by: Andrew Albanese
Some 80% of Americans ages 16-29 have read a book in the past year, and six in ten say they have used their local public library, but library attitudes among that age group are somewhat in flux, according to survey report released today by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, with younger readers reporting that they are reading more in an “era of digital content,” and increasingly on their mobile devices, suggesting “opportunities of further engagement with libraries” later in life.
The survey looks at an especially attractive segment of the reading population for both libraries and publishers, and how the e-book revolution is changing the reading landscape, and the buying—and borrowing—services of libraries. The findings are especially fascinating among the different age groups within the survey:
Among high schoolers (ages 16-17): Although this group is most likely to have used the library in the past year for school, they are less likely to say that “the library is important to them.” Just over half consider the library “very important” or “somewhat important” compared with roughly two-thirds of older Americans. At the same time, however, this age group is “significantly more likely” to say that they would be interested in checking out pre-loaded e-readers from their local public library if this service was offered, even though the survey revealed that high schoolers among the least likely age groups to have read an e-book in the past year.
Among college-aged adults (ages 18-24): This group has the highest overall reading rate of any age group, and overall, college-aged adults are more likely than high-schoolers to purchase their books—but they also borrow them from friends and family.
Among adults in their late twenties (ages 25-29): Although this segment is less likely to have read a book in the past year, and most likely to have purchased, rather than borrowed, that book, nearly three-quarters say that the library is important to them and their families.
Other major takeaways among Americans between the ages of 16 and 29:
60% reported using the library in the past year.
83% reported reading a book in the past year—with 75% saying they’ve read a print book; 19% reading e-book, and 11% listening to an audiobook.
Among e-book users, those under age 30 are more likely to read on a cell phone (41%) or a computer (55%) than on an e-book reader such as a Kindle (23%) or tablet (16%).
Readers under age 30 are more likely to say that they are reading more these days due to the availability of e-content (40% vs. 28%).
Meanwhile, as with the last Pew survey of older readers, younger readers are also generally unaware that they can borrow an e-book from their local library, a significant challenge going forward. Just 10% of the e-book readers in the 16-29 age group have borrowed an e-book from a library and, among those who have not borrowed an e-book, 52% said they were unaware they could do so.
The survey is the latest in an effort by Pew to divine Americans reading habits and library behavior in the digital age. The data was from nationally-representative phone surveys of 2,986 people ages 16 and older, administered from November 16-December 21, 2011. The report also contains “voices and insights” drawn from an online panel of library patrons ages 16-29 who borrow e-books, fielded in the spring of 2012.
from: Publishers Weekly
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
California State Library grant provides books for California prisons
SACRAMENTO – The California State Library has awarded the Southern California Library Cooperative (SCLC) a grant for $371,000 to provide text books and recreational reading materials to California Prisons. These funds provided through the Library Services Training Act (LSTA), are being granted to support an important need - new materials and textbooks in prison libraries. The monies granted are being used to furnish textbooks to three California prisons. These include adult prisons San Quentin and Ironwood and juvenile prison, the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility. Recreational reading materials are being sent to all California prisons.
The textbooks provided for the adult prisons will be used to give inmates more resources to complete classes at community colleges. At Ventura’s Youth Correctional Facility, juvenile offenders will get textbooks to help them complete their high school diplomas. The recreational reading materials, going to all 33 prisons in California, include magazines, newspapers, and fiction and non-fiction books.
According to SCLC Executive Director Rosario Garza, the grant’s administrator, this program has been “one of the most rewarding projects I’ve worked on with the State Library. It’s meeting a desperate need and the staff is very appreciative because this allows more people to be able to take classes.” Tom Bolema, a teacher with VEP, the Voluntary Education Program at San Quentin, says “the books have made the program.” Although he coordinates learning activities for inmates for both high school and community college, the college program has no money in the budget for textbooks. Inmates have had to buy their own, but many inmates do not have financial resources to do so. So this grant is just what they need. Bolema has been able to purchase 10 textbooks for each of the classes for two community college programs that inmates at San Quentin participate in.
Studies show that inmates who participate in prison education programs like this have lower recidivism rates than non-participants. Inmates who use prison libraries have higher literacy rates than those who don’t. According to Bolema, education and literacy are the keys to lower re-offense rates in about 70% of the prison population. It gives them the tools necessary to help them be successful once they’re back in mainstream society.
The Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) is a federal grant program that is managed by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and administered in California by the State Librarian.
from: California State Library
The textbooks provided for the adult prisons will be used to give inmates more resources to complete classes at community colleges. At Ventura’s Youth Correctional Facility, juvenile offenders will get textbooks to help them complete their high school diplomas. The recreational reading materials, going to all 33 prisons in California, include magazines, newspapers, and fiction and non-fiction books.
According to SCLC Executive Director Rosario Garza, the grant’s administrator, this program has been “one of the most rewarding projects I’ve worked on with the State Library. It’s meeting a desperate need and the staff is very appreciative because this allows more people to be able to take classes.” Tom Bolema, a teacher with VEP, the Voluntary Education Program at San Quentin, says “the books have made the program.” Although he coordinates learning activities for inmates for both high school and community college, the college program has no money in the budget for textbooks. Inmates have had to buy their own, but many inmates do not have financial resources to do so. So this grant is just what they need. Bolema has been able to purchase 10 textbooks for each of the classes for two community college programs that inmates at San Quentin participate in.
Studies show that inmates who participate in prison education programs like this have lower recidivism rates than non-participants. Inmates who use prison libraries have higher literacy rates than those who don’t. According to Bolema, education and literacy are the keys to lower re-offense rates in about 70% of the prison population. It gives them the tools necessary to help them be successful once they’re back in mainstream society.
The Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) is a federal grant program that is managed by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and administered in California by the State Librarian.
from: California State Library
Monday, October 29, 2012
Murdoch's News Corp joins the battle to p-p-p-ick up Penguin
by: Lucy Tobin
News Corporation is preparing to make a cash offer worth as much as £1bn for Pearson's Penguin Group, throwing plans to merge the major book publisher with rival Random House into disarray.
Penguin and Random House were weighing up a deal in an attempt to capitalise on the rise of the e-book and wrestle back industry leadership from technology interlopers Apple and Amazon.
Now, however, Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chef executive of media conglomerate News Corp, is said to have approached Pearson about an all-cash offer of about £1bn to buy Penguin, publisher of a party planning guide by Pippa Middleton, pictured. A deal would see Penguin combined with News Corp's existing staple of books under its ownership of publisher HarperCollins.
News of Mr Murdoch's appetite for a deal will worry Germany's Bertelsmann, which owns Fifty Shades of Grey publisher Random House. It said last week that it could join with Penguin to become a single powerhouse in a £2.4bn deal, with the German group retaining a 60 per cent stake in the combined business.
The publishing industry has been remodelled by the launch of e-book readers such as Amazon's Kindle. Penguin's sales fell 4 per cent to £441m in the first half of this year, andprofits nearly halved to £22m because of "continued pressure on physical book retailing".
Where once publishers could set their own prices, digital book sales and the rapid rise of Amazon have eroded their powers of negotiation. Apple and several leading publishers were sued by the US Department of Justice this year for alleged collusion. Most parties agreed to settle.
Pearson and News Corp declined to comment.
from: Independent
Friday, October 26, 2012
Random House Says Libraries Own Their Ebooks
by: Michael Kelley
Let’s violate a journalistic tenet and repeat that headline: Random House says libraries own their ebooks.
For those who have been paying close attention, this is not news. It came up at the Massachusetts Library Association conference in May, it was bruited about at the American Library Association (ALA) annual meeting in Anaheim in June, and it was mentioned in a “corner office” interview I had with Skip Dye, Random House’s vice president of library and academic marketing and sales, during LJ’s virtual ebook summit on Wednesday. But the potential implications of Random House’s stance are not receiving enough attention and consideration.
I asked Random House to confirm its position in a subsequent interview, and here is what Dye told me.
“We spend a lot of time discussing this with librarians, at conferences and elsewhere, and it’s clear that there is still some confusion out there around whether libraries own their ebooks,” Dye said. “Random House’s often repeated, and always consistent position is this: when libraries buy their RH, Inc. ebooks from authorized library wholesalers, it is our position that they own them.”
He went on to make clear the distinction with licensing:
“This is our business model: we sell copies of our ebooks to an approved list of library wholesalers, and those wholesalers are supposed to resell them to libraries. In our view, this purchase constitutes ownership of the book by the library. It is not a license.”
That last sentence needs to be underlined and italicized.
The Connecticut State Library’s Advisory Council for Library Planning and Development (ACLPD) this week released a white paper on ebooks which says, among other things, that “While libraries have traditionally valued ownership of materials, when it comes to ebooks, a careful reading and thorough understanding of the licensing agreement with each vendor will hold the library in better stead than promises of electronic ownership.”
A well-crafted perpetual license is not to be sniffed at, particularly when preservation is a concern. But if a Big Six publisher affirms, without equivocation, that libraries own that publisher’s ebooks, it behooves librarians to ensure that whatever licenses they are signing with vendors or aggregators do not unwittingly curtail or sign away the rights that entail from this frankly avowed ownership, particularly user exceptions under copyright law. Are libraries doing this now when it comes to Random House titles? Do contracts contravene Random House’s laudable intent? Random House is still taking heat for its price hikes (which the company continues to adjust), but are librarians fully appreciating the import of the position the company is staking out here?
The downstream implications are potentially tremendous. The ebook economic analysis by Stanley Besen and Sheila Nataraj Kirby that ALA released in September says:
…the use of aggregators appeals to libraries because it fits the model of third-party hosting of e-resources, already well-established for e-journals and databases, and avoids the difficulties and costs of maintaining the technical infrastructure needed for hosting e-books. It also appeals to publishers because it gives them ‘greater control over the distribution and use of their content than if downloaded files were simply sold to libraries, something that is of particular concern given the size and value of the consumer market for books.’
Dye’s thinking dovetailed somewhat with this:
“While a small number of libraries have asked about hosting library lending on their internal servers, the vast majority of librarians we talk to are not interested in taking on the additional administrative work involved, which would require tremendous resources in programming, manpower, and back-end processing and bookkeeping,” he said.
But as more robust library platform experiments mature, not only Douglas County and Califa but also such pilot projects as the Massachusetts Statewide Resource Sharing Plan, endorsed by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners (MBLC) on October 4, then technical impediments and burdens may lessen, the trustworthiness of library managed platforms may grow, and the wise library will be the one that did not sign away its rights for the sake of convenience.
Robert C. Maier, the director of MBLC, said that in discussions about a statewide ebook platform Massachusetts librarians were very clear that they wanted to own the content.
“Our primary reason for wanting ownership is to assure that the content could be migrated to a different platform if necessary or desirable in the future,” he said. “Our primary motivation in this project is to solve the resource sharing challenge by being able to circulate e-content to any resident of the Commonwealth from a common collection. We welcome Random House’s clear statement that they consider their ebooks to be owned by the purchasing library.”
Random House already does not object to libraries moving their ebooks from one platform to another, the crux of the dispute between Jo Budler (Kansas state librarian) and OverDrive. Here’s Dye:
We work with several library service vendors who have met our systems and security standards, and are authorized to act as library lending wholesalers for our books. If a library wants to move its collection from one authorized wholesaler platform to another authorized wholesaler platform, we don’t see any reason to object. A number of libraries have already asked about this – for prior permission to move their titles – and in every instance so far, we have said yes.
To appreciate why it is important libraries not sign away this right simply imagine what would happen if Amazon were to purchase OverDrive, and then shut it down.
If libraries carefully ensure that ownership of their Random House ebooks remains uncompromised, then what is there to impede First Sale ramifications such as interlibrary loans or even library ebook sales? The Connecticut white paper notes:
Although this isn’t an immediate issue, the current licensing environment restricts libraries and library Friends groups from reselling ebooks donated by individuals or by the libraries. Funds raised through these book sales are a major revenue stream for supporting many public libraries. While vendors may promise ownership, it is the publisher who grants it.
Yes. And one Big Six publisher is, to its credit, on the record saying it is granting ownership. That bears repeating: a Big Six publisher says it is granting ownership. Librarians should do everything possible to test the limits of this ownership and to identify specific vendor practices (or clauses) that may undermine it.
from: Library Journal
Let’s violate a journalistic tenet and repeat that headline: Random House says libraries own their ebooks.
For those who have been paying close attention, this is not news. It came up at the Massachusetts Library Association conference in May, it was bruited about at the American Library Association (ALA) annual meeting in Anaheim in June, and it was mentioned in a “corner office” interview I had with Skip Dye, Random House’s vice president of library and academic marketing and sales, during LJ’s virtual ebook summit on Wednesday. But the potential implications of Random House’s stance are not receiving enough attention and consideration.
I asked Random House to confirm its position in a subsequent interview, and here is what Dye told me.
“We spend a lot of time discussing this with librarians, at conferences and elsewhere, and it’s clear that there is still some confusion out there around whether libraries own their ebooks,” Dye said. “Random House’s often repeated, and always consistent position is this: when libraries buy their RH, Inc. ebooks from authorized library wholesalers, it is our position that they own them.”
He went on to make clear the distinction with licensing:
“This is our business model: we sell copies of our ebooks to an approved list of library wholesalers, and those wholesalers are supposed to resell them to libraries. In our view, this purchase constitutes ownership of the book by the library. It is not a license.”
That last sentence needs to be underlined and italicized.
The Connecticut State Library’s Advisory Council for Library Planning and Development (ACLPD) this week released a white paper on ebooks which says, among other things, that “While libraries have traditionally valued ownership of materials, when it comes to ebooks, a careful reading and thorough understanding of the licensing agreement with each vendor will hold the library in better stead than promises of electronic ownership.”
A well-crafted perpetual license is not to be sniffed at, particularly when preservation is a concern. But if a Big Six publisher affirms, without equivocation, that libraries own that publisher’s ebooks, it behooves librarians to ensure that whatever licenses they are signing with vendors or aggregators do not unwittingly curtail or sign away the rights that entail from this frankly avowed ownership, particularly user exceptions under copyright law. Are libraries doing this now when it comes to Random House titles? Do contracts contravene Random House’s laudable intent? Random House is still taking heat for its price hikes (which the company continues to adjust), but are librarians fully appreciating the import of the position the company is staking out here?
The downstream implications are potentially tremendous. The ebook economic analysis by Stanley Besen and Sheila Nataraj Kirby that ALA released in September says:
…the use of aggregators appeals to libraries because it fits the model of third-party hosting of e-resources, already well-established for e-journals and databases, and avoids the difficulties and costs of maintaining the technical infrastructure needed for hosting e-books. It also appeals to publishers because it gives them ‘greater control over the distribution and use of their content than if downloaded files were simply sold to libraries, something that is of particular concern given the size and value of the consumer market for books.’
Dye’s thinking dovetailed somewhat with this:
“While a small number of libraries have asked about hosting library lending on their internal servers, the vast majority of librarians we talk to are not interested in taking on the additional administrative work involved, which would require tremendous resources in programming, manpower, and back-end processing and bookkeeping,” he said.
But as more robust library platform experiments mature, not only Douglas County and Califa but also such pilot projects as the Massachusetts Statewide Resource Sharing Plan, endorsed by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners (MBLC) on October 4, then technical impediments and burdens may lessen, the trustworthiness of library managed platforms may grow, and the wise library will be the one that did not sign away its rights for the sake of convenience.
Robert C. Maier, the director of MBLC, said that in discussions about a statewide ebook platform Massachusetts librarians were very clear that they wanted to own the content.
“Our primary reason for wanting ownership is to assure that the content could be migrated to a different platform if necessary or desirable in the future,” he said. “Our primary motivation in this project is to solve the resource sharing challenge by being able to circulate e-content to any resident of the Commonwealth from a common collection. We welcome Random House’s clear statement that they consider their ebooks to be owned by the purchasing library.”
Random House already does not object to libraries moving their ebooks from one platform to another, the crux of the dispute between Jo Budler (Kansas state librarian) and OverDrive. Here’s Dye:
We work with several library service vendors who have met our systems and security standards, and are authorized to act as library lending wholesalers for our books. If a library wants to move its collection from one authorized wholesaler platform to another authorized wholesaler platform, we don’t see any reason to object. A number of libraries have already asked about this – for prior permission to move their titles – and in every instance so far, we have said yes.
To appreciate why it is important libraries not sign away this right simply imagine what would happen if Amazon were to purchase OverDrive, and then shut it down.
If libraries carefully ensure that ownership of their Random House ebooks remains uncompromised, then what is there to impede First Sale ramifications such as interlibrary loans or even library ebook sales? The Connecticut white paper notes:
Although this isn’t an immediate issue, the current licensing environment restricts libraries and library Friends groups from reselling ebooks donated by individuals or by the libraries. Funds raised through these book sales are a major revenue stream for supporting many public libraries. While vendors may promise ownership, it is the publisher who grants it.
Yes. And one Big Six publisher is, to its credit, on the record saying it is granting ownership. That bears repeating: a Big Six publisher says it is granting ownership. Librarians should do everything possible to test the limits of this ownership and to identify specific vendor practices (or clauses) that may undermine it.
from: Library Journal
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Pay-What-You-Want Ebook Service Curates Book Bundles for Readers
by: Kim Ukura
Want to read more self-published ebooks, but not sure how to find the good ones? The creators of a new service called StoryBundle hope to help by offering specially-selected collections of DRM-free ebooks in specific genres at a “pay-what-you-want” price.
StoryBundle founder Jason Chen — a former technology and software editor for Gizmodo and Lifehacker — said the idea for the service came from his combined interest in reading and ebooks.
“To me, taking ebooks (which are convenient, easy to load and great to read) and combining them with the bundle concept, which has been tremendously successful for games and apps, was the logical next step,” said Chen. “I would have loved to pay what I wanted for a set of books that someone has curated and ensured was good, and when I saw that nobody has done this, I decided to do it myself.”
The books for each bundle are chosen by combing through books by indie authors — authors publishing the book themselves outside the major publishing houses — and choosing several that will work well together, said Chen. In the future, Chen said the plan is to have curators help develop the bundles; in an upcoming horror bundle, for example, StoryBundle will be working with a former President of the Horror Writer’s Association to pick books.
“The end result for the readers is having a friend pick quality books and saying, ‘Hey, I read these books and they’re really good — I think you’ll really like them!’” said Chen.
The site’s current bundle, a selection of crime and thriller novels called “The Second Degree Bundle,” includes authors who have been nominated as a 2012 Best Indie Book finalist, won a Pulitzer Prize, had multiple plays commissioned and produced, been an elected official, and been endorsed by wrestling legend and author Mick Foley.
StoryBundle has also developed a different payment model for the service. Readers can choose what to pay for each five-book bundle (with a minimum price of $1). Each bundle includes a special bonus price, which adds a bonus book or two to the bundle. Additionally, readers can chose how much of the price goes to the author and whether to give a percentage of their purchase price to charity.
Some numbers might help: StoryBundle sold 3,600 copies of their first bundle at an average price of about $8. Of that total, about 70 percent — around $21,000 after fees were paid — was split evenly among the participating authors. Because the books were self-published, the authors kept all of their share, explained Chen.
“The authors so far have been very happy with the added sales from just 21 days of being in a bundle,” said Chen. “Other than that, they’re thrilled with the added fans and social media presence as well, and readers who bought the bundle are buying their other works after the bundle is over, because they want to get more from those authors.”
The books in each bundle are also offered DRM free, which means all files can be read on any device. StoryBundle offers both .mobi and .epub formats, which means they should be supported on almost every ereader and laptops, smartphones, and tablets with an ereader program. The books can also be sent directly to devices that support the Kindle App, meaning readers won’t need to download and sync the books manually.
Chen said they hope to offer a new bundle about every month, and feature a variety of genres including horror, fantasy, romance, science fiction, thrillers, comic books, nonfiction, humor and self-help. To keep up with StoryBundle and see when a bundle of books you’d enjoy will be available, follow StoryBundle on Facebook or Twitter.
from: BookRiot
Want to read more self-published ebooks, but not sure how to find the good ones? The creators of a new service called StoryBundle hope to help by offering specially-selected collections of DRM-free ebooks in specific genres at a “pay-what-you-want” price.
StoryBundle founder Jason Chen — a former technology and software editor for Gizmodo and Lifehacker — said the idea for the service came from his combined interest in reading and ebooks.
“To me, taking ebooks (which are convenient, easy to load and great to read) and combining them with the bundle concept, which has been tremendously successful for games and apps, was the logical next step,” said Chen. “I would have loved to pay what I wanted for a set of books that someone has curated and ensured was good, and when I saw that nobody has done this, I decided to do it myself.”
The books for each bundle are chosen by combing through books by indie authors — authors publishing the book themselves outside the major publishing houses — and choosing several that will work well together, said Chen. In the future, Chen said the plan is to have curators help develop the bundles; in an upcoming horror bundle, for example, StoryBundle will be working with a former President of the Horror Writer’s Association to pick books.
“The end result for the readers is having a friend pick quality books and saying, ‘Hey, I read these books and they’re really good — I think you’ll really like them!’” said Chen.
The site’s current bundle, a selection of crime and thriller novels called “The Second Degree Bundle,” includes authors who have been nominated as a 2012 Best Indie Book finalist, won a Pulitzer Prize, had multiple plays commissioned and produced, been an elected official, and been endorsed by wrestling legend and author Mick Foley.
StoryBundle has also developed a different payment model for the service. Readers can choose what to pay for each five-book bundle (with a minimum price of $1). Each bundle includes a special bonus price, which adds a bonus book or two to the bundle. Additionally, readers can chose how much of the price goes to the author and whether to give a percentage of their purchase price to charity.
Some numbers might help: StoryBundle sold 3,600 copies of their first bundle at an average price of about $8. Of that total, about 70 percent — around $21,000 after fees were paid — was split evenly among the participating authors. Because the books were self-published, the authors kept all of their share, explained Chen.
“The authors so far have been very happy with the added sales from just 21 days of being in a bundle,” said Chen. “Other than that, they’re thrilled with the added fans and social media presence as well, and readers who bought the bundle are buying their other works after the bundle is over, because they want to get more from those authors.”
The books in each bundle are also offered DRM free, which means all files can be read on any device. StoryBundle offers both .mobi and .epub formats, which means they should be supported on almost every ereader and laptops, smartphones, and tablets with an ereader program. The books can also be sent directly to devices that support the Kindle App, meaning readers won’t need to download and sync the books manually.
Chen said they hope to offer a new bundle about every month, and feature a variety of genres including horror, fantasy, romance, science fiction, thrillers, comic books, nonfiction, humor and self-help. To keep up with StoryBundle and see when a bundle of books you’d enjoy will be available, follow StoryBundle on Facebook or Twitter.
from: BookRiot
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Giving online customers the chance to pay what they want works
The Humble Indie Bundle shows most do the right thing which helps offset the people who don't give a damn
by: Cory Doctorow
What if the experience of purchasing electronic media was redesigned around making you feel trusted and sincerely appreciated? What if you knew that the lion's share of the money you spent on electronic media went straight to the creator? What if, in short, you knew your honesty would be rewarded with a fair deal for all parties?
Of all the ideas from the heady days of internet futurism, none is as fraught as "price discrimination," the practice of charging different rates to different customers for the same product. Price discrimination is a mainstay of the travel industry, where airlines and hotels try all manner of tricks to try and figure out who's willing to pay more and charge them accordingly.
For example, travellers who won't endure an overnight Saturday stay are presumed to be travelling on business, charging the ticket to someone else, and therefore less price-sensitive. So itineraries with Saturday stays are often much cheaper than those without.
Region-coding on DVDs is a crack at this: the cost of producing a DVD is very low, so the retail price is pretty much arbitrary. The studios thought they could offer goods at one price in rich countries, and a lower price in poor countries, and use region-codes to prevent the flow of cheap versions from the poor world to the rich world. But DVDs actually cost something to produce on a per-unit basis. What about purely digital goods?
On the face of it, digital goods are perfect candidates for price discrimination. The marginal cost of distributing a digital good – an ebook, a game, a video, a song – is virtually nothing. So the art and science of selling digital goods is figuring out the optimal price, informed not by what your upfront costs are, but what you think the market will bear. With digital goods, the object isn't to make the maximum profit per customer, but to make the maximum profit overall.
The 1980s and 1990s were full of stories of "perfect markets" where goods could be priced to exactly align with the amount customers are willing to spend. You could sell someone an ebook for a day, then let them upgrade to a weekly licence. You could rent a movie for a low price, rent out the pause button by the second.
But with the exception of a few online video-rental services (which offer a time-bound use of a movie) no one seems to want this.
People are especially resentful of their neighbours or friends abroad paying radically different prices. And in order to make this kind of limited-use model work, the entertainment industry had to deploy DRM – software that lurked in the customers' devices, ready to swim to the fore and intone "I can't let you do that, Dave," any time a purchaser wanted to do something outside of the deal they'd been offered.
Those deals are viewed as rip-offs, and rightly so. They're a way for big companies to confiscate most of the value that used to come with the price of purchase. A book comes with the right to lend it or give it away, to read it in any chair, under any lightbulb, shelve it on any bookcase, and take it with you to any country.
A DRM-crippled ebook comes with arbitrary, ever-shifting limits on lending, reselling and giving away; and is locked to a single platform, effectively giving the store that sold you the book the right to control how you read it.
It hasn't escaped the attention of digital customers that they don't need to spend any money to get digital goods.
Pirate versions of digital goods are only a few clicks away, and the likelihood of being prosecuted for downloading is about on par with the likelihood of being struck by lightning.
What's more, the pirate versions come with no restrictions at all. The inadvertent lesson of price discrimination through DRM is that people who pay more get less.
In 2010, a group of independent game developers launched an experiment in voluntary price discrimination. They called it the Humble Indie Bundle, and offered a collection of independently produced, DRM-free, Mac/Windows/Linux video games on a "name your price" basis.
Customers were invited to pay whatever they thought the bundle was worth, and were allowed to come back later and pay more if they reconsidered. They were also given the option of diverting some (or all) of their payment to two named charities: the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child's Play.
The theory behind this pricing model is both honest and sophisticated. Honest, because it is a public display of trust and generosity, a message to customers that says: "We don't need DRM to keep you honest, and we know you'll pay us what this is worth."
Sophisticated, because the canny game developers behind Humble introduced all sorts of game-like mechanics to encourage maximum spending, including:
• A public leaderboard, listing the biggest spenders – some deep-pocketed customers got into a bidding war against each other to maintain pride of place.
• An "over-the-average" premium that unlocked access to more games for any purchaser who'd put down a higher-than-average sum – which meant that the average was being steadily driven up.
• Grouping users into teams by their operating system, and informing them continuously of the relative generosity of Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux users, encouraging platform advocates to stump up more money to prove their side's virtue.
It was a tremendous success, garnering more than a million dollars in the first week alone. Humble has heaped triumph upon triumph since, and the most recent Bundle made nearly $5m (£3.1m) in its first week.
It turns out that people do the right thing when given the chance; enough, anyway, to offset people who don't give a damn about doing the right thing.
Since last spring, I've been volunteering with Humble to curate their first-ever ebook bundle, which launches today, and includes my latest book, Pirate Cinema, a young adult techno-thriller about kids in London who make their own remix movies and show them on hidden screens in cemeteries, squatted pubs, even old sewers (and who end up in hot water with the entertainment industry when word gets out).
Almost without exception, the writers I approached for inclusion in the ebook Bundle were enthusiastic about it. However, many of these authors were disappointed to learn that their publishers wouldn't allow them to sell their books without DRM, and had to pull out of the project.
But even with those setbacks, I'm delighted with the authors who've come to the Bundle: Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman (with Dave McKean, no less!), Lauren Beukes, John Scalzi, Mercedes Lackey, and a host of others (some will not be revealed before the end of the first week).
The charities for this Bundle are the Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Science Fiction Writers of America Emergency Medical Fund (the lack of reliable public healthcare in the US means many writers risk destitution from even minor illnesses and accidents).
And we're trying a new price-setting strategy: in addition to the information about how different platforms' users are spending, customers will also get insight into how their city or region ranks in a worldwide league table of relative generosity.
We have no idea how this will fare. But the ebook market has been riven by fights over pricing and DRM, and with a roster of brilliant writers and exciting books, I can only hope that readers will follow the example of the gamers before them, and do the right thing.
from: Guardian
by: Cory Doctorow
 |
| Humble Indie Bundle: 'We don’t need DRM to keep you honest, and we know you’ll pay us what this is worth' |
Of all the ideas from the heady days of internet futurism, none is as fraught as "price discrimination," the practice of charging different rates to different customers for the same product. Price discrimination is a mainstay of the travel industry, where airlines and hotels try all manner of tricks to try and figure out who's willing to pay more and charge them accordingly.
For example, travellers who won't endure an overnight Saturday stay are presumed to be travelling on business, charging the ticket to someone else, and therefore less price-sensitive. So itineraries with Saturday stays are often much cheaper than those without.
Region-coding on DVDs is a crack at this: the cost of producing a DVD is very low, so the retail price is pretty much arbitrary. The studios thought they could offer goods at one price in rich countries, and a lower price in poor countries, and use region-codes to prevent the flow of cheap versions from the poor world to the rich world. But DVDs actually cost something to produce on a per-unit basis. What about purely digital goods?
On the face of it, digital goods are perfect candidates for price discrimination. The marginal cost of distributing a digital good – an ebook, a game, a video, a song – is virtually nothing. So the art and science of selling digital goods is figuring out the optimal price, informed not by what your upfront costs are, but what you think the market will bear. With digital goods, the object isn't to make the maximum profit per customer, but to make the maximum profit overall.
The 1980s and 1990s were full of stories of "perfect markets" where goods could be priced to exactly align with the amount customers are willing to spend. You could sell someone an ebook for a day, then let them upgrade to a weekly licence. You could rent a movie for a low price, rent out the pause button by the second.
But with the exception of a few online video-rental services (which offer a time-bound use of a movie) no one seems to want this.
People are especially resentful of their neighbours or friends abroad paying radically different prices. And in order to make this kind of limited-use model work, the entertainment industry had to deploy DRM – software that lurked in the customers' devices, ready to swim to the fore and intone "I can't let you do that, Dave," any time a purchaser wanted to do something outside of the deal they'd been offered.
Those deals are viewed as rip-offs, and rightly so. They're a way for big companies to confiscate most of the value that used to come with the price of purchase. A book comes with the right to lend it or give it away, to read it in any chair, under any lightbulb, shelve it on any bookcase, and take it with you to any country.
A DRM-crippled ebook comes with arbitrary, ever-shifting limits on lending, reselling and giving away; and is locked to a single platform, effectively giving the store that sold you the book the right to control how you read it.
It hasn't escaped the attention of digital customers that they don't need to spend any money to get digital goods.
Pirate versions of digital goods are only a few clicks away, and the likelihood of being prosecuted for downloading is about on par with the likelihood of being struck by lightning.
What's more, the pirate versions come with no restrictions at all. The inadvertent lesson of price discrimination through DRM is that people who pay more get less.
In 2010, a group of independent game developers launched an experiment in voluntary price discrimination. They called it the Humble Indie Bundle, and offered a collection of independently produced, DRM-free, Mac/Windows/Linux video games on a "name your price" basis.
Customers were invited to pay whatever they thought the bundle was worth, and were allowed to come back later and pay more if they reconsidered. They were also given the option of diverting some (or all) of their payment to two named charities: the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child's Play.
The theory behind this pricing model is both honest and sophisticated. Honest, because it is a public display of trust and generosity, a message to customers that says: "We don't need DRM to keep you honest, and we know you'll pay us what this is worth."
Sophisticated, because the canny game developers behind Humble introduced all sorts of game-like mechanics to encourage maximum spending, including:
• A public leaderboard, listing the biggest spenders – some deep-pocketed customers got into a bidding war against each other to maintain pride of place.
• An "over-the-average" premium that unlocked access to more games for any purchaser who'd put down a higher-than-average sum – which meant that the average was being steadily driven up.
• Grouping users into teams by their operating system, and informing them continuously of the relative generosity of Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux users, encouraging platform advocates to stump up more money to prove their side's virtue.
It was a tremendous success, garnering more than a million dollars in the first week alone. Humble has heaped triumph upon triumph since, and the most recent Bundle made nearly $5m (£3.1m) in its first week.
It turns out that people do the right thing when given the chance; enough, anyway, to offset people who don't give a damn about doing the right thing.
Since last spring, I've been volunteering with Humble to curate their first-ever ebook bundle, which launches today, and includes my latest book, Pirate Cinema, a young adult techno-thriller about kids in London who make their own remix movies and show them on hidden screens in cemeteries, squatted pubs, even old sewers (and who end up in hot water with the entertainment industry when word gets out).
Almost without exception, the writers I approached for inclusion in the ebook Bundle were enthusiastic about it. However, many of these authors were disappointed to learn that their publishers wouldn't allow them to sell their books without DRM, and had to pull out of the project.
But even with those setbacks, I'm delighted with the authors who've come to the Bundle: Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman (with Dave McKean, no less!), Lauren Beukes, John Scalzi, Mercedes Lackey, and a host of others (some will not be revealed before the end of the first week).
The charities for this Bundle are the Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Science Fiction Writers of America Emergency Medical Fund (the lack of reliable public healthcare in the US means many writers risk destitution from even minor illnesses and accidents).
And we're trying a new price-setting strategy: in addition to the information about how different platforms' users are spending, customers will also get insight into how their city or region ranks in a worldwide league table of relative generosity.
We have no idea how this will fare. But the ebook market has been riven by fights over pricing and DRM, and with a roster of brilliant writers and exciting books, I can only hope that readers will follow the example of the gamers before them, and do the right thing.
from: Guardian
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Publishing: A very public library
A New York City tech start-up wants to create a Spotify-like service for reading. A place where you can borrow books? How novel...
by: Tim Walker
Imagine there was a place where you could browse a vast selection of fiction and non-fiction books, a place a bit like a bookshop – only, instead of buying these books, you could just borrow them, for as long as you liked. And for free! (Sort of.) Sounds a bit like a library, doesn't it? It also sounds a lot like the business model for Oyster, a brand new digital service that does for books what Netflix does for films, and Spotify for music: in return for a monthly subscription fee, users can borrow from what it calls "an ever-growing collection of high-quality published works," and read them on their smartphones.
This week the fledgling tech firm, which is based in New York, announced that it had raised $3m from its latest funding round. Founders Eric Stromberg (ex-eBay), Andrew Brown (ex-Google and Microsoft) and Willem Van Lancker (ex-Google and Apple) say their investors include "international business and creative leaders in technology, media, and books."
Oyster – as in, "The world is your…" – is yet to roll out for general consumption, and it's unclear when it would become available to UK users, though anyone can request an invitation to the service at readoyster.com.
However, its website suggests why it might be an improvement on past apps of a similar bent. It is tailored specifically to smartphones, unlike rivals (such as the Amazon Kindle app), which it claims are "incomplete and shrunken copies of their tablet counterparts". It also wants to retain users with its innovative book recommendation and discovery aids.
There are potential pitfalls, naturally. Oyster says its market research found that people "love" reading on smartphones, "the perfect reading device for those in-between moments in their lives."
Presently, however, there are no plans to make Oyster books available to users on other platforms, such as tablets. Many Kindle app users, for instance, read the same book simultaneously on their tablet and their smartphone, depending on the circumstances.
The service sounds good for readers, but what about writers? Authors, says Oyster, "deserve to have their books treated in a way that reflects the care they put into their writing."
Stromberg told TechCrunch that his firm already has deals in place with a selection of publishers, and will share its revenue with its publishing partners based on how many times a book is read.
While this sounds rather noble, it's a lot like Spotify's deals with record labels, which have left many artists disgruntled by its meagre royalties.
from: Independent
by: Tim Walker
Imagine there was a place where you could browse a vast selection of fiction and non-fiction books, a place a bit like a bookshop – only, instead of buying these books, you could just borrow them, for as long as you liked. And for free! (Sort of.) Sounds a bit like a library, doesn't it? It also sounds a lot like the business model for Oyster, a brand new digital service that does for books what Netflix does for films, and Spotify for music: in return for a monthly subscription fee, users can borrow from what it calls "an ever-growing collection of high-quality published works," and read them on their smartphones.
This week the fledgling tech firm, which is based in New York, announced that it had raised $3m from its latest funding round. Founders Eric Stromberg (ex-eBay), Andrew Brown (ex-Google and Microsoft) and Willem Van Lancker (ex-Google and Apple) say their investors include "international business and creative leaders in technology, media, and books."
Oyster – as in, "The world is your…" – is yet to roll out for general consumption, and it's unclear when it would become available to UK users, though anyone can request an invitation to the service at readoyster.com.
However, its website suggests why it might be an improvement on past apps of a similar bent. It is tailored specifically to smartphones, unlike rivals (such as the Amazon Kindle app), which it claims are "incomplete and shrunken copies of their tablet counterparts". It also wants to retain users with its innovative book recommendation and discovery aids.
There are potential pitfalls, naturally. Oyster says its market research found that people "love" reading on smartphones, "the perfect reading device for those in-between moments in their lives."
Presently, however, there are no plans to make Oyster books available to users on other platforms, such as tablets. Many Kindle app users, for instance, read the same book simultaneously on their tablet and their smartphone, depending on the circumstances.
The service sounds good for readers, but what about writers? Authors, says Oyster, "deserve to have their books treated in a way that reflects the care they put into their writing."
Stromberg told TechCrunch that his firm already has deals in place with a selection of publishers, and will share its revenue with its publishing partners based on how many times a book is read.
While this sounds rather noble, it's a lot like Spotify's deals with record labels, which have left many artists disgruntled by its meagre royalties.
from: Independent
Monday, October 22, 2012
Print Is Still the Dominant Format for Canadians, Says New BookNet Canada Study
E-books represent 16% of book purchases in Canada
Canadians still overwhelmingly prefer print books to e-books, says BookNet Canada’s new The Canadian Book Consumer 2012: Book-Buying Behaviour in Canada January to June 2012 report. The first edition of the report—available today—finds that 86% of Canadians still purchase print formats and 19% buy electronic formats. Only 7% buy both. Paperback formats remain the most popular, but hardcover books still account for 24% of all book purchases.
This long-awaited study provides some much needed insight into consumer behaviour after some tumultuous times for the industry. The report also looks at where book purchases are made and why. It found that approximately 20% of print book purchases were made online (27.5% of all book sales were online, including mobile). But in-store purchases are still more prevalent: non-book retailers account for 32% of sales and traditional bookstores for 37%.
“What we’re seeing is that Canadians are still devoted to print and they’re most comfortable shopping in physical stores,” said Noah Genner, CEO of BookNet Canada. “But online shopping and digital formats already have significant adoption across Canada, and it’s something we will continue to track as the study continues over the next two years.”
Among Canadian e-book buyers, Kobo was the most popular purveyor of e-reading devices—27% planned to use a Kobo device to read their next e-book. “Given Kobo’s Canadian roots, this isn’t surprising,” said Pamela Millar, BookNet Canada’s Director of Customer Relations. “But Kindle and Apple devices are not far behind. The next couple of holiday seasons will be important events for e-reader adoption. Then we’ll see if the majority will mimic the early adopters in terms of device preference.”
This report is based on the first two fieldings of a two-year study that began this year. This edition will cover the book-buying behavior, including genre, format, price tolerance, and retailer preference, and demographics of book-buying Canadians according to surveys from the first and second quarter of 2012. This edition also features a focus on library usage. BookNet Canada plans to release bi-annual editions over the next two years.
Data for The Canadian Consumer was derived from a nationally representative panel of book consumers. Each month a new group of respondents completed surveys about their book-purchasing behaviour for Bowker Market Research. Respondents were qualified for the survey when they indicated they had purchased a minimum of one book, regardless of format, in the prior month. This process yielded a survey sample of 1,000 book consumers.
The survey findings are available for sale in a PDF report, and a substantial discount is available for BNC SalesData subscribers. An executive summary is also available at no cost. For more information and to order a copy of The Canadian Book Consumer 2012: Book-Buying Behaviour in Canada January to June 2012, visit http://www.booknetcanada.ca/canadian-book-consumer/.
from: BookNet Canada
Canadians still overwhelmingly prefer print books to e-books, says BookNet Canada’s new The Canadian Book Consumer 2012: Book-Buying Behaviour in Canada January to June 2012 report. The first edition of the report—available today—finds that 86% of Canadians still purchase print formats and 19% buy electronic formats. Only 7% buy both. Paperback formats remain the most popular, but hardcover books still account for 24% of all book purchases.
This long-awaited study provides some much needed insight into consumer behaviour after some tumultuous times for the industry. The report also looks at where book purchases are made and why. It found that approximately 20% of print book purchases were made online (27.5% of all book sales were online, including mobile). But in-store purchases are still more prevalent: non-book retailers account for 32% of sales and traditional bookstores for 37%.
“What we’re seeing is that Canadians are still devoted to print and they’re most comfortable shopping in physical stores,” said Noah Genner, CEO of BookNet Canada. “But online shopping and digital formats already have significant adoption across Canada, and it’s something we will continue to track as the study continues over the next two years.”
Among Canadian e-book buyers, Kobo was the most popular purveyor of e-reading devices—27% planned to use a Kobo device to read their next e-book. “Given Kobo’s Canadian roots, this isn’t surprising,” said Pamela Millar, BookNet Canada’s Director of Customer Relations. “But Kindle and Apple devices are not far behind. The next couple of holiday seasons will be important events for e-reader adoption. Then we’ll see if the majority will mimic the early adopters in terms of device preference.”
This report is based on the first two fieldings of a two-year study that began this year. This edition will cover the book-buying behavior, including genre, format, price tolerance, and retailer preference, and demographics of book-buying Canadians according to surveys from the first and second quarter of 2012. This edition also features a focus on library usage. BookNet Canada plans to release bi-annual editions over the next two years.
Data for The Canadian Consumer was derived from a nationally representative panel of book consumers. Each month a new group of respondents completed surveys about their book-purchasing behaviour for Bowker Market Research. Respondents were qualified for the survey when they indicated they had purchased a minimum of one book, regardless of format, in the prior month. This process yielded a survey sample of 1,000 book consumers.
The survey findings are available for sale in a PDF report, and a substantial discount is available for BNC SalesData subscribers. An executive summary is also available at no cost. For more information and to order a copy of The Canadian Book Consumer 2012: Book-Buying Behaviour in Canada January to June 2012, visit http://www.booknetcanada.ca/canadian-book-consumer/.
from: BookNet Canada
Friday, October 19, 2012
Libraries reinvent themselves as labs of creativity
Local libraries are becoming centers for creativity and innovation – not only places to borrow stuff, but also places to make stuff.
by: Cat Johnson
From their inception, libraries were designed to be hubs of information. What that looked like for a long time was that they housed books and other media including music, film, and historic documents.
These days, being a hub of information looks rather different. In addition to lending traditional media materials, libraries are becoming community centers for creativity and innovation. By providing patrons access to emerging digital and manufacturing tools, libraries are reinventing themselves as laboratories that help bridge the digital divide and move projects from the idea stage into the production stage.
Recently, the Online Education Database published a round-up of the 10 Most Amazing Library Laboratories. Among those featured were some well-known projects: the NYPL Labs at the New York Public Library and the FabLab at the Fayetteville Free Library in Fayetteville, N.Y., as well as some lesser-known labs that are helping to move libraries into the center of future-forward communities.
Through book publication, digital media workshops, "makerspaces," and even organic gardens, these laboratories are demonstrating that libraries aren’t just places to borrow stuff, they’re also places to make stuff.
Catering exclusively to teens, the YOUMedia Lab at the Chicago Public Library offers young people a way to create, edit, and produce podcasts, recorded music, blogs, film, photographs, and more. By providing access to digital tools of all kinds, the library gives voice to the teens and nurtures a new generation of creators.
Providing a way to write books and to publish them on-site, the Sacramento (Calif.) Public Library’s I Street Press turns readers of books into makers of books. Using the Espresso Book Machine, patrons can print their own material or access one of thousands of out-of-print titles. The library also offers writing classes for budding authors.
A digital media laboratory for teens, the StoryLab at the Tacoma (Wash.) Public Library is a production center for digital illustration, filmmaking, photography, music production, and the like. Boasting tools that range from MIDI controllers to tablets (as well as classes on how to use the tools), the lab is an incubator for a variety of projects.
Proving that space doesn’t have to be an issue when it comes to library laboratories, the Allen County Public Library Maker Station is located in a trailer right behind the library in Fort Wayne, Ind. A makerspace open to library patrons, the Maker Station features laser-cutters, 3-D printers, digital sewing and embroidery machines, saws, vinyl cutters, and more. As methods of production become increasingly available to the public, spaces like this will become necessary elements of communities.
While access to digital tools is imperative these days, so is access to healthy food. A community hub of a different kind, the Library Farm at the Northern Onondaga Public Library in Cicero, N.Y., encourages patrons to use its organic garden as a laboratory. Patrons can “check out” a small plot of land and learn from master gardeners how to grow organic produce on it.
There’s also a community area, for those who don’t want a plot to themselves. The stated purpose of the project is to teach food literacy, preserve the knowledge that our grandparents had, and to provide food to local pantries.
• This article originally appeared at Shareable.net, a nonprofit online magazine that tells the story of how sharing can promote the common good.
from: CS Monitor
by: Cat Johnson
From their inception, libraries were designed to be hubs of information. What that looked like for a long time was that they housed books and other media including music, film, and historic documents.
These days, being a hub of information looks rather different. In addition to lending traditional media materials, libraries are becoming community centers for creativity and innovation. By providing patrons access to emerging digital and manufacturing tools, libraries are reinventing themselves as laboratories that help bridge the digital divide and move projects from the idea stage into the production stage.
Recently, the Online Education Database published a round-up of the 10 Most Amazing Library Laboratories. Among those featured were some well-known projects: the NYPL Labs at the New York Public Library and the FabLab at the Fayetteville Free Library in Fayetteville, N.Y., as well as some lesser-known labs that are helping to move libraries into the center of future-forward communities.
Through book publication, digital media workshops, "makerspaces," and even organic gardens, these laboratories are demonstrating that libraries aren’t just places to borrow stuff, they’re also places to make stuff.
Catering exclusively to teens, the YOUMedia Lab at the Chicago Public Library offers young people a way to create, edit, and produce podcasts, recorded music, blogs, film, photographs, and more. By providing access to digital tools of all kinds, the library gives voice to the teens and nurtures a new generation of creators.
Providing a way to write books and to publish them on-site, the Sacramento (Calif.) Public Library’s I Street Press turns readers of books into makers of books. Using the Espresso Book Machine, patrons can print their own material or access one of thousands of out-of-print titles. The library also offers writing classes for budding authors.
A digital media laboratory for teens, the StoryLab at the Tacoma (Wash.) Public Library is a production center for digital illustration, filmmaking, photography, music production, and the like. Boasting tools that range from MIDI controllers to tablets (as well as classes on how to use the tools), the lab is an incubator for a variety of projects.
Proving that space doesn’t have to be an issue when it comes to library laboratories, the Allen County Public Library Maker Station is located in a trailer right behind the library in Fort Wayne, Ind. A makerspace open to library patrons, the Maker Station features laser-cutters, 3-D printers, digital sewing and embroidery machines, saws, vinyl cutters, and more. As methods of production become increasingly available to the public, spaces like this will become necessary elements of communities.
While access to digital tools is imperative these days, so is access to healthy food. A community hub of a different kind, the Library Farm at the Northern Onondaga Public Library in Cicero, N.Y., encourages patrons to use its organic garden as a laboratory. Patrons can “check out” a small plot of land and learn from master gardeners how to grow organic produce on it.
There’s also a community area, for those who don’t want a plot to themselves. The stated purpose of the project is to teach food literacy, preserve the knowledge that our grandparents had, and to provide food to local pantries.
• This article originally appeared at Shareable.net, a nonprofit online magazine that tells the story of how sharing can promote the common good.
from: CS Monitor
Thursday, October 18, 2012
The 10 Most Mentioned Songs in Books
by: Gabe Habash
There are a lot of cool things you can discover on Small Demons, a website that acts as a book content web, connecting what artists write about. For example, you can look at The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and see all the people, places, music, movies, TV/radio, books, food/drink, magazines, events, vehicles, and weapons mentioned in the book. Click on any of those things, say…Planet of the Apes (mentioned on page 301), and see that that movie was also mentioned in Trainspotting and The Rules of Attraction, among other books.
You can also use the site to find the most commonly referenced songs in literature. Here’s the top 10, with some choice quotes for each song.
10. “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen
“If there are any members of the American Parents Against English Gay Men with Mustaches who are offended by the inclusion of Freddie Mercurial on my show, you are welcome to lodge your complaints up Lord Rupert’s hole. Looking on the positive side for a moment, if a big one gets through SkyWeb and pulps the Big Apple into quarks and gluons, I can ask the great Saint Freddie in person what the bejesus ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is about. The track before was dedicated to my ex-wife: The Smiths’ ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’.”
-Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
On the radio, an eager voice encouraged everyone to “Wang Chung” tonight, which was one of the many confusing songs I figured I’d understand when I knew more of the world. Sort of like the lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the comprehension of which I assumed required a familiarity with European arts and music. An educated person would know precisely what a scaramouch was and why he ought to do the fandango.
-The Ethical Assassin by David Liss
9. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana
The first present is going to be a mix tape. I just know that it should. I already have the songs picked and a theme. It’s called “One Winter.” But I’ve decided not to hand-color the cover. The first side has a lot of songs by the Village People and Blondie because Patrick likes that type of music a lot. It also has Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana, which Sam and Patrick love. But the second side is the one I like the most. It has winter kind of songs.
-The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
We’re messing around at work, the three of us, getting ready to go home and rubbishing each other’s five best side one track ones of all time (mine: ‘Janie Jones,’ The Clash from The Clash; ‘Thunder Road,’ Bruce Springsteen, from Born to Run; ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ Nirvana, from Nevermind; ‘Let’s Get It On,’ Marvin Gaye, from Let’s Get It On; ‘Return of the Grievous Angel,’ Gram Parsons, from Grievous Angel.)
-High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
8. “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson
Aomame took in a long, deep breath, and slowly let it out. Then, to the tune of “Billie Jean,” she swung her leg over the metal barrier. Her miniskirt rode up to her hips. Who gives a damn? Let them look all they want. Seeing what’s under my skirt doesn’t let them really see me as a person. Besides, her legs were the part of her body of which Aomame was the most proud.
-1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Dad had just discovered the Internet. He pulled up a clip that set the ardent mating displays of birds of paradise in New Guinea to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”
-Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman
7. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” by The Beatles
Granny removes her teeth and lies back, her bones grinding. Her chest heaves with exhaustion. Nancy sits down in the rocking chair, and as she rocks back and forth she searches the photograph, exploring the features of the young woman, who is wearing an embroidered white dress, and the young man, in a curly beard that starts below his chin, framing his face like a ruffle. The woman looks frightened—of the camera perhaps—but nevertheless her deep-set eyes sparkle like shards of glass. This young woman would be glad to dance to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on her wedding day, Nancy thinks. The man seems bewildered, as if he did not know what to expect, marrying a woman who has her eyes fixed on something so far away.
-Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason
On a crystalline blue day, we set off on a path behind our house. I carry a backpack with food, water, and sweaters—it gets chilly at the top—and Lachlann, for whom the ascent is a dawdle, carries a second pack. He also annoys us all by blasting “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on his tape player and screeching along nonstop.
-Immortal Birds by Doron Weber
6. “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin
Uncle Joley, who has brought a ukulele, is trying to play the beginning bars of “Stairway to Heaven.” He has almost got the notes right, but it sounds like sick luau music. To me it is not soothing, but it lulls Hadley to sleep. His head rests in my lap. The entire trip, Uncle Joley strums unlikely songs: “Happy Birthday,” the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, “Blue Velvet,” “Twist and Shout.”
-Songs of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult
The colossus brayed. “No. It’s called and that’s what it is. In prison you discover some surprising things about your body, and some of us noticed a variance in fart pitch. And we had one guy was a real star. Nothing he couldn’t do—basso profundo to coloratura, whistles and quavers, tremolo. The Louis Armstrong of the asshole. It was simple after that. I just recorded samples—I had this little Casio digital sampler that looks like a wristwatch—and when I got out I spliced them together. People love it. We got ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and ‘Freebird’ on there, but ‘Stairway to Heaven’ plays for eight minutes and it is dynamite. A lot of studio work, but worth it. It wasn’t like we all got together in the Tabernacle Fart Choir—technology made it happen. And I had a couple hits after that, not farting, but in the same mode.”
-That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx
5. “Blue Suede Shoes” by Elvis Presley
The back door opens, and I feel my heart in my throat. It’s only Maddie coming in from the yard, breezing into the kitchen, singing “Blue Suede Shoes.” “The Pope has given me his blessing,” she says, and she goes on to explain that she and Arthur are starting to see eye to eye. “Zippity doo-dah,” she says. She stands with her hands on her hips, a smile on her face. “Look at that sunshine, gents. What a glorious day, and here you stand, both of you looking like you’ve seen a ghost.”
-River of Heaven by Lee Martin
2. In fact, about 1 percent of the static that sometimes appears on your television set is a relic of the Big Bang and, if your eyes were sensitive to microwave light instead of just visible light, then the sky at night would appear white instead of black, because it continues to glow from the heat of the Big Bang. Oh, and because atoms are so small, and are constantly recycled, every breath you take contains atoms that were once breathed by Julius Caesar and Elvis Presley. So a little bit of you formerly ruled Rome, and sang “Blue Suede Shoes.”
-The Gates by John Connolly
4. “Dancing Queen” by ABBA
“Yes, indeed, we do some ABBA. ‘Dancing Queen.’ That one always goes down well. In fact, it is on ‘Dancing Queen’ I actually do a little singing myself, a little harmony part. Sonja will tell you I have the most terrible voice. So we must make sure to perform this song only when our customers are right in the middle of their meal, when there is for them no chance of escape!”
-Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro
The reason it was Walt Comeau’s fault was that Janine, Tick’s mother, played “Mama Mia” and “Dancing Queen” in her beginning and intermediate aerobics classes at Walt’s fitness club, then hummed these same songs at home. Only her advanced steppers were deemed ready for the rigors of Barry Manilow and the Copa Cabana.
-Empire Falls by Richard Russo
3. “We Are the World”
Brad laughed at his wife, his green eyes sparkling with amusement. “I want to see if you’re still this excited three months into it, when the shit’s hitting the fan and the tablecloths aren’t ready and you still don’t have anybody to sing the ‘We Are the World’ party song to guests who paid a small fortune to come to the shindig.”
-Substitute Me by Lori Tharps
Kimberly, who spent her free time carefully ripping holes in her brand-new Guess jeans, told me that I’d be better off being her assistant, because she was either going to be the president of Greenpeace or she would direct music videos for a living, but only ones with social messages, like “We Are the World.”
-Dixieland Sushi by Cara Lockwood
2. “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley
I intended to go into the hall, then up the stairs with a sasquatch-like, banister-shaking tread, and along the hall to my room, where I was going to put on an Elvis Presley record and turn the volume up just loud enough so she would repress the desire to complain. She was beginning to worry about her ability to communicate with me. I didn’t have any intentional plans, I was merely acting according to a dimly felt, sluggish instinct. I was aware only of a wish to hear “Heartbreak Hotel” at the maximum volume possible without reprisals.
-Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood
Outside, the candles have been lit. A torch flames from a metal holder—one of the silliest things I have ever seen—and blue lanterns have been lit in the trees. Someone has turned on a radio, and Elizabeth and some man, not recognizable, dance to “Heartbreak Hotel.”
-The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie
1. “Hey Jude” by The Beatles
Paul said, “Mr. Maple, we’ll be moving Jude”—he called Judith “Jude,” as in “Hey Jude,” rather than Jude the Obscure—”in here, but if you wanted to finish watching the Super Bowl I bet it’s on in the lobby downstairs. I don’t think they want you to stay on this floor.” Already, he seemed more mature, and slightly stooped.
-The Afterlife and Other Stories by John Updike
The late afternoon light was pouring in like a visitor from space, which after all it was. She absorbed the burgundy atmosphere of plant fronds and crystal paperweights. In the waiting room she had been listening to “Hey Jude” on the intercom, and she felt wrapped in its residue. She looked at the pictures of dreamy long-haired girls on the walls and thought with mild astonishment, “This is what a therapist is for.”
-Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill
from: Publisher's Weekly
There are a lot of cool things you can discover on Small Demons, a website that acts as a book content web, connecting what artists write about. For example, you can look at The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and see all the people, places, music, movies, TV/radio, books, food/drink, magazines, events, vehicles, and weapons mentioned in the book. Click on any of those things, say…Planet of the Apes (mentioned on page 301), and see that that movie was also mentioned in Trainspotting and The Rules of Attraction, among other books.
You can also use the site to find the most commonly referenced songs in literature. Here’s the top 10, with some choice quotes for each song.
10. “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen
“If there are any members of the American Parents Against English Gay Men with Mustaches who are offended by the inclusion of Freddie Mercurial on my show, you are welcome to lodge your complaints up Lord Rupert’s hole. Looking on the positive side for a moment, if a big one gets through SkyWeb and pulps the Big Apple into quarks and gluons, I can ask the great Saint Freddie in person what the bejesus ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is about. The track before was dedicated to my ex-wife: The Smiths’ ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’.”
-Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
On the radio, an eager voice encouraged everyone to “Wang Chung” tonight, which was one of the many confusing songs I figured I’d understand when I knew more of the world. Sort of like the lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the comprehension of which I assumed required a familiarity with European arts and music. An educated person would know precisely what a scaramouch was and why he ought to do the fandango.
-The Ethical Assassin by David Liss
9. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana
The first present is going to be a mix tape. I just know that it should. I already have the songs picked and a theme. It’s called “One Winter.” But I’ve decided not to hand-color the cover. The first side has a lot of songs by the Village People and Blondie because Patrick likes that type of music a lot. It also has Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana, which Sam and Patrick love. But the second side is the one I like the most. It has winter kind of songs.
-The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
We’re messing around at work, the three of us, getting ready to go home and rubbishing each other’s five best side one track ones of all time (mine: ‘Janie Jones,’ The Clash from The Clash; ‘Thunder Road,’ Bruce Springsteen, from Born to Run; ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ Nirvana, from Nevermind; ‘Let’s Get It On,’ Marvin Gaye, from Let’s Get It On; ‘Return of the Grievous Angel,’ Gram Parsons, from Grievous Angel.)
-High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
8. “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson
Aomame took in a long, deep breath, and slowly let it out. Then, to the tune of “Billie Jean,” she swung her leg over the metal barrier. Her miniskirt rode up to her hips. Who gives a damn? Let them look all they want. Seeing what’s under my skirt doesn’t let them really see me as a person. Besides, her legs were the part of her body of which Aomame was the most proud.
-1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Dad had just discovered the Internet. He pulled up a clip that set the ardent mating displays of birds of paradise in New Guinea to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”
-Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman
7. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” by The Beatles
Granny removes her teeth and lies back, her bones grinding. Her chest heaves with exhaustion. Nancy sits down in the rocking chair, and as she rocks back and forth she searches the photograph, exploring the features of the young woman, who is wearing an embroidered white dress, and the young man, in a curly beard that starts below his chin, framing his face like a ruffle. The woman looks frightened—of the camera perhaps—but nevertheless her deep-set eyes sparkle like shards of glass. This young woman would be glad to dance to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on her wedding day, Nancy thinks. The man seems bewildered, as if he did not know what to expect, marrying a woman who has her eyes fixed on something so far away.
-Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason
On a crystalline blue day, we set off on a path behind our house. I carry a backpack with food, water, and sweaters—it gets chilly at the top—and Lachlann, for whom the ascent is a dawdle, carries a second pack. He also annoys us all by blasting “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on his tape player and screeching along nonstop.
-Immortal Birds by Doron Weber
6. “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin
Uncle Joley, who has brought a ukulele, is trying to play the beginning bars of “Stairway to Heaven.” He has almost got the notes right, but it sounds like sick luau music. To me it is not soothing, but it lulls Hadley to sleep. His head rests in my lap. The entire trip, Uncle Joley strums unlikely songs: “Happy Birthday,” the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, “Blue Velvet,” “Twist and Shout.”
-Songs of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult
The colossus brayed. “No. It’s called and that’s what it is. In prison you discover some surprising things about your body, and some of us noticed a variance in fart pitch. And we had one guy was a real star. Nothing he couldn’t do—basso profundo to coloratura, whistles and quavers, tremolo. The Louis Armstrong of the asshole. It was simple after that. I just recorded samples—I had this little Casio digital sampler that looks like a wristwatch—and when I got out I spliced them together. People love it. We got ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and ‘Freebird’ on there, but ‘Stairway to Heaven’ plays for eight minutes and it is dynamite. A lot of studio work, but worth it. It wasn’t like we all got together in the Tabernacle Fart Choir—technology made it happen. And I had a couple hits after that, not farting, but in the same mode.”
-That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx
5. “Blue Suede Shoes” by Elvis Presley
The back door opens, and I feel my heart in my throat. It’s only Maddie coming in from the yard, breezing into the kitchen, singing “Blue Suede Shoes.” “The Pope has given me his blessing,” she says, and she goes on to explain that she and Arthur are starting to see eye to eye. “Zippity doo-dah,” she says. She stands with her hands on her hips, a smile on her face. “Look at that sunshine, gents. What a glorious day, and here you stand, both of you looking like you’ve seen a ghost.”
-River of Heaven by Lee Martin
2. In fact, about 1 percent of the static that sometimes appears on your television set is a relic of the Big Bang and, if your eyes were sensitive to microwave light instead of just visible light, then the sky at night would appear white instead of black, because it continues to glow from the heat of the Big Bang. Oh, and because atoms are so small, and are constantly recycled, every breath you take contains atoms that were once breathed by Julius Caesar and Elvis Presley. So a little bit of you formerly ruled Rome, and sang “Blue Suede Shoes.”
-The Gates by John Connolly
4. “Dancing Queen” by ABBA
“Yes, indeed, we do some ABBA. ‘Dancing Queen.’ That one always goes down well. In fact, it is on ‘Dancing Queen’ I actually do a little singing myself, a little harmony part. Sonja will tell you I have the most terrible voice. So we must make sure to perform this song only when our customers are right in the middle of their meal, when there is for them no chance of escape!”
-Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro
The reason it was Walt Comeau’s fault was that Janine, Tick’s mother, played “Mama Mia” and “Dancing Queen” in her beginning and intermediate aerobics classes at Walt’s fitness club, then hummed these same songs at home. Only her advanced steppers were deemed ready for the rigors of Barry Manilow and the Copa Cabana.
-Empire Falls by Richard Russo
3. “We Are the World”
Brad laughed at his wife, his green eyes sparkling with amusement. “I want to see if you’re still this excited three months into it, when the shit’s hitting the fan and the tablecloths aren’t ready and you still don’t have anybody to sing the ‘We Are the World’ party song to guests who paid a small fortune to come to the shindig.”
-Substitute Me by Lori Tharps
Kimberly, who spent her free time carefully ripping holes in her brand-new Guess jeans, told me that I’d be better off being her assistant, because she was either going to be the president of Greenpeace or she would direct music videos for a living, but only ones with social messages, like “We Are the World.”
-Dixieland Sushi by Cara Lockwood
2. “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley
I intended to go into the hall, then up the stairs with a sasquatch-like, banister-shaking tread, and along the hall to my room, where I was going to put on an Elvis Presley record and turn the volume up just loud enough so she would repress the desire to complain. She was beginning to worry about her ability to communicate with me. I didn’t have any intentional plans, I was merely acting according to a dimly felt, sluggish instinct. I was aware only of a wish to hear “Heartbreak Hotel” at the maximum volume possible without reprisals.
-Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood
Outside, the candles have been lit. A torch flames from a metal holder—one of the silliest things I have ever seen—and blue lanterns have been lit in the trees. Someone has turned on a radio, and Elizabeth and some man, not recognizable, dance to “Heartbreak Hotel.”
-The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie
1. “Hey Jude” by The Beatles
Paul said, “Mr. Maple, we’ll be moving Jude”—he called Judith “Jude,” as in “Hey Jude,” rather than Jude the Obscure—”in here, but if you wanted to finish watching the Super Bowl I bet it’s on in the lobby downstairs. I don’t think they want you to stay on this floor.” Already, he seemed more mature, and slightly stooped.
-The Afterlife and Other Stories by John Updike
The late afternoon light was pouring in like a visitor from space, which after all it was. She absorbed the burgundy atmosphere of plant fronds and crystal paperweights. In the waiting room she had been listening to “Hey Jude” on the intercom, and she felt wrapped in its residue. She looked at the pictures of dreamy long-haired girls on the walls and thought with mild astonishment, “This is what a therapist is for.”
-Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill
from: Publisher's Weekly
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Famous Authors’ Funniest Responses to Their Books Being Banned
by: Emily Temple
As you might have already heard, it’s Banned Books Week, and booksellers, librarians, and literary critics of all kinds are taking the opportunity to celebrate their favorite once-banned (or oft-banned) literature. But what do the authors themselves have to say about all this? After the jump, we’ve collected a few of our favorite hilarious responses from authors when their books were banned or challenged — because when there’s a challenge, why not challenge right back? Click through to hear what visionaries like Mark Twain, Harper Lee, and Maurice Sendak have to say to those who would deprive the world of their books, and let us know if we missed any choice quotes in the comments.
Mark Twain to his editor on the Concord Public Library banning The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885:
“Apparently, the Concord library has condemned Huck as ‘trash and only suitable for the slums.’ This will sell us another twenty-five thousand copies for sure!”
And to a librarian on the Brooklyn Public Library’s ban on the same book in 1905:
“I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote ‘Tom Sawyer’ & ‘Huck Finn’ for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.”
Maurice Sendak to Stephen Colbert on the frequent banning of In The Night Kitchen:
Stephen Colbert: “This one gets banned all over the place. And you know why.”
Maurice Sendak: “He’s got a dick.”
…
SC: “Why are you printing a smutty book?”
MS: “Because he’s a boy.”
SC: “Yeah, yeah, but you don’t have to rub it in our face. Boys wear pants.”
MS: “Not when they’re dreaming. Have you never had a dream yourself where you were totally naked?”
SC: “No.”
MS: “Well I think you’re a man of little imagination.”
Watch the entire interview here.
John Irving in response to an attempt to ban The Hotel New Hampshire from a New Hampshire school library:
“I take the side of young people, but I am also a realist; it is especially offensive to me when an uptight adult suggests that my stories are ‘inappropriate’ for young readers. I imagine, when I write, that I am writing for young readers — not for uptight adults.”
Read the entire letter here.
Ray Bradbury on the frequent attempts to censor or ban his books:
“… it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmild teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my ‘Wonderful Ice Cream Suit’ so it shapes ‘Zoot,’ may the belt unravel and the pants fall.”
Read more here.
Harper Lee in a 1966 letter to the Hanover County School Board in Virginia after they banned To Kill a Mockingbird from school libraries state-wide:
“Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbirdspells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is ‘immoral’ has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink. I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism. Therefore I enclose a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice.”
Read the whole letter here.
Kurt Vonnegut on censorship of his books (and in general):
“All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let’s get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States — and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!”
Philip Roth on the controversy surrounding his works:
“This indictment is a kind of fever that flares up from time to time. It flared up after Defender of the Faith, again after Goodbye Columbus, and understandably it went way up — to about 107 — after Portnoy’s Complaint. Now there’s just a low-grade fever running, nothing to worry about. I think the generation that got hot and bothered by my work is getting a little tired of the fuss. You know… if you hang around long enough, they begin to get used to you.”
Read more here.
J.K. Rowling on accusations that Harry Potter promotes Satanism (the same reason for which it has been variously banned from schools), particularly one write-in question on the same in an interview with Katie Couric:
“A very famous writer once said, ‘A book is like a mirror. If a fool looks in, you can’t expect a genius to look out.’ People tend to find in books what they want to find. And I think my books are very moral. I know they have absolutely nothing to do with what this lady is writing about, so I’m afraid I can’t give her much help there.”
Philip Pullman on the news that The Golden Compass was #2 on the list of most challenged books in American in 2008:
He described his response as “glee… Firstly, I had obviously annoyed a lot of censorious people, and secondly, any ban would provoke interested readers to move from the library, where they couldn’t get hold of my novel, to the bookshops, where they could.”
He added that banning a book on religious grounds was “the worst reason of the lot… Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.”
Read more here.
Justin Richardson, co-author of the picture book And Tango Makes Three, was the most challenged book in America in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2010 (in 2009 it was second place):
“We wrote the book to help parents teach children about same-sex parent families. It’s no more an argument in favor of human gay relationships than it is a call for children to swallow their fish whole or sleep on rocks.”
Read more here.
from: Flavorwire
As you might have already heard, it’s Banned Books Week, and booksellers, librarians, and literary critics of all kinds are taking the opportunity to celebrate their favorite once-banned (or oft-banned) literature. But what do the authors themselves have to say about all this? After the jump, we’ve collected a few of our favorite hilarious responses from authors when their books were banned or challenged — because when there’s a challenge, why not challenge right back? Click through to hear what visionaries like Mark Twain, Harper Lee, and Maurice Sendak have to say to those who would deprive the world of their books, and let us know if we missed any choice quotes in the comments.
Mark Twain to his editor on the Concord Public Library banning The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885:
“Apparently, the Concord library has condemned Huck as ‘trash and only suitable for the slums.’ This will sell us another twenty-five thousand copies for sure!”
And to a librarian on the Brooklyn Public Library’s ban on the same book in 1905:
“I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote ‘Tom Sawyer’ & ‘Huck Finn’ for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.”
Maurice Sendak to Stephen Colbert on the frequent banning of In The Night Kitchen:
Stephen Colbert: “This one gets banned all over the place. And you know why.”
Maurice Sendak: “He’s got a dick.”
…
SC: “Why are you printing a smutty book?”
MS: “Because he’s a boy.”
SC: “Yeah, yeah, but you don’t have to rub it in our face. Boys wear pants.”
MS: “Not when they’re dreaming. Have you never had a dream yourself where you were totally naked?”
SC: “No.”
MS: “Well I think you’re a man of little imagination.”
Watch the entire interview here.
John Irving in response to an attempt to ban The Hotel New Hampshire from a New Hampshire school library:
“I take the side of young people, but I am also a realist; it is especially offensive to me when an uptight adult suggests that my stories are ‘inappropriate’ for young readers. I imagine, when I write, that I am writing for young readers — not for uptight adults.”
Read the entire letter here.
Ray Bradbury on the frequent attempts to censor or ban his books:
“… it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmild teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my ‘Wonderful Ice Cream Suit’ so it shapes ‘Zoot,’ may the belt unravel and the pants fall.”
Read more here.
Harper Lee in a 1966 letter to the Hanover County School Board in Virginia after they banned To Kill a Mockingbird from school libraries state-wide:
“Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbirdspells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is ‘immoral’ has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink. I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism. Therefore I enclose a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice.”
Read the whole letter here.
Kurt Vonnegut on censorship of his books (and in general):
“All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let’s get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States — and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!”
Philip Roth on the controversy surrounding his works:
“This indictment is a kind of fever that flares up from time to time. It flared up after Defender of the Faith, again after Goodbye Columbus, and understandably it went way up — to about 107 — after Portnoy’s Complaint. Now there’s just a low-grade fever running, nothing to worry about. I think the generation that got hot and bothered by my work is getting a little tired of the fuss. You know… if you hang around long enough, they begin to get used to you.”
Read more here.
J.K. Rowling on accusations that Harry Potter promotes Satanism (the same reason for which it has been variously banned from schools), particularly one write-in question on the same in an interview with Katie Couric:
“A very famous writer once said, ‘A book is like a mirror. If a fool looks in, you can’t expect a genius to look out.’ People tend to find in books what they want to find. And I think my books are very moral. I know they have absolutely nothing to do with what this lady is writing about, so I’m afraid I can’t give her much help there.”
Philip Pullman on the news that The Golden Compass was #2 on the list of most challenged books in American in 2008:
He described his response as “glee… Firstly, I had obviously annoyed a lot of censorious people, and secondly, any ban would provoke interested readers to move from the library, where they couldn’t get hold of my novel, to the bookshops, where they could.”
He added that banning a book on religious grounds was “the worst reason of the lot… Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.”
Read more here.
Justin Richardson, co-author of the picture book And Tango Makes Three, was the most challenged book in America in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2010 (in 2009 it was second place):
“We wrote the book to help parents teach children about same-sex parent families. It’s no more an argument in favor of human gay relationships than it is a call for children to swallow their fish whole or sleep on rocks.”
Read more here.
from: Flavorwire
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
After recession, Washington area libraries adapt to high demand on a tight budget
by: Patricia Sullivan
Walk into Arlington County’s Central Library at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday. The parking lot is full. Grade-schoolers and their younger siblings are scattered around the children’s section. Adults are plugged into the wireless signals from their devices or browsing novels and DVDs. At the moment, the Digital Projects Lab where residents can record videos is free, but it won’t be for long.
Try Montgomery County’s Germantown Library on a Sunday afternoon. Someone is using the computers to search for a job. Someone else is leafing through the collection of Vietnamese-language books. The librarian at the counter fields a question about e-books.
Across the Washington region, public libraries have increased their role in the community, hosting myriad meetings in their conference rooms, teaching people to use the latest technological devices and connecting residents with language classes and voter registration services.
The range of users and uses is breathtaking. Although proposals for gorgeous new or renovated library buildings in the District and the wealthier suburbs get the headlines and television airtime, the main challenge lies in the day-to-day operations of this public resource.
As the region recovers from the Great Recession of the past four years, public library leaders say they are slowly recovering from the budget cuts that reduced their collections, closed their doors on weekends and nights and caused cutbacks in custodial services. The doors might be open longer, but not as long as they were before the economic downturn.
“We’ve been able to restore most of those [reduced] hours,” said Sam Clay, director of Fairfax County libraries. “Over time, our customers really voiced to the powers that be that they don’t like reduced hours, and their voices were heard.”
Library directors are careful to praise the elected officials who hold the purse strings and have to balance the needs of police and fire, economic development, infrastructure and other community services in a time of uncertainty, even in the relatively wealthy Washington area. But just beneath the surface of the team-player talk, the stress of the past few years shows through as directors struggle to replace experienced, full-time professionals with fewer or part-time researchers.
And public demand is as strong as ever, librarians say. Whether measured by circulation size, customer visits to branches or Web sites, or participation in classes, reading programs or information inquiries, people are using their public libraries.
“We’re still facing challenges around unemployment,” said Larry Broxton, spokesman for the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System. “Number one, [patrons] can’t afford Internet access at home, so they come to us. Two, they need job-searching resources.”
The American Library Association reports that a national 2010 study showed that 4.4 million Americans used their libraries for job-related activities, even as budgets shrank. A Pew Charitable Trusts study of 15 urban library systems, not including Washington, noted that library visits rose 6 percent from 2005 to 2011. And if you happened by the Arlington Central Library on June 30, the scorchingly hot day after the derecho storm cut power and phone service in much of Northern Virginia, you would have found 700 people sharing air conditioning, Internet access and power strips.
Diane Kresh, director of Arlington’s libraries, considers the library, along with public schools, to be one of the twin pillars of democracy in the community.
“I like to think of us as taking complex information that’s very abstract — not everyone is Bill Nye the Science Guy — and turning it into concrete information,” she said.
That information is increasingly coming in digital form. To access it, librarians are becoming digital experts, teaching others to use e-readers on smartphones and tablets and all the other devices now used for reading and research.
“You’ll have the grandparent who comes in and says, ‘My grandkids bought this for me for Christmas — now what do I do?’ ” said Rose Dawson, director of Alexandria’s libraries, whose colleagues have become trainers for other librarians as well.
Stocking those digital shelves is an entirely separate matter. The American Library Association has led the effort to negotiate with major publishers, four of whom have refused to sell e-books to libraries. Others have raised prices significantly, which, in some cases, has caused a shortage of e-books. The group Friends of the Reston Regional Library donated $100,000 to that facility for the purchase of e-books, Clay said. But not all jurisdictions are so wealthy.
Just keeping up-to-date with computer software is a challenge, and library users increasingly want to connect without stepping foot into the facility.
“We tweet, we chat, we answer questions via e-mail, we have teen and adult [Web] pages,” said Parker Hamilton, head of Montgomery County public libraries. “We are still doing our job, but we are doing it in different ways. . . The need is to provide meaningful, relevant information that folks can get to. There’s no sense having information if people can’t get to it.”
The same goes for language skills. Library directors say the demand includes immigrants who need help learning English, highly educated professionals from foreign countries wanting to use databases for research and homesick expatriates wanting to read magazines from their homelands. Libraries hiring new staff members are therefore always on the lookout for foreign-language speakers with research skills.
Many libraries have expanded into business or professional library services and forged partnerships with college and government libraries in the area. At Longwood Community Recreation Center in Brookeville, residents can borrow books and DVDs from a vending machine. In Arlington, they can care for a garden, and in Alexandria, they can delve into special collections dating to Colonial times.
Although those historical resources are valued, the attention of local librarians is clearly on the future.
“How do we know we’re reaching everybody who needs us?” Kresh said. “We try to make sure we are welcoming...We are reaching out to caregivers, we have programs for teen parents and for inmates. Our librarians go to community meetings. . .From these conversations has come an expansion of our scope of mission.”
from: Washington Post
Walk into Arlington County’s Central Library at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday. The parking lot is full. Grade-schoolers and their younger siblings are scattered around the children’s section. Adults are plugged into the wireless signals from their devices or browsing novels and DVDs. At the moment, the Digital Projects Lab where residents can record videos is free, but it won’t be for long.
Try Montgomery County’s Germantown Library on a Sunday afternoon. Someone is using the computers to search for a job. Someone else is leafing through the collection of Vietnamese-language books. The librarian at the counter fields a question about e-books.
Across the Washington region, public libraries have increased their role in the community, hosting myriad meetings in their conference rooms, teaching people to use the latest technological devices and connecting residents with language classes and voter registration services.
The range of users and uses is breathtaking. Although proposals for gorgeous new or renovated library buildings in the District and the wealthier suburbs get the headlines and television airtime, the main challenge lies in the day-to-day operations of this public resource.
As the region recovers from the Great Recession of the past four years, public library leaders say they are slowly recovering from the budget cuts that reduced their collections, closed their doors on weekends and nights and caused cutbacks in custodial services. The doors might be open longer, but not as long as they were before the economic downturn.
“We’ve been able to restore most of those [reduced] hours,” said Sam Clay, director of Fairfax County libraries. “Over time, our customers really voiced to the powers that be that they don’t like reduced hours, and their voices were heard.”
Library directors are careful to praise the elected officials who hold the purse strings and have to balance the needs of police and fire, economic development, infrastructure and other community services in a time of uncertainty, even in the relatively wealthy Washington area. But just beneath the surface of the team-player talk, the stress of the past few years shows through as directors struggle to replace experienced, full-time professionals with fewer or part-time researchers.
And public demand is as strong as ever, librarians say. Whether measured by circulation size, customer visits to branches or Web sites, or participation in classes, reading programs or information inquiries, people are using their public libraries.
“We’re still facing challenges around unemployment,” said Larry Broxton, spokesman for the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System. “Number one, [patrons] can’t afford Internet access at home, so they come to us. Two, they need job-searching resources.”
The American Library Association reports that a national 2010 study showed that 4.4 million Americans used their libraries for job-related activities, even as budgets shrank. A Pew Charitable Trusts study of 15 urban library systems, not including Washington, noted that library visits rose 6 percent from 2005 to 2011. And if you happened by the Arlington Central Library on June 30, the scorchingly hot day after the derecho storm cut power and phone service in much of Northern Virginia, you would have found 700 people sharing air conditioning, Internet access and power strips.
Diane Kresh, director of Arlington’s libraries, considers the library, along with public schools, to be one of the twin pillars of democracy in the community.
“I like to think of us as taking complex information that’s very abstract — not everyone is Bill Nye the Science Guy — and turning it into concrete information,” she said.
That information is increasingly coming in digital form. To access it, librarians are becoming digital experts, teaching others to use e-readers on smartphones and tablets and all the other devices now used for reading and research.
“You’ll have the grandparent who comes in and says, ‘My grandkids bought this for me for Christmas — now what do I do?’ ” said Rose Dawson, director of Alexandria’s libraries, whose colleagues have become trainers for other librarians as well.
Stocking those digital shelves is an entirely separate matter. The American Library Association has led the effort to negotiate with major publishers, four of whom have refused to sell e-books to libraries. Others have raised prices significantly, which, in some cases, has caused a shortage of e-books. The group Friends of the Reston Regional Library donated $100,000 to that facility for the purchase of e-books, Clay said. But not all jurisdictions are so wealthy.
Just keeping up-to-date with computer software is a challenge, and library users increasingly want to connect without stepping foot into the facility.
“We tweet, we chat, we answer questions via e-mail, we have teen and adult [Web] pages,” said Parker Hamilton, head of Montgomery County public libraries. “We are still doing our job, but we are doing it in different ways. . . The need is to provide meaningful, relevant information that folks can get to. There’s no sense having information if people can’t get to it.”
The same goes for language skills. Library directors say the demand includes immigrants who need help learning English, highly educated professionals from foreign countries wanting to use databases for research and homesick expatriates wanting to read magazines from their homelands. Libraries hiring new staff members are therefore always on the lookout for foreign-language speakers with research skills.
Many libraries have expanded into business or professional library services and forged partnerships with college and government libraries in the area. At Longwood Community Recreation Center in Brookeville, residents can borrow books and DVDs from a vending machine. In Arlington, they can care for a garden, and in Alexandria, they can delve into special collections dating to Colonial times.
Although those historical resources are valued, the attention of local librarians is clearly on the future.
“How do we know we’re reaching everybody who needs us?” Kresh said. “We try to make sure we are welcoming...We are reaching out to caregivers, we have programs for teen parents and for inmates. Our librarians go to community meetings. . .From these conversations has come an expansion of our scope of mission.”
from: Washington Post
Monday, October 15, 2012
New license plate supports libraries
“Kentucky’s public libraries welcomed more than 20 million visitors last year who checked out more than 30 million books and other items,” said Gov. Beshear. “It’s clear that Kentuckians love their public libraries, and now they have another way to show their support.”
The new plate is available at any county clerk’s office with a $44 application fee. The annual fee on the plate thereafter is $31. At the time of issuance, an optional $10 can be paid to fund library science scholarships. Those who signed the initial petition to create the license plate and paid the $25 application fee will be receive a $25 credit when the plate is purchased.
“Public libraries not only make reading possible and more accessible to Kentuckians, they offer computer access and a place in our communities for continued education and job training courses,” said Mrs. Beshear. “People truly value the positive impact public libraries have in our communities and this license plate is a perfect way for them to display their support.”
The Kentucky Library Association (KLA) worked with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet to make the license plate available. Citizens from across the Commonwealth signed the application petition, which requires a minimum of 900 signatures to create a new plate.
“In this difficult economic climate, public libraries fill a critical need in the community,” said KLA Library Awareness Committee Chair and Logan County Public Library director Linda Kompanik, who spearheaded the effort to bring such a license plate to Kentucky. “For years, we’ve had library users who expressed interest in a way to show their support for libraries of all kinds – public, academic and special libraries. This new license plate is a great way to do just that.”
from: WKYT
Friday, October 12, 2012
What Do Harvard Business Publishing and Harlequin Have in Common?
by: Nick Morgan
What do Harvard Business Publishing and Harlequin – the publisher of a gazillion romance novels – have in common? More than you might think. I’ve blogged before about Harvard’s efforts to create a community of readers, thinkers, and kibitzers. It turns out that Harlequin has been doing the same for nearly 15 years – long before the Internet made it easy, or at least easier.
The romance novel publisher has a devoted following of mostly women who devour its books, and Harlequin has helped them create a community that talks about a great deal more than the torrid fiction itself. I spoke with some of the people who run Harlequin recently, and Eleanor Elliott, Director, Digital Capabilities, Digital & Internet, explains how they think about their readers:
Harlequin has always had a direct relationship with our readers, and it’s not just about us connecting to them, but also about encouraging and facilitating the connections they make with each other and with our authors. We’ve had an online community for almost 15 years where readers can talk to each other, to Harlequin employees, and to our authors. And while we absolutely talk about what books we’re reading, we also talk about our lives. Over the years our community has shared many milestones together – we’ve celebrated marriages, births, debut author contracts (we love those!) and we’ve also shed a few tears and supported each other through difficult times.
Every year at the Romance Writers of America conference, we host a “Pajama Party”, and it’s always delightful to see people who’ve connected online meet each other IRL (In Real Life) for the first time. It’s very gratifying knowing we created a place where friendship can grow.
What I love about that attitude is that it shows a way of thinking about readers that goes way beyond the obvious and the utilitarian. I’m hoping that some traditional publishers read Eleanor’s words and say to themselves, “Why don’t we do that?”
What’s my angle? As a reader, writer, and passionate follower of all things book-related, the narrow thinking about audience of most of the traditional publishers has always mystified me. More recently, I’ve become alarmed as audiences have continued to fracture and shrink. It’s harder and harder for any but the most established authors to find audiences and the traditional publishers seem absurdly myopic and unhelpful in this regard.
Set against that Harlequin’s flexibility in the face of technological change, as indicated by Eleanor, again:
We use social media extensively. Our digital strategy is not different from what Harlequin’s strategy has always been – which is be where women are. That’s why, decades ago, Harlequin put books in grocery stores. Now, women are the heaviest users of social media, and we need to be there and communicate with them on their terms. We use technology such as discussion forums, chat, blogs, and live video streaming with integrated chat to facilitate that connection. But it’s really not about the tools and gadgets…it’s about how those tools enable the connection that matters. In fact, when we relaunched our community earlier this year, we stripped back on some techno-toys and went with a more traditional discussion forum platform because our members told us that all the bells and whistles got in the way of true, meaningful discussion.
Now, that’s how publishers should be thinking. Yes to technology, but in service to the community. Exactly.
And while so many traditional publishers are predicting Armageddon, Harlequin is cheerfully expanding beyond romance into ‘serious’ fiction and non-fiction and keeping its technological options open. As Craig Swinwood, COO, North America, explains,
From Harlequin’s viewpoint, the publishing landscape is one of great opportunity. One of the pillars of our strategy has always been to provide great reading entertainment for women, whenever, wherever and however they choose to read. As digital publishing increases the availability and accessibility of this content, Harlequin is well positioned to adapt and innovate along the value chain to enhance the reading experience. Great editorial is key and we remain committed to providing it based on how our readers want to consume it.
So today, even though I’ve never read — and certainly never written — a romance novel, I’m grateful to Harlequin for getting what the reading experience is all about and putting its customers first. Thanks to Eleanor, Craig, and Melanie Dulos, who connected us. May traditional publishers begin to get this idea of relating to readers before it’s too late.
from: Forbes
What do Harvard Business Publishing and Harlequin – the publisher of a gazillion romance novels – have in common? More than you might think. I’ve blogged before about Harvard’s efforts to create a community of readers, thinkers, and kibitzers. It turns out that Harlequin has been doing the same for nearly 15 years – long before the Internet made it easy, or at least easier.
The romance novel publisher has a devoted following of mostly women who devour its books, and Harlequin has helped them create a community that talks about a great deal more than the torrid fiction itself. I spoke with some of the people who run Harlequin recently, and Eleanor Elliott, Director, Digital Capabilities, Digital & Internet, explains how they think about their readers:
Harlequin has always had a direct relationship with our readers, and it’s not just about us connecting to them, but also about encouraging and facilitating the connections they make with each other and with our authors. We’ve had an online community for almost 15 years where readers can talk to each other, to Harlequin employees, and to our authors. And while we absolutely talk about what books we’re reading, we also talk about our lives. Over the years our community has shared many milestones together – we’ve celebrated marriages, births, debut author contracts (we love those!) and we’ve also shed a few tears and supported each other through difficult times.
Every year at the Romance Writers of America conference, we host a “Pajama Party”, and it’s always delightful to see people who’ve connected online meet each other IRL (In Real Life) for the first time. It’s very gratifying knowing we created a place where friendship can grow.
What I love about that attitude is that it shows a way of thinking about readers that goes way beyond the obvious and the utilitarian. I’m hoping that some traditional publishers read Eleanor’s words and say to themselves, “Why don’t we do that?”
What’s my angle? As a reader, writer, and passionate follower of all things book-related, the narrow thinking about audience of most of the traditional publishers has always mystified me. More recently, I’ve become alarmed as audiences have continued to fracture and shrink. It’s harder and harder for any but the most established authors to find audiences and the traditional publishers seem absurdly myopic and unhelpful in this regard.
Set against that Harlequin’s flexibility in the face of technological change, as indicated by Eleanor, again:
We use social media extensively. Our digital strategy is not different from what Harlequin’s strategy has always been – which is be where women are. That’s why, decades ago, Harlequin put books in grocery stores. Now, women are the heaviest users of social media, and we need to be there and communicate with them on their terms. We use technology such as discussion forums, chat, blogs, and live video streaming with integrated chat to facilitate that connection. But it’s really not about the tools and gadgets…it’s about how those tools enable the connection that matters. In fact, when we relaunched our community earlier this year, we stripped back on some techno-toys and went with a more traditional discussion forum platform because our members told us that all the bells and whistles got in the way of true, meaningful discussion.
Now, that’s how publishers should be thinking. Yes to technology, but in service to the community. Exactly.
And while so many traditional publishers are predicting Armageddon, Harlequin is cheerfully expanding beyond romance into ‘serious’ fiction and non-fiction and keeping its technological options open. As Craig Swinwood, COO, North America, explains,
From Harlequin’s viewpoint, the publishing landscape is one of great opportunity. One of the pillars of our strategy has always been to provide great reading entertainment for women, whenever, wherever and however they choose to read. As digital publishing increases the availability and accessibility of this content, Harlequin is well positioned to adapt and innovate along the value chain to enhance the reading experience. Great editorial is key and we remain committed to providing it based on how our readers want to consume it.
So today, even though I’ve never read — and certainly never written — a romance novel, I’m grateful to Harlequin for getting what the reading experience is all about and putting its customers first. Thanks to Eleanor, Craig, and Melanie Dulos, who connected us. May traditional publishers begin to get this idea of relating to readers before it’s too late.
from: Forbes
Thursday, October 11, 2012
The library with no rules
Manila's Reading Club 2000 is a library like no other: it lets anyone borrow and then bring back or keep any of its thousands of books
Books, believes Hernando Guanlao, need to live. And they're only alive if they are being read. Thought and effort, time and money went into making them; they will never repay it lying idle in a cabinet or on a shelf. Books need to be set free. So walk by his home on Balagtas Street in Makati, downtown Manila, and it seems books are pretty much all you'll see. Thousands of them, on shelves and in crates outside on the pavement, piled high in the garage and on the stairs, each one free to anyone who wants it.
"People can borrow, take home, bring back or keep," says Guanlao, 60, a former tax accountant, ice-cream salesman and government employee known by all as Nanie. "Or they can share and pass on to another. But basically they should just take, take!" Guanlao reckons books "have lives, and have to lead them. They have work to do. And the act of giving a book …it makes you complete. It makes your life meaningful and abundant."
Thankfully for Guanlao's faith in human nature, people also give – often people he has never previously met, or doesn't even see: they leave boxes of books outside his door. "What's taken gets replaced many times over," he says. "I don't keep an inventory. But there are a lot of books. They want to be read, so they come here."
The Reading Club 2000, as it is called, began 12 years ago as a tribute to Guanlao's late parents, both civil servants. "They gave me my love of reading," he says. "I wanted to honour them and to do some kind of community service. So I put my old books – and my brothers' and sisters', maybe 100 in all – outside, to see if anyone was interested."
It took a while for people to work out that this was, as Guanlao puts it, a library "open 24/7, and with no rules", but the scheme, offering everything from battered crime paperbacks to fashion magazines, technical manuals, arcane histories and school textbooks, is booming.
It is helped by the fact that despite a 1994 act pledging "reading centres throughout the country", the Philippines, with a population of 92 million, has fewer than 700 public libraries, and buying books is a luxury many cannot afford.
Fortunately the Reading Club is spreading. Guanlao takes boxes of books into Manila's neighbourhoods himself, on a specially adapted book bike. He has also helped friends set up similar schemes at 10 other sites around the country, and inspired student book drives.
Aurora Verayo, from a town several hours drive from Manila, says she came to see Guanlao to donate books, but he persuaded her to open her own centre. "I'm going a step further and offering reading sessions for children," she says. "This is the start of a movement." Mark, a 16-year-old accountancy student at the Philippine Christian University in Manila, is organising a book drive with friends. "We've collected 90 books so far, and we expect many more," he says. "We're taking them to the barrios next month. Books open minds. A book can take you anywhere."
from: Guardian
 |
| Hernando Guanlao and his library in the centre of Manila in the Philippines |
"People can borrow, take home, bring back or keep," says Guanlao, 60, a former tax accountant, ice-cream salesman and government employee known by all as Nanie. "Or they can share and pass on to another. But basically they should just take, take!" Guanlao reckons books "have lives, and have to lead them. They have work to do. And the act of giving a book …it makes you complete. It makes your life meaningful and abundant."
Thankfully for Guanlao's faith in human nature, people also give – often people he has never previously met, or doesn't even see: they leave boxes of books outside his door. "What's taken gets replaced many times over," he says. "I don't keep an inventory. But there are a lot of books. They want to be read, so they come here."
The Reading Club 2000, as it is called, began 12 years ago as a tribute to Guanlao's late parents, both civil servants. "They gave me my love of reading," he says. "I wanted to honour them and to do some kind of community service. So I put my old books – and my brothers' and sisters', maybe 100 in all – outside, to see if anyone was interested."
It took a while for people to work out that this was, as Guanlao puts it, a library "open 24/7, and with no rules", but the scheme, offering everything from battered crime paperbacks to fashion magazines, technical manuals, arcane histories and school textbooks, is booming.
It is helped by the fact that despite a 1994 act pledging "reading centres throughout the country", the Philippines, with a population of 92 million, has fewer than 700 public libraries, and buying books is a luxury many cannot afford.
Fortunately the Reading Club is spreading. Guanlao takes boxes of books into Manila's neighbourhoods himself, on a specially adapted book bike. He has also helped friends set up similar schemes at 10 other sites around the country, and inspired student book drives.
Aurora Verayo, from a town several hours drive from Manila, says she came to see Guanlao to donate books, but he persuaded her to open her own centre. "I'm going a step further and offering reading sessions for children," she says. "This is the start of a movement." Mark, a 16-year-old accountancy student at the Philippine Christian University in Manila, is organising a book drive with friends. "We've collected 90 books so far, and we expect many more," he says. "We're taking them to the barrios next month. Books open minds. A book can take you anywhere."
from: Guardian
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Hold the front page: cover art is going out of fashion
Given that e-readers have no use for cover illustrations, how will books of the future be displayed?
by: James Bridle
Leaf through a copy of Phil Baines's Penguin by Design and you'll see the evolution of almost 80 years of book covers. From the stark formalism of Edward Young's horizontal orange bands (admittedly offset by his cheeky logo), through German typographer Jan Tschichold's even starker redesign of the late 1940s, to Germano Facetti and Romek Marber's 1960s grids, and a host of visual experiments in the Pelican, Penguin Specials and Classics ranges, Penguin's covers stood for many things besides the brand itself: for quality in literature; for a range of genres; for mood, atmosphere and style. And while Penguin's succession of superstar art directors may have been masters of the form, the cover has remained of central importance in publishing and bookselling for all involved, not least authors, up to the present day – but not, perhaps, for much longer.
Covers increasingly exist not as foot-high billboards and paintings on shelves, but as blurred, compressed little icons in lists on websites and devices, inscrutable jumbles of pixels that tell us little about the work. When read on an e-reader, books open to the first page of the text; the traditional cover increasingly seems irrelevant.
So will a new method for displaying books emerge? One possible path is offered by music platform Soundcloud, where songs are represented in the form of soundwaves. Could a book's text give form to its cover in a similar fashion, becoming its own representation? It's not so far-fetched. The work of a designer like Stefanie Posavec, whose Literary Organism visualises Kerouac's On the Road as a branching flower of sentence structures and themes, is more like a book as we understand it in our era of increasing information literacy than any photograph or drawing.
"Never judge a book by its cover", runs the adage. But if text and cover become inseparable, then it might be possible to do so.
from: Guardian
by: James Bridle
Leaf through a copy of Phil Baines's Penguin by Design and you'll see the evolution of almost 80 years of book covers. From the stark formalism of Edward Young's horizontal orange bands (admittedly offset by his cheeky logo), through German typographer Jan Tschichold's even starker redesign of the late 1940s, to Germano Facetti and Romek Marber's 1960s grids, and a host of visual experiments in the Pelican, Penguin Specials and Classics ranges, Penguin's covers stood for many things besides the brand itself: for quality in literature; for a range of genres; for mood, atmosphere and style. And while Penguin's succession of superstar art directors may have been masters of the form, the cover has remained of central importance in publishing and bookselling for all involved, not least authors, up to the present day – but not, perhaps, for much longer.
Covers increasingly exist not as foot-high billboards and paintings on shelves, but as blurred, compressed little icons in lists on websites and devices, inscrutable jumbles of pixels that tell us little about the work. When read on an e-reader, books open to the first page of the text; the traditional cover increasingly seems irrelevant.
So will a new method for displaying books emerge? One possible path is offered by music platform Soundcloud, where songs are represented in the form of soundwaves. Could a book's text give form to its cover in a similar fashion, becoming its own representation? It's not so far-fetched. The work of a designer like Stefanie Posavec, whose Literary Organism visualises Kerouac's On the Road as a branching flower of sentence structures and themes, is more like a book as we understand it in our era of increasing information literacy than any photograph or drawing.
"Never judge a book by its cover", runs the adage. But if text and cover become inseparable, then it might be possible to do so.
from: Guardian
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Time Is On Your Side
Did you see those silly cats on Tumblr, that breaking news on Twitter, and those photos of your friend’s kids on Facebook? Different social networks have their own distinct personalities. Bitly links are shared across all social networking services, giving us a unique viewpoint on how these networks differ.
We track metrics like the main type of content being shared on a network, the geographic locations of the people sharing and viewing the content, and how the popularity of the network has risen and fallen compared to other networks. Studying the differences between these networks leads us to interesting insights, for example, did you know that the half-life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours?
Recently weʼve been exploring how content propagates (or “goes viral”) through social networks, particularly how the day and time something is posted affects the eventual amount of attention it will receive.
Note: All the plots are based on EST. You will see day of the week, starting with Monday, on the Y axis, and hour of the day, starting with midnight, along the X axis. For the first plot in each section, the darker the blue block, the more traffic on average links posted during that hour received in the following 24 hour period of time. White blocks, show when links got less traffic. For the second plot, the darker blue represents when the site is most active, which we calculate based on number of clicks on Bitly links coming from these social platforms.
Twitter
For Twitter, posting in the afternoon earlier in the week is your best chance at achieving a high click count (1-3pm Monday through Thursday). Posting after 8pm should be avoided. Specifically, don’t bother posting after 3pm on a Friday since, as far as being a gateway to drive traffic to your content, it appears that Twitter doesn’t work on weekends.
The peaks of Twitter activity fall before the optimal time to post. The peak traffic times for Twitter are 9am through 3pm, Monday through Thursday. Posting on Twitter when there are many people clicking does help raise the average number of clicks, but it in no way guarantees an optimal amount of attention, since there is more competition for any individual’s attention. An optimal strategy must weigh the number of people paying attention against the number of other posts vying for that attention.
Facebook
Links posted from 1pm to 4pm result in the highest average click throughs. The peak time of the week was on Wednesday at 3pm. Links posted after 8pm and before 8am will have more difficulty achieving high amounts of attention. As with Twitter, avoid posting on the weekends.
Facebook traffic peeks mid-week, 1 to 3pm. While traffic starts to increase around 9am, one would be wise to wait to post until 11am. Traffic from Facebook fades after 4pm. Despite similar traffic counts at 8pm and 7pm, posting at 7pm will result in more clicks on average than posting at 8pm.
Tumblr
Tumblr likes to party! This network shows a drastically different pattern of usage from Facebook and Twitter. One should wait until at least 4pm to post. Also postings after 7pm on average receive more clicks over 24 hours than content posted mid-day during the week. Friday evening, a no-man’s land on other platforms, is an optimal time to post on Tumblr.
Bitly traffic from Tumblr peaks between 7pm and 10pm on Monday and Tuesday, with similar traffic on Sunday.
Conclusion
It’s easy to see that just like your neighborhood restaurants, each social network has its own culture and behavior patterns. By understanding the simple characteristics of each social network, you can publish your content at exactly the right time for it to reach the maximum number of people.
from: bitly blog
We track metrics like the main type of content being shared on a network, the geographic locations of the people sharing and viewing the content, and how the popularity of the network has risen and fallen compared to other networks. Studying the differences between these networks leads us to interesting insights, for example, did you know that the half-life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours?
Recently weʼve been exploring how content propagates (or “goes viral”) through social networks, particularly how the day and time something is posted affects the eventual amount of attention it will receive.
Note: All the plots are based on EST. You will see day of the week, starting with Monday, on the Y axis, and hour of the day, starting with midnight, along the X axis. For the first plot in each section, the darker the blue block, the more traffic on average links posted during that hour received in the following 24 hour period of time. White blocks, show when links got less traffic. For the second plot, the darker blue represents when the site is most active, which we calculate based on number of clicks on Bitly links coming from these social platforms.
For Twitter, posting in the afternoon earlier in the week is your best chance at achieving a high click count (1-3pm Monday through Thursday). Posting after 8pm should be avoided. Specifically, don’t bother posting after 3pm on a Friday since, as far as being a gateway to drive traffic to your content, it appears that Twitter doesn’t work on weekends.
The peaks of Twitter activity fall before the optimal time to post. The peak traffic times for Twitter are 9am through 3pm, Monday through Thursday. Posting on Twitter when there are many people clicking does help raise the average number of clicks, but it in no way guarantees an optimal amount of attention, since there is more competition for any individual’s attention. An optimal strategy must weigh the number of people paying attention against the number of other posts vying for that attention.
Links posted from 1pm to 4pm result in the highest average click throughs. The peak time of the week was on Wednesday at 3pm. Links posted after 8pm and before 8am will have more difficulty achieving high amounts of attention. As with Twitter, avoid posting on the weekends.
Facebook traffic peeks mid-week, 1 to 3pm. While traffic starts to increase around 9am, one would be wise to wait to post until 11am. Traffic from Facebook fades after 4pm. Despite similar traffic counts at 8pm and 7pm, posting at 7pm will result in more clicks on average than posting at 8pm.
Tumblr
Tumblr likes to party! This network shows a drastically different pattern of usage from Facebook and Twitter. One should wait until at least 4pm to post. Also postings after 7pm on average receive more clicks over 24 hours than content posted mid-day during the week. Friday evening, a no-man’s land on other platforms, is an optimal time to post on Tumblr.
Bitly traffic from Tumblr peaks between 7pm and 10pm on Monday and Tuesday, with similar traffic on Sunday.
Conclusion
It’s easy to see that just like your neighborhood restaurants, each social network has its own culture and behavior patterns. By understanding the simple characteristics of each social network, you can publish your content at exactly the right time for it to reach the maximum number of people.
from: bitly blog
Friday, October 5, 2012
Stranger, young adult novel with gay hero, acquired by publisher
Viking Penguin signs unchanged version of novel which ignited a row after a literary agent advised authors to 'straightwash'
by: Alison Flood
Yuki, the gay protagonist of a young adult novel whose authors were told to make him straight if they wished to find a publisher, has found a happy ending after Viking Penguin acquired the book he stars in – and allowed him to remain gay.
Last year the American novelists Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown unleashed a wave of support after they revealed that a major literary agent had agreed to take on their post-apocalyptic young adult novel Stranger – provided they make Yuki, a gay teen with a boyfriend, straight. "When you refuse to allow major characters in YA novels to be gay, you are telling gay teenagers that they are so utterly horrible that people like them can't even be allowed to exist in fiction," they said at the time.
But despite the unnamed agent's belief that a gay main character would put publishers off the novel, Viking, an imprint of Penguin, has just signed up Stranger and will publish in winter 2014. And Yuki, one of five main characters, is still gay. So are the supporting characters Brisa and Becky, a lesbian couple.
Brown said she was never tempted to "straightwash" Yuki to find a publisher because she and her co-author wanted the novel "to be about the people who are so often left out … Latinos and African-Americans, Jews and Asian-Americans, gay boys and lesbian girls, multiracial teenagers and teenagers with physical and mental disabilities".
"We noticed that while there are lots of excellent realistic books about the troubles and difficulties of being a minority, there was very little fun, escapist fiction about teenage wizards or vampires or mutants who aren't white and straight. And of what little there was, most had those characters as sidekicks to the straight white protagonist. So the many teens we knew who preferred fantasy almost never got to read about heroes like themselves," she said. "We didn't do this to fulfil some imaginary quota, but because we wanted to write about teenagers like the real ones we know, [and] making gay characters straight would have gone against the entire reason why we wrote the book in the first place."
Brown said that a number of her writer friends had revealed similar experiences, "with agents and editors, over non-white characters and over gay and lesbian characters and even disabled characters", and pointed to the author Malinda Lo's statistical analysis of all YA novels published in America over the last 40 years. "She found that less than 1% had any LGBTQ characters whatsoever, even in minor supporting roles," said Brown. "That confirmed our decision to go public. Whatever people believed about our own story, there was clearly a genuine issue at hand."
The author hopes that being honest about their experiences will have made a difference. "We are only two of a great many people trying to make a better, more just and inclusive world. I hope that we've contributed one small piece to a much larger movement... and that in the future, some bestseller about mutant or alien or gladiator teenagers will have its inevitable love triangle consist of a girl who must decide between the two girls who love her," she said.
by: Alison Flood
Yuki, the gay protagonist of a young adult novel whose authors were told to make him straight if they wished to find a publisher, has found a happy ending after Viking Penguin acquired the book he stars in – and allowed him to remain gay.
Last year the American novelists Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown unleashed a wave of support after they revealed that a major literary agent had agreed to take on their post-apocalyptic young adult novel Stranger – provided they make Yuki, a gay teen with a boyfriend, straight. "When you refuse to allow major characters in YA novels to be gay, you are telling gay teenagers that they are so utterly horrible that people like them can't even be allowed to exist in fiction," they said at the time.
But despite the unnamed agent's belief that a gay main character would put publishers off the novel, Viking, an imprint of Penguin, has just signed up Stranger and will publish in winter 2014. And Yuki, one of five main characters, is still gay. So are the supporting characters Brisa and Becky, a lesbian couple.
Brown said she was never tempted to "straightwash" Yuki to find a publisher because she and her co-author wanted the novel "to be about the people who are so often left out … Latinos and African-Americans, Jews and Asian-Americans, gay boys and lesbian girls, multiracial teenagers and teenagers with physical and mental disabilities".
"We noticed that while there are lots of excellent realistic books about the troubles and difficulties of being a minority, there was very little fun, escapist fiction about teenage wizards or vampires or mutants who aren't white and straight. And of what little there was, most had those characters as sidekicks to the straight white protagonist. So the many teens we knew who preferred fantasy almost never got to read about heroes like themselves," she said. "We didn't do this to fulfil some imaginary quota, but because we wanted to write about teenagers like the real ones we know, [and] making gay characters straight would have gone against the entire reason why we wrote the book in the first place."
Brown said that a number of her writer friends had revealed similar experiences, "with agents and editors, over non-white characters and over gay and lesbian characters and even disabled characters", and pointed to the author Malinda Lo's statistical analysis of all YA novels published in America over the last 40 years. "She found that less than 1% had any LGBTQ characters whatsoever, even in minor supporting roles," said Brown. "That confirmed our decision to go public. Whatever people believed about our own story, there was clearly a genuine issue at hand."
The author hopes that being honest about their experiences will have made a difference. "We are only two of a great many people trying to make a better, more just and inclusive world. I hope that we've contributed one small piece to a much larger movement... and that in the future, some bestseller about mutant or alien or gladiator teenagers will have its inevitable love triangle consist of a girl who must decide between the two girls who love her," she said.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Groovin’ To The Classics
Brace yourselves — officially licensed “Fifty Shades of Grey” products are about to hit shelves (including a version of the iconic necktie from Van Heusen).
EMI Music hosted a launch party in NYC for a classical music “soundtrack” on Monday, which uses the book’s cover art. It includes 15 classical pieces selected by E.L. James, the trilogy’s author (it should be safe even for those libraries who have shied away from stocking the books).
The VP of Classics at EMI predicts it will sell 15,000 copies in the first week.
from: EarlyWord
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Reader recommendations a growing business in the book world
Need help finding your next favorite title? With new works like 'Start Here' and 'Read This!,' bloggers and booksellers aim to ease the way.
by: Carolyn Kellogg
This summer Molly Ringwald said that she read "Fifty Shades of Grey" because "when a book becomes that big, I feel like it's culturally relevant."
No book in recent memory has sold as fast as the lead title of E.L. James' erotic trilogy. It enjoyed an avalanche of popularity: The more people were reading it, the more other people wanted to read it. But "Fifty Shades" is the exception: Today it's easier than ever to find something to read. But the right thing? That's another matter altogether.
Almost any book you could hope to buy is just a few clicks away online. When it launched in 1995, Amazon proclaimed it was the world's largest bookstore; the site makes it easy to find what you know you want. What it's not as good at is helping you discover the thing you don't know you want but might like.
The ideal place to find that something new has traditionally been a room with a lot of shelves, display tables and maybe some helpful staff — like bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Yet they've been disappearing; when Borders went bankrupt in 2011, its nearly 400 bookstores closed, and there are half as many independent bookstores now as there were 20 years ago.
Seeing an opening, bloggers and booksellers have converged on the idea of telling people what they should read.
Last month the group blog Book Riot used the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to raise $25,000 for a volume of book recommendations. "Start Here" will point readers to the best entry point for famous authors, on the assumption that everyone has a writer they'd like to read but find too daunting.
With an emphasis on accessibility, "Start Here" is tapping a mix of writers, critics and bloggers to provide its recommendations. Among them is Kevin Smokler, a publishing consultant and author. He believes that the best way to suggest a book is when "the recommender writes like a human being and lets their passion show, naked and uninhibited." For the anthology, Smokler is writing about Sherman Alexie's short-story collection "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven."
That book, first published in 1993, is easy to find online, as is "Water Flowing Home," Alexie's 24-page collection of poems printed in 1995, even though it's so rare that it costs $500 and more. Just about any title you could want — and thousands you might never think to ask for — are easily purchased online.
All that choice can be downright paralyzing. That's where booksellers come in; they are professionals who can find what you're looking for, even if you don't know what it is. Former bookseller John Warner, now an author and professor, regularly appears as the Biblioracle in the Chicago Tribune: Tell him the last five books you've read, and he promises to tell you your next favorite.
The new book "Read This!" (Coffeehouse Press, $12) compiles similar expertise of booksellers from all over the country into one cheerful red volume. It was edited by Hans Weyandt, co-owner of Micawber's Books in St. Paul, Minn., who began the project on the store's blog.
"Lately it's become en vogue to describe booksellers as 'tastemakers' or 'curators,'" Weyandt writes. "Our job is to constantly search through the new and old to find works that entertain and challenge us, and make us want to pass them on."
Expect to find it near the cash register at your local independent bookstore. Subtitled "Handpicked Favorites from America's Indie Bookstores," the book is packed with lists and lists of books. The lists are given context with short profiles of the bookstores they come from and notes from the bookseller who created them.
The lists are intimidating — so many! And they all come with checkboxes! — but they are both broad and deep. If you like Zadie Smith, Larry Doyle and Graham Greene, says Subterranean Books in St. Louis, you'll probably like "The Slap," a dark comedy by Christos Tsiolkas.
Novelist Ann Patchett has written the introduction to "Read This!," describing the book as a "catalogue of matchmakers." She's uniquely positioned to think about how books reach readers — not only is she a bestselling author ("State of Wonder," "Bel Canto"), she's the owner of Parnassus Books, a new independent bookstore in her Nashville hometown.
"I love it when a book I might not naturally gravitate to is brought to my attention," she says.
The nonfiction book "The Other Wes Moore" is an example of what Patchett whimsically calls "a Universal Donor. Pretty much everyone, men, women, young readers, non-readers, they're all going to find something in this book."
On the other hand, she continues, "My favorite books this year are the Patrick Melrose novels of Edward St. Aubyn. Those books are decisively NOT Universal Donors. They're about as universal as anchovies, but they are electrifying and utterly brilliant."
One of the great delights of visiting friends' houses is peeking at the anchovies on their bookshelves. For readers, a line of book spines can be a window into a new love, a portrait of where we've been, a means of semi-public self-definition — something rendered invisible by e-readers.
"My Ideal Bookshelf" (coming in November from Little, Brown, $24.99), a visually entrancing collection of illustrations, explores how we use books to represent us. It's an expansion of the work of artist Jane Mount, who has been doing a series of paintings based on the essential reading lists of clients. She and writer Thessaly La Force, who interviewed all the contributors, got lists of books from writers, chefs, designers, musicians and artists.
"I think your books always tell a story about you," says La Force, a former online editor at the Paris Review studying at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. "They're a way to touch on ideas and thoughts that aren't your own but are essential to you. A lot of people would put books on shelves they hadn't read or were by someone who had touched their lives."
The "Ideal Bookshelf" images hold some surprises. Yes, chef Thomas Keller has a lot of books about French cooking, but he's also got one by the late UCLA basketball Coach John Wooden — because it's about teamwork, he says.
Judd Apatow includes Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes" because after Owen Wilson recommended it to him, it inspired him to begin reading again. Pop culture writer Chuck Klosterman's ideal bookshelf features the unexpected, massive Warren Commission report on the Kennedy assassination.
"There's an endless feeling of searching for something," says La Force. "You kind of are what you read — and what you're interested in reading becomes what you are."
from: LA Times
by: Carolyn Kellogg
This summer Molly Ringwald said that she read "Fifty Shades of Grey" because "when a book becomes that big, I feel like it's culturally relevant."
No book in recent memory has sold as fast as the lead title of E.L. James' erotic trilogy. It enjoyed an avalanche of popularity: The more people were reading it, the more other people wanted to read it. But "Fifty Shades" is the exception: Today it's easier than ever to find something to read. But the right thing? That's another matter altogether.
Almost any book you could hope to buy is just a few clicks away online. When it launched in 1995, Amazon proclaimed it was the world's largest bookstore; the site makes it easy to find what you know you want. What it's not as good at is helping you discover the thing you don't know you want but might like.
The ideal place to find that something new has traditionally been a room with a lot of shelves, display tables and maybe some helpful staff — like bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Yet they've been disappearing; when Borders went bankrupt in 2011, its nearly 400 bookstores closed, and there are half as many independent bookstores now as there were 20 years ago.
Seeing an opening, bloggers and booksellers have converged on the idea of telling people what they should read.
Last month the group blog Book Riot used the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to raise $25,000 for a volume of book recommendations. "Start Here" will point readers to the best entry point for famous authors, on the assumption that everyone has a writer they'd like to read but find too daunting.
With an emphasis on accessibility, "Start Here" is tapping a mix of writers, critics and bloggers to provide its recommendations. Among them is Kevin Smokler, a publishing consultant and author. He believes that the best way to suggest a book is when "the recommender writes like a human being and lets their passion show, naked and uninhibited." For the anthology, Smokler is writing about Sherman Alexie's short-story collection "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven."
That book, first published in 1993, is easy to find online, as is "Water Flowing Home," Alexie's 24-page collection of poems printed in 1995, even though it's so rare that it costs $500 and more. Just about any title you could want — and thousands you might never think to ask for — are easily purchased online.
All that choice can be downright paralyzing. That's where booksellers come in; they are professionals who can find what you're looking for, even if you don't know what it is. Former bookseller John Warner, now an author and professor, regularly appears as the Biblioracle in the Chicago Tribune: Tell him the last five books you've read, and he promises to tell you your next favorite.
The new book "Read This!" (Coffeehouse Press, $12) compiles similar expertise of booksellers from all over the country into one cheerful red volume. It was edited by Hans Weyandt, co-owner of Micawber's Books in St. Paul, Minn., who began the project on the store's blog.
"Lately it's become en vogue to describe booksellers as 'tastemakers' or 'curators,'" Weyandt writes. "Our job is to constantly search through the new and old to find works that entertain and challenge us, and make us want to pass them on."
Expect to find it near the cash register at your local independent bookstore. Subtitled "Handpicked Favorites from America's Indie Bookstores," the book is packed with lists and lists of books. The lists are given context with short profiles of the bookstores they come from and notes from the bookseller who created them.
The lists are intimidating — so many! And they all come with checkboxes! — but they are both broad and deep. If you like Zadie Smith, Larry Doyle and Graham Greene, says Subterranean Books in St. Louis, you'll probably like "The Slap," a dark comedy by Christos Tsiolkas.
Novelist Ann Patchett has written the introduction to "Read This!," describing the book as a "catalogue of matchmakers." She's uniquely positioned to think about how books reach readers — not only is she a bestselling author ("State of Wonder," "Bel Canto"), she's the owner of Parnassus Books, a new independent bookstore in her Nashville hometown.
"I love it when a book I might not naturally gravitate to is brought to my attention," she says.
The nonfiction book "The Other Wes Moore" is an example of what Patchett whimsically calls "a Universal Donor. Pretty much everyone, men, women, young readers, non-readers, they're all going to find something in this book."
On the other hand, she continues, "My favorite books this year are the Patrick Melrose novels of Edward St. Aubyn. Those books are decisively NOT Universal Donors. They're about as universal as anchovies, but they are electrifying and utterly brilliant."
One of the great delights of visiting friends' houses is peeking at the anchovies on their bookshelves. For readers, a line of book spines can be a window into a new love, a portrait of where we've been, a means of semi-public self-definition — something rendered invisible by e-readers.
"My Ideal Bookshelf" (coming in November from Little, Brown, $24.99), a visually entrancing collection of illustrations, explores how we use books to represent us. It's an expansion of the work of artist Jane Mount, who has been doing a series of paintings based on the essential reading lists of clients. She and writer Thessaly La Force, who interviewed all the contributors, got lists of books from writers, chefs, designers, musicians and artists.
"I think your books always tell a story about you," says La Force, a former online editor at the Paris Review studying at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. "They're a way to touch on ideas and thoughts that aren't your own but are essential to you. A lot of people would put books on shelves they hadn't read or were by someone who had touched their lives."
The "Ideal Bookshelf" images hold some surprises. Yes, chef Thomas Keller has a lot of books about French cooking, but he's also got one by the late UCLA basketball Coach John Wooden — because it's about teamwork, he says.
Judd Apatow includes Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes" because after Owen Wilson recommended it to him, it inspired him to begin reading again. Pop culture writer Chuck Klosterman's ideal bookshelf features the unexpected, massive Warren Commission report on the Kennedy assassination.
"There's an endless feeling of searching for something," says La Force. "You kind of are what you read — and what you're interested in reading becomes what you are."
from: LA Times
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