And the film, shot in black and white and equipped with a moody jazz score, lived up (or down) to the novel’s clammy atmosphere. It didn’t sell tickets like “Goldfinger,” but it made an impression, and it holds up. Watching “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” now — the Criterion Collection released an excellent DVD in 2008 — you can still feel the grim, gray slog of the cold war in your bones.
In retrospect it seems miraculous that the movies did so well by Mr. le Carré on that first go. The next couple of attempts, Sidney Lumet’s 1966 “Deadly Affair” (based on the novel “Call for the Dead”) and Frank R. Pierson’s “Looking Glass War” (1969), were largely bungled operations, though “Deadly Affair” benefits from the casting of James Mason as a version of Mr. le Carré’s most famous character, the mild-mannered and deceptively wily spymaster George Smiley. After “The Looking Glass War,” an adaptation roughly as successful as the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, Mr. le Carré withdrew from the field for better than a decade. He knew when it was time to come in from the cold.
What the failed adaptations of his books had made clear was that even in his relatively straightforward early novels his narrative techniques were a little too tricky for the movies to handle. Mr. le Carré is maybe the most eccentric constructor of fiction in English literature since Joseph Conrad. His stories are full of digressions and long flashbacks; he circles around his plots for the longest time, as if he were doing reconnaissance on them before deciding to go in for the kill. And the verbal textures of the books can be challenging too, because his spies tend to speak in their own special jargon, which seems like normal speech, but isn’t quite. It’s like one of those maddeningly elusive regional English dialects: you need to get the hang of it, and it always takes longer than you would have thought possible.
In the ’70s Mr. le Carré’s novels became yet more daunting: denser, more complex, more stubbornly ambiguous. It’s as if he had determined to make them movie-proof. “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” his sixth novel, dates from that era, and at the time it was the twistiest, most labyrinthine act of narration he had ever perpetrated: a novel in which Smiley, in the course of an operation to sniff out a high-level Soviet mole (i.e., double agent) in the British intelligence service, hears story after story about his agency’s failures and apparent successes, and finds himself constantly doubling back on his own history, reinterpreting everything he thought he knew. This is a remarkable performance, both by the writer and by his troubled hero, and one that only an exceptionally intrepid filmmaker would try to wrangle into a two-hour movie. None did.
But in 1979 the BBC did the sensible thing and turned “Tinker, Tailor” into a six-hour mini-series, directed by John Irvin, which allowed Mr. le Carré’s intricate plot to unspool at a pace that didn’t do violence to either the story or the audience; even at leisure you have to be pretty agile to keep up. The casting of Alec Guinness as Smiley was beyond sensible; “inspired” is the word that comes to mind.
A second mini-series, “Smiley’s People,” directed by Simon Langton and again starring Guinness, followed three years later; this time Mr. le Carré had a hand in the script. The expansive serial form was clearly the right approach for his more demanding books. Unfortunately the makers of “The Little Drummer Girl” (1984), one of Mr. le Carré’s densest novels, chose instead to try to condense all the nuance and detail of that rangy story about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a single feature film. The movie feels hasty, like a message scrawled on a napkin.
By the late ’80s the cold war was winding down at last, and Mr. le Carré would begin to turn his attention to different sorts of conflicts. (John Boorman made a lively 2001 movie of the Central American story “The Tailor of Panama,” and one of Mr. le Carré’s books about Africa, “The Constant Gardener,” was filmed, beautifully, by Fernando Meirelles in 2005.) But as a kind of valediction he wrote an uncharacteristically simple novel called “The Russia House,” which the Australian director Fred Schepisi in 1990 turned into perhaps the best feature film ever made from one of his books.
It’s about a Soviet scientist named Yakov (Klaus Maria Brandauer), who offers top-secret military information to a book publisher (Sean Connery) whom he once met, briefly, at a party. British intelligence brings the full weight of its formidable analytic skills — augmented (or perhaps diminished) by those of the C.I.A. — to the task of figuring out whether the scientist’s information is real. The espionage pros wind up looking a little foolish, because for once, at this moment not long before the fall of the Soviet Union, everything is exactly as it seems to be; Yakov is, to the shock of the veteran spooks, perfectly sincere. You know the cold war is over when somebody actually tells the truth.
But it’s back, in all its gloomy, paranoiac glory, in the new “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” which views the bygone world through a very dark glass and yet feels, somehow, nostalgic. Mr. Alfredson’s visual style is moody, muted, crepuscular, and his rhythm is contemplative. And as if managing the novel’s many temporal shifts weren’t challenge enough, he and the screenwriters, Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, have added a flashback that doesn’t appear in the book, a Christmas-party sequence that shows the main characters drinking and singing and laughing in the good old days when they (almost) trusted one another.
The film returns to this scene, which doesn’t advance the plot, again and again, and the effect is, helplessly, elegiac. It’s an odd tone; Mr. le Carré, who can be spotted among the party guests, never struck this note in any of his novels. But perhaps for those who lived through the cold war, as he did, it may still feel at least passing strange that it’s really over, dead and gone these 20 years.
And it may be possible, in the lingering glow of the West’s victory, to experience a fleeting rush of pride: a sense that, even out in the cold, the lonely place where spies and writers ply their trade, one knew — once — exactly where one stood. What does it say about the muddle the world’s in today that the cold war now looks clear?
From: The New York Times
THE Englishman David Cornwell, who writes under the name John le Carré, has been a best-selling novelist for nearly five decades, and he has been, right from the start, an unusually perverse member of that select class: he writes books that practically beg not to be turned into movies. Of his 22 novels nearly all of them about the perennially popular and movie-friendly subject of espionage, a mere 7 have made the perilous border crossing to the big screen. (Three others have been adapted as television mini-series and one more as a stand-alone television movie.)
An eighth le Carré feature film, Tomas Alfredson’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” will be released on Dec. 9, and it’s a fair illustration of the fiendish difficulties this sly, subtle storyteller’s work presents to moviemakers. Mr. le Carré’s tales always take place in a kind of no man’s land, in the disputed territories of reason, morality and even simple truth. That’s a terrain that major-studio films are almost entirely unfamiliar with these days: it’s too dangerous, too unpredictable, like the wilder reaches of Afghanistan.
The world of “Tinker, Tailor,” which was originally published in 1974, is, though fearsomely murky, at least one with recognizable coordinates. The action takes place during the cold war, when East was East and West was West, and the point of intersection was a wall in the divided city of Berlin. That wall is the scene of the melancholy climax of the first movie made from a le Carré novel, Martin Ritt’s “Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1965), in which a British intelligence agent named Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) is asked by his masters to pretend to defect to the other side.
The novel, Mr. le Carré’s third, had been a publishing sensation; it was on The New York Times’s best-seller list for over a year, much of that time at No. 1. Part of the book’s appeal was its apparent realism about the sordid details of international espionage. Mr. le Carré’s rumpled, depressed-looking spies didn’t much resemble Ian Fleming’s impossibly suave James Bond. (David Cornwell, before he became John le Carré, had worked in British intelligence, where he seems not to have encountered any 007s.)
And the film, shot in black and white and equipped with a moody jazz score, lived up (or down) to the novel’s clammy atmosphere. It didn’t sell tickets like “Goldfinger,” but it made an impression, and it holds up. Watching “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” now — the Criterion Collection released an excellent DVD in 2008 — you can still feel the grim, gray slog of the cold war in your bones.
In retrospect it seems miraculous that the movies did so well by Mr. le Carré on that first go. The next couple of attempts, Sidney Lumet’s 1966 “Deadly Affair” (based on the novel “Call for the Dead”) and Frank R. Pierson’s “Looking Glass War” (1969), were largely bungled operations, though “Deadly Affair” benefits from the casting of James Mason as a version of Mr. le Carré’s most famous character, the mild-mannered and deceptively wily spymaster George Smiley. After “The Looking Glass War,” an adaptation roughly as successful as the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, Mr. le Carré withdrew from the field for better than a decade. He knew when it was time to come in from the cold.
What the failed adaptations of his books had made clear was that even in his relatively straightforward early novels his narrative techniques were a little too tricky for the movies to handle. Mr. le Carré is maybe the most eccentric constructor of fiction in English literature since Joseph Conrad. His stories are full of digressions and long flashbacks; he circles around his plots for the longest time, as if he were doing reconnaissance on them before deciding to go in for the kill. And the verbal textures of the books can be challenging too, because his spies tend to speak in their own special jargon, which seems like normal speech, but isn’t quite. It’s like one of those maddeningly elusive regional English dialects: you need to get the hang of it, and it always takes longer than you would have thought possible.
In the ’70s Mr. le Carré’s novels became yet more daunting: denser, more complex, more stubbornly ambiguous. It’s as if he had determined to make them movie-proof. “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” his sixth novel, dates from that era, and at the time it was the twistiest, most labyrinthine act of narration he had ever perpetrated: a novel in which Smiley, in the course of an operation to sniff out a high-level Soviet mole (i.e., double agent) in the British intelligence service, hears story after story about his agency’s failures and apparent successes, and finds himself constantly doubling back on his own history, reinterpreting everything he thought he knew. This is a remarkable performance, both by the writer and by his troubled hero, and one that only an exceptionally intrepid filmmaker would try to wrangle into a two-hour movie. None did.
But in 1979 the BBC did the sensible thing and turned “Tinker, Tailor” into a six-hour mini-series, directed by John Irvin, which allowed Mr. le Carré’s intricate plot to unspool at a pace that didn’t do violence to either the story or the audience; even at leisure you have to be pretty agile to keep up. The casting of Alec Guinness as Smiley was beyond sensible; “inspired” is the word that comes to mind.
A second mini-series, “Smiley’s People,” directed by Simon Langton and again starring Guinness, followed three years later; this time Mr. le Carré had a hand in the script. The expansive serial form was clearly the right approach for his more demanding books. Unfortunately the makers of “The Little Drummer Girl” (1984), one of Mr. le Carré’s densest novels, chose instead to try to condense all the nuance and detail of that rangy story about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a single feature film. The movie feels hasty, like a message scrawled on a napkin.
By the late ’80s the cold war was winding down at last, and Mr. le Carré would begin to turn his attention to different sorts of conflicts. (John Boorman made a lively 2001 movie of the Central American story “The Tailor of Panama,” and one of Mr. le Carré’s books about Africa, “The Constant Gardener,” was filmed, beautifully, by Fernando Meirelles in 2005.) But as a kind of valediction he wrote an uncharacteristically simple novel called “The Russia House,” which the Australian director Fred Schepisi in 1990 turned into perhaps the best feature film ever made from one of his books.
It’s about a Soviet scientist named Yakov (Klaus Maria Brandauer), who offers top-secret military information to a book publisher (Sean Connery) whom he once met, briefly, at a party. British intelligence brings the full weight of its formidable analytic skills — augmented (or perhaps diminished) by those of the C.I.A. — to the task of figuring out whether the scientist’s information is real. The espionage pros wind up looking a little foolish, because for once, at this moment not long before the fall of the Soviet Union, everything is exactly as it seems to be; Yakov is, to the shock of the veteran spooks, perfectly sincere. You know the cold war is over when somebody actually tells the truth.
But it’s back, in all its gloomy, paranoiac glory, in the new “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” which views the bygone world through a very dark glass and yet feels, somehow, nostalgic. Mr. Alfredson’s visual style is moody, muted, crepuscular, and his rhythm is contemplative. And as if managing the novel’s many temporal shifts weren’t challenge enough, he and the screenwriters, Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, have added a flashback that doesn’t appear in the book, a Christmas-party sequence that shows the main characters drinking and singing and laughing in the good old days when they (almost) trusted one another.
The film returns to this scene, which doesn’t advance the plot, again and again, and the effect is, helplessly, elegiac. It’s an odd tone; Mr. le Carré, who can be spotted among the party guests, never struck this note in any of his novels. But perhaps for those who lived through the cold war, as he did, it may still feel at least passing strange that it’s really over, dead and gone these 20 years.
And it may be possible, in the lingering glow of the West’s victory, to experience a fleeting rush of pride: a sense that, even out in the cold, the lonely place where spies and writers ply their trade, one knew — once — exactly where one stood. What does it say about the muddle the world’s in today that the cold war now looks clear?
From: The New York Times
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Do Androids Dream of Electric Authors?
By PAGAN KENNEDY
One day, I stumbled across a book on Amazon called “Saltine Cracker.” It didn’t make sense: who would pay $54 for a book entirely about perforated crackers? The book was co-edited by someone called Lambert M. Surhone — a name that sounds like one of Kurt Vonnegut’s inventions. According to Amazon, Lambert M. Surhone has written or edited more than 100,000 titles, on every subject from beekeeping to the world’s largest cedar bucket. He was churning out books at a rate that was simply not possible for a human being.
So who was Lambert M. Surhone? Just looking at the numbers, you could argue that he’s one of the most prolific creators of literature who ever lived. But was he even human? There are now software programs — robots, if you will — that can gather text and organize it into a book. Surhone might be one of them.
Whatever he was, Lambert M. Surhone worked under the auspices of a German company, VDM Publishing. In addition to selling conventional books, VDM also extrudes thousands of paperbacks every year using content available without cost on the Internet. These books, or booklike products, lie in wait for the distracted shopper, someone who might think, Oh good, I really need a tome on Spearman’s law of diminishing returns, so I’ll just go ahead and pay $84. And with one overhasty click on the “Place your order” button, the shopper can pay a lot of money for a book that turns out to be warmed-over Wikipedia.
VDM Publishing puts a notice on the cover of its books, boasting “high-quality content by Wikipedia articles!” Still, not every buyer sees the disclaimer. Librarians, for instance, report that they must be vigilant in order to avoid wasting money on the robot-books. Readers complain that the books proliferate like kudzu in online stores.
But the invasion of robot-books is unsettling for another reason. I think we can all agree that it’s O.K. for robots to take over unpleasant jobs — like cleaning up nuclear waste. But how could we have allowed them to commandeer one of the most gratifying occupations, that of author?
Which brings me back to Lambert M. Surhone. Might he be a robot? Reading the fine print, I traced some of Surhone’s books to a VDM branch office in the island nation of Mauritius, off the coast of Madagascar. I called. As the faraway phone rang, I fantasized about what I would say to Surhone. By now I imagined him as a character in a Vonnegut novel, and so I was tempted to ask whether he hailed from Tralfamadore, the planet inhabited by robots. But I never had a chance. No one at the company answered the phone.
Then, when I least expected it, Surhone came for me. One day, a book titled “Pagan Kennedy” popped up on Barnesandnoble.com, priced at $50. The lead editor: Lambert M. Surhone. I was both thrilled and creeped out. Reader, I ordered it. Within a few days, the book appeared on my doorstep. The cover was adorned with a stripy abstraction that looked like a beach towel. Inside was the Pagan Kennedy Wikipedia entry, and then a random collection of wiki-text tenuously connected to my path through life. (About a quarter of the book is devoted to Dartmouth College, where I worked as a visiting writer a few years ago.) Some of the text is so small you might need a jeweler’s loupe to read it. So the book was, as advertised, Wikipedia content — though it’s hard to imagine anyone would want it in this format.
Around that time, I also heard from a managing director of VDM, who responded to my badgering questions about robots. “Our wiki-books are produced by a group of about 40 editors,” Wolfgang Philipp Müller told me via e-mail. “Editors start at A and end their work at Z. Every topic that has enough content for a book is our target.” He said that last year, the company sold about 3,000 wiki-books — not a lot. Still, with prices that average around $50, it’s likely the company sees a high profit on each one.
Müller assured me that the editors are human. But many of the titles of these books suggest the mind of a machine at work. It’s hard to imagine a person signing off on, for instance, a book titled “Storage Ring: Particle Accelerator, Particle Beam, Accelerator Physics, Beamline, Australian Synchrotron, Cyclotron, Dipole Magnet, Electromagnetism.” Also, there were other robotlike errors: one of VDM’s books about the rock band the Police was paired with a cover illustration of actual police officers.
These mistakes made me wonder: Could robots ever be trusted to write original novels, histories, scientific papers and sonnets? For years, artificial-intelligence experts have insisted that machines can succeed as authors. But would we humans ever want to read the robot-books? For a serious consideration of the matter, I consulted Philip Parker, an economist and inventor who sees a bright future for the computer as author. Parker believes that A.I.-produced books, issued in a dazzling array of languages, could be crucial to the spread of literacy. Think of farmers in Malawi who lack the most basic guides to agriculture in their own language. Parker talked about the need to distribute books aimed at people who speak underserved languages like Chichewa and Tumbuka. “One thing that’s missing is the content itself — the textbooks,” Parker said, and A.I. could offer a cheap solution. In the late 1990s, he began using automatic text-generation software to produce such books. More recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has financed Parker’s use of A.I. to produce weather reports for the radio in local languages.
But Chris Csikszentmihalyi, a co-founder of the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is skeptical. “Would you really want to bet your life on text generated by a robot? Imagine a book on fixing the diesel engine on your tractor. If one piece of information is wrong, you could ruin the engine. It gets even more complicated when you think about books that dispense medical advice.”
And, he added, what’s the point of using artificial intelligence to simulate the kind of work that humans enjoy? If you want to generate books in a plethora of languages, he said, “You can use the power of the diaspora from Malawi or Mozambique,” the army of highly educated volunteers who are eager to help their countrymen. “That obviates the need for A.I.”
The Internet itself offers proof of the enormous human desire to produce text — to pontificate, edit, elegize, redact, hash out, bloviate, opine and instruct. We’re spewing out billions of comments a day. VDM Publishing may have created a niche business for itself, but in the long run, I suspect, the robots will have a hard time getting a word in edgewise.
Pagan Kennedy, a 2010 Knight science journalism fellow, is the author, most recently, of “The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories.”
From: New York Times Book Review
One day, I stumbled across a book on Amazon called “Saltine Cracker.” It didn’t make sense: who would pay $54 for a book entirely about perforated crackers? The book was co-edited by someone called Lambert M. Surhone — a name that sounds like one of Kurt Vonnegut’s inventions. According to Amazon, Lambert M. Surhone has written or edited more than 100,000 titles, on every subject from beekeeping to the world’s largest cedar bucket. He was churning out books at a rate that was simply not possible for a human being.
So who was Lambert M. Surhone? Just looking at the numbers, you could argue that he’s one of the most prolific creators of literature who ever lived. But was he even human? There are now software programs — robots, if you will — that can gather text and organize it into a book. Surhone might be one of them.
Whatever he was, Lambert M. Surhone worked under the auspices of a German company, VDM Publishing. In addition to selling conventional books, VDM also extrudes thousands of paperbacks every year using content available without cost on the Internet. These books, or booklike products, lie in wait for the distracted shopper, someone who might think, Oh good, I really need a tome on Spearman’s law of diminishing returns, so I’ll just go ahead and pay $84. And with one overhasty click on the “Place your order” button, the shopper can pay a lot of money for a book that turns out to be warmed-over Wikipedia.
VDM Publishing puts a notice on the cover of its books, boasting “high-quality content by Wikipedia articles!” Still, not every buyer sees the disclaimer. Librarians, for instance, report that they must be vigilant in order to avoid wasting money on the robot-books. Readers complain that the books proliferate like kudzu in online stores.
But the invasion of robot-books is unsettling for another reason. I think we can all agree that it’s O.K. for robots to take over unpleasant jobs — like cleaning up nuclear waste. But how could we have allowed them to commandeer one of the most gratifying occupations, that of author?
Which brings me back to Lambert M. Surhone. Might he be a robot? Reading the fine print, I traced some of Surhone’s books to a VDM branch office in the island nation of Mauritius, off the coast of Madagascar. I called. As the faraway phone rang, I fantasized about what I would say to Surhone. By now I imagined him as a character in a Vonnegut novel, and so I was tempted to ask whether he hailed from Tralfamadore, the planet inhabited by robots. But I never had a chance. No one at the company answered the phone.
Then, when I least expected it, Surhone came for me. One day, a book titled “Pagan Kennedy” popped up on Barnesandnoble.com, priced at $50. The lead editor: Lambert M. Surhone. I was both thrilled and creeped out. Reader, I ordered it. Within a few days, the book appeared on my doorstep. The cover was adorned with a stripy abstraction that looked like a beach towel. Inside was the Pagan Kennedy Wikipedia entry, and then a random collection of wiki-text tenuously connected to my path through life. (About a quarter of the book is devoted to Dartmouth College, where I worked as a visiting writer a few years ago.) Some of the text is so small you might need a jeweler’s loupe to read it. So the book was, as advertised, Wikipedia content — though it’s hard to imagine anyone would want it in this format.
Around that time, I also heard from a managing director of VDM, who responded to my badgering questions about robots. “Our wiki-books are produced by a group of about 40 editors,” Wolfgang Philipp Müller told me via e-mail. “Editors start at A and end their work at Z. Every topic that has enough content for a book is our target.” He said that last year, the company sold about 3,000 wiki-books — not a lot. Still, with prices that average around $50, it’s likely the company sees a high profit on each one.
Müller assured me that the editors are human. But many of the titles of these books suggest the mind of a machine at work. It’s hard to imagine a person signing off on, for instance, a book titled “Storage Ring: Particle Accelerator, Particle Beam, Accelerator Physics, Beamline, Australian Synchrotron, Cyclotron, Dipole Magnet, Electromagnetism.” Also, there were other robotlike errors: one of VDM’s books about the rock band the Police was paired with a cover illustration of actual police officers.
These mistakes made me wonder: Could robots ever be trusted to write original novels, histories, scientific papers and sonnets? For years, artificial-intelligence experts have insisted that machines can succeed as authors. But would we humans ever want to read the robot-books? For a serious consideration of the matter, I consulted Philip Parker, an economist and inventor who sees a bright future for the computer as author. Parker believes that A.I.-produced books, issued in a dazzling array of languages, could be crucial to the spread of literacy. Think of farmers in Malawi who lack the most basic guides to agriculture in their own language. Parker talked about the need to distribute books aimed at people who speak underserved languages like Chichewa and Tumbuka. “One thing that’s missing is the content itself — the textbooks,” Parker said, and A.I. could offer a cheap solution. In the late 1990s, he began using automatic text-generation software to produce such books. More recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has financed Parker’s use of A.I. to produce weather reports for the radio in local languages.
But Chris Csikszentmihalyi, a co-founder of the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is skeptical. “Would you really want to bet your life on text generated by a robot? Imagine a book on fixing the diesel engine on your tractor. If one piece of information is wrong, you could ruin the engine. It gets even more complicated when you think about books that dispense medical advice.”
And, he added, what’s the point of using artificial intelligence to simulate the kind of work that humans enjoy? If you want to generate books in a plethora of languages, he said, “You can use the power of the diaspora from Malawi or Mozambique,” the army of highly educated volunteers who are eager to help their countrymen. “That obviates the need for A.I.”
The Internet itself offers proof of the enormous human desire to produce text — to pontificate, edit, elegize, redact, hash out, bloviate, opine and instruct. We’re spewing out billions of comments a day. VDM Publishing may have created a niche business for itself, but in the long run, I suspect, the robots will have a hard time getting a word in edgewise.
Pagan Kennedy, a 2010 Knight science journalism fellow, is the author, most recently, of “The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories.”
From: New York Times Book Review
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Library sees boom in e-book use — and print, too
Patty Winsa
It looks like e-books are easy reading.
The Toronto Public Library is reporting that digital downloads from its site will hit 500,000 this year, double the number from 2010 and more than 10 times what they were in 2007.
“This is a huge jump,” said Anne Marie Aikins, the library’s manager of community relations. “And incidentally, book borrowing is increasing slightly as well, so the book isn’t dead. That's for sure.” The library had its busiest year in 2010, with 18 million visits and 32 million items circulated.
But the library may have to limit additions to its digital and print collections this year, as it searches for ways to cut the mandated 10 per cent — or $17 million — from its 2011 operating budget to reduce the city’s deficit.
The recommended staff cuts will be released Thursday afternoon in advance of Monday’s library board meeting. Although Aikins wouldn’t say what the recommendations involved, she did say closing library branches isn’t one of them.
Seventy-five per cent of the library’s operating budget goes toward paying staff. The remaining 25 per cent covers new purchases and maintaining and operating buildings.
Staff have already identified about $4 million in savings by reorganizing the way books are circulated throughout the system and automating check-out service, which it has already completed in 40 branches throughout the city.
“In general, our focus was to try and leave customer service intact but look at where technology could help us,” says City Librarian Jane Pyper. Staff were also offered a voluntary separation package.
The library currently spends a small percentage of its acquisition budget on e-books, which only really took off about four years ago when Kindle released its first e-reader. But demand has been “skyrocketing,” says Pyper.
Currently, borrowers can download material using devices such as the Kobo and Sony readers and the iPad and iPhone. But one of the most popular readers, the Kindle, isn’t on the list because of an exclusive deal with Amazon.
However, just last month it was announced in the U.S. that public libraries and schools can now lend e-books for the Amazon Kindle through OverDrive, the same company that distributes e-books for the Toronto Public Library.
Pyper says the challenge for Toronto branches is maintaining a collection that has the depth to meet the economic and linguistic diversity across the city. That means providing e-books and printed books, but also providing free access to magazines such as The New Yorker and National Geographic, and free Internet access and wi-fi.
“I think (e-books) will be a very important part of our future, a big growth area,” says Pyper. But “there are many people for whom e-books aren’t a reality, who have other language needs or are adult learners with low literacy levels. The wonderful thing about our collection is it speaks to all those interests across the city.”
LIBRARY GROWTH
Total circulation
2007: 28.9 million
2010: 32.3 million
E-downloads
(includes digital books, audio books and reference material)
2007: 39,001
2010: 257,715
Visits
2007: 16.3 million
2010: 18.3 million
From, Toronto Star
It looks like e-books are easy reading.
The Toronto Public Library is reporting that digital downloads from its site will hit 500,000 this year, double the number from 2010 and more than 10 times what they were in 2007.
“This is a huge jump,” said Anne Marie Aikins, the library’s manager of community relations. “And incidentally, book borrowing is increasing slightly as well, so the book isn’t dead. That's for sure.” The library had its busiest year in 2010, with 18 million visits and 32 million items circulated.
But the library may have to limit additions to its digital and print collections this year, as it searches for ways to cut the mandated 10 per cent — or $17 million — from its 2011 operating budget to reduce the city’s deficit.
The recommended staff cuts will be released Thursday afternoon in advance of Monday’s library board meeting. Although Aikins wouldn’t say what the recommendations involved, she did say closing library branches isn’t one of them.
Seventy-five per cent of the library’s operating budget goes toward paying staff. The remaining 25 per cent covers new purchases and maintaining and operating buildings.
Staff have already identified about $4 million in savings by reorganizing the way books are circulated throughout the system and automating check-out service, which it has already completed in 40 branches throughout the city.
“In general, our focus was to try and leave customer service intact but look at where technology could help us,” says City Librarian Jane Pyper. Staff were also offered a voluntary separation package.
The library currently spends a small percentage of its acquisition budget on e-books, which only really took off about four years ago when Kindle released its first e-reader. But demand has been “skyrocketing,” says Pyper.
Currently, borrowers can download material using devices such as the Kobo and Sony readers and the iPad and iPhone. But one of the most popular readers, the Kindle, isn’t on the list because of an exclusive deal with Amazon.
However, just last month it was announced in the U.S. that public libraries and schools can now lend e-books for the Amazon Kindle through OverDrive, the same company that distributes e-books for the Toronto Public Library.
Pyper says the challenge for Toronto branches is maintaining a collection that has the depth to meet the economic and linguistic diversity across the city. That means providing e-books and printed books, but also providing free access to magazines such as The New Yorker and National Geographic, and free Internet access and wi-fi.
“I think (e-books) will be a very important part of our future, a big growth area,” says Pyper. But “there are many people for whom e-books aren’t a reality, who have other language needs or are adult learners with low literacy levels. The wonderful thing about our collection is it speaks to all those interests across the city.”
LIBRARY GROWTH
Total circulation
2007: 28.9 million
2010: 32.3 million
E-downloads
(includes digital books, audio books and reference material)
2007: 39,001
2010: 257,715
Visits
2007: 16.3 million
2010: 18.3 million
From, Toronto Star
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