by: David Vinjamuri
Libraries and big six publishers are at war over eBooks: how much they should cost, how they can be lent and who owns them. If you don’t use your public library and assume that this doesn’t affect you, you’re wrong.
In a society where bookstores disappear every day while the number of books available to read has swelled exponentially, libraries will play an ever more crucial role. Even more than in the past, we will depend on libraries of the future to help discover and curate great books. Libraries are already transforming themselves around the country to create more symbiotic relationships with their communities, with book clubs and as work and meeting spaces for local citizens.
For publishers, the library will be the showroom of the future. Ensuring that libraries have continuing access to published titles gives them a chance to meet this role, but an important obstacle remains: how eBooks are obtained by libraries.
This column is the first in a two-part series about libraries and their role in the marketing and readership of books. This first part addresses the present conflict. The second part will look forward to the future for libraries and publishers and the important challenges that they must address.
The solution to the current pricing problem lies in understanding that the argument publishers and libraries are having is the wrong argument. It is based on the paradigm of the printed book and as such presents a series of intractable challenges for both publishers and libraries. By changing the model for pricing an eBook, both parties could find a clear and equitable resolution to the current impasse.
The Issue
Do libraries increase book sales or cannibalize them? This is the issue at the heart of the struggle between libraries represented by the American Library Association (whose president is Maureen Sullivan) and the Big Six publishers.
The current struggle is taking place in a landscape that will be familiar to those who followed the travails of the music industry over the last decade. Publishing is changing dramatically as it tries to cope with the rise of eBooks and the increasing power of Amazon, the decline of bookstores and a flood of low-priced indie titles. In spite of the good year that Random House is experiencing (anticipating a merger with Penguin and just having paid employees a $5,000 bonus each thanks to the success of once-indie author EL James’ Fifty Shades trilogy), most publishers have found it difficult to maintain sales and profitability in the current environment. Whether they’re doomed or not is debatable, but no mainstream publisher is comfortable in the current environment.
The landscape is also shifting for libraries. The Information Age has posed numerous challenges to the public library, as Steve Coffman adroitly chronicles in “The Decline and Fall of the Library Empire.” Libraries have struggled to understand their role in communities as technology has changed. In addition to encouraging children to read and lending books, they have migrated from providing access to online databases to cataloging the web then providing computer terminals and now broadband access as the needs of the citizenry for information has changed. The shift in reading towards eBooks presents a particular problem for them because it’s happening with startling rapidity and presents significant technological challenges.
In addition to the central issue of pricing, libraries are struggling with the copyright implications of eBooks, their role as curators and promoters of reading in an age where publishing is exploding, dealing with technology intermediaries and gaining access to the newly available wealth of self-published works.
The Library Perspective
The central issue for libraries is simple: they believe that withholding eBooks from libraries entirely, pricing them higher or limiting lends all undermine the library’s core mission. Robin Nesbit, of the Columbus (OH) Metropolitan Library System told me that although her eBook circulation of 500,000 lends annually is only 3 percent of the system’s total, that number is growing by more than 200% a year. “Plus it’s at least 10% of our budget.” Between the cost of eBooks and a technology component, providing access to eBooks is three times as expensive for her as physical books.
This pricing pressure is significant and it’s being felt across the country. Jamie LaRue, Director of the Douglas County Libraries in Colorado told me that,
I saw a decrease in use that was hard to explain because our libraries are busy. Then I looked at our inventory and realized that the problem is that as we shift our dollars to eBooks, I am buying fewer items because the prices are so much higher.
The challenge to libraries is not insignificant. Four of the six publishers are not providing eBooks to libraries at any price. The other two – Random House and HarperCollins lead the industry with two different models. Random House adjusted eBook pricing in 2012. While the prices on some books were lowered, the most popular titles increased in price – some dramatically. Author Justin Cronin’s post-apocalyptic bestseller “The Twelve” whose print edition costs the Douglas County Libraries $15.51 from Baker & Taylor and whose eBook is priced at $9.99 on Amazon was priced at $84 to Douglas County on October 31st.
HarperCollins meanwhile has adopted a different model, selling eBooks to libraries at consumer prices but electronically limiting them to 26 lends and then requiring that the book be repurchased. Robin Nesbitt sees this as fairer to libraries, but she points out that it’s still much more expensive than print books, “I get forty to fifty lends from a bestseller in library binding. But at least they’re playing.”
And that’s the bigger problem. As detailed below, the rest of the Big Six aren’t playing – at least not nationally. That’s a big warning sign for libraries, as fully 80% of lends – and an important part of their traffic – comes from bestsellers. While it seems likely that most of the other publishers will eventually play, the terms may be worse than those offered by Random House and HarperCollins.
The Publisher Perspective
Publishers worry that library eBooks will hurt their eBook sales. They have less friction than physical books. When they speak of friction, publishers mean that borrowers don’t hold eBooks late, they arrive instantly for the next patron in line, they never wear out and they don’t even require a trip to the library. To some extent, publishers may also see eBooks as a way to improve a situation that they were never really happy with: unrestricted lending of retail-priced books (more on this later).
I talked to Skip Dye, the VP of Academic & Library sales and marketing for Random House. Dye seemed genuinely supportive of the mission of public libraries and very sophisticated in his desire to use research to determine the amount of friction that actually exists in library systems. He said that the Random House is “format agnostic” but acknowledged that,
We went through and looked at our pricing and wanted to make sure that the right value conversation was happening between our library patrons and us. Some titles went up as much as 200%, some went down in price.
Dye and others who work for big publishers and deal with eBooks have another challenge that library directors do not: layers of management that already believe that eBooks may kill large publishing houses and view their growth as more of a threat than an opportunity. A big part of the problem is data – there’s a paucity of it. Dye has reviewed the Pew Report on library usage extensively to inform pricing decisions. But if the institutional bias among publishers is to see eBooks as more threat than opportunity, title and library-specific data will be needed to prove that either friction or cannibalization are less than expected in order to justify consumer pricing for libraries.
Where the Big Six Publishers Stand Today:
Random House – Sells eBooks to libraries through multiple distributors. Prices were adjusted in 2012. Although some prices were lowered, the distributor price to libraries for some popular titles such as 50 Shades Of Grey range up to $84 for a single eBook copy – over 8 times the price of the eBook on Amazon.
HarperCollins - Sells eBooks to libraries through multiple distributors. On some popular titles it has restricted eBook usage to 26 “lends” after which the library must repurchase the book.
Penguin – Penguin (slated to merge with Random House) is conducting a test of eBook sales to libraries (through a single distributor, 3M) with the New York Public Library system. eBooks will become available six months after their publication date. While pricing will be similar to physical books, the books will only be available to the library for one year, after which they will need to be repurchased.
Hachette – Only sells older eBooks to libraries (through the distributor Overdrive). Hachette increased prices for these older eBooks by an average of 220% in October.
Macmillan – Does not currently sell eBooks to libraries. Macmillan has announced a test of eBook sales to libraries but not announced details.
Simon & Schuster – Simon and Schuster does not yet sell ebooks to libraries. According to Carolyn Reidy, CEO, “We have not yet found a business model that makes us happy. That’s why we’re not in it.”
Evaluating the Arguments
“In the absence of data people say either what they fear will be true or hope what will be true.” – Robert Wolven, Columbia University Libraries
Publishers make three basic arguments for either raising prices on eBooks or limiting their distribution:
•eBooks Don’t Wear Out – This argument is overstated. The libraries I spoke to said that print bestsellers see more than 26 lends over their lifetime, up to 50 or more before the book would need to be retired.
•eBooks Lend More Frequently – Publishers may not have checked out a popular book from their library recently. After signing up on a list, a patron gets a call when the book becomes available and if she doesn’t get to the library that same day someone else on the list may get the book. At the end of her rental period she will also get a call if the book is not returned precisely on time. The librarians I spoke with said that a book in high demand would spend very few days in limbo. This may account for one or two additional eBook lends over the course of a year, but not more.
•You Can Borrow eBooks Without Visiting The Library – Here the publishers have a more valid argument. The removal of the need to visit the library could attract an entirely different consumer to borrow eBooks. In a survey conducted by the ALA and Overdrive, 31% of eBook library borrowers say that they “rarely or never” visit the physical library. While 36% said that they had purchased a book after borrowing the same title from the library, over half said that they’d consider purchasing an eBook from an online retailer if it was not available from a library. While libraries are very customer-service oriented, it’s not clear to me why they would want to disintermediate themselves from the lending transaction. Borrowers will be more reluctant to visit the library but that necessary visit gives the library the opportunity to promote a variety of other services.
Libraries have three counter-arguments to publisher concerns:
•Libraries Also Buy Duds – Libraries have a valid point when they suggest that all the margin analysis done by publishers on their most valuable books ignores the fact that libraries buy thousands of titles each year which see few or no lends. Unlike physical booksellers, they do not pulp or return these titles. Unlike Amazon, they have to pay the publisher when they purchase the title, not just when they lend it out to their readers. As customers, libraries feel that their risk profile has not been adequately appreciated by publishers.
•Libraries Stimulate Sales– This is partly true. The libraries point to data I’ve already quoted showing that a significant number of readers go on to buy books they’ve borrowed. I’ve examined the data and it suggests two things.
•Bestsellers Probably Do Cannibalize: Though survey research is notoriously poor at predicting actual purchase behavior, the ALA/Overdrive study shows that over half of e-borrowers might consider buy a bestseller they couldn’t find at a library. Even if this number is smaller in practice, libraries probably don’t increase sales for books already on the bestseller lists.
•Libraries Help New Authors and Older Titles: Most Big Six publishers are hopelessly unsophisticated with pricing. They perversely discount bestsellers and end up charging a higher price for new and unknown authors. By removing the price hurdle to full-book sampling, libraries can help these authors build following and word-of-mouth sales.
•Libraries Deserve Big Customer Pricing – This argument is true but irrelevant under current law. Libraries assert that although they are smaller than Amazon, Barnes & Noble and distributors like Ingram, they are still big customers. They deserve lower prices than individual consumers rather than higher prices. The problem is that this is an argument that assumes that libraries own what they buy. It’s true for physical books – which is why libraries receive preferential pricing to ordinary consumers. But it is not true for eBooks. Libraries license eBooks rather than buying them. Thus, libraries are treated like resellers rather than end users.
The Real Problem – Both Sides Are Having the Wrong Argument
The argument between libraries and publishers has proven so difficult to resolve for a simple reason: both sides are using a faulty paradigm in their negotiations. They are treating eBooks like physical property, not software. This compels them to create difficult and complicated schemes for reproducing the ownership experience. But the data to determine an equitable price to sell eBooks to libraries in this scenario are almost impossible to collect. So the sides remain deadlock and guided by their own pre-existing beliefs rather than fact. The simple fact is this:
eBooks are Licensed, not Sold
Physical books are sold to libraries under the First Sale Doctrine, established under the Supreme Court ruling in Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Strauss in 1908. In this case a publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, sued Macy’s when they violated the publisher’s copyright (and a collusive industry pricing practice) by pricing a book eleven cents under the publisher-mandated retail price of one dollar. The court ruled that certain aspects of copyright do not survive the first sale: in particular, the owner after the first sale may resell or lend the book for any price. (Caleb Crain writes a much better summary of the law and its current implications than I can in his blog Steamboats are Ruining Everything) It is this First Sale doctrine that allows bookstores to discount and libraries to lend.
Under current law, though, eBooks are not books – not under copyright law, at least. Instead, they’re sold under a use license, just like software. This issue gets a little complex because the pricing rights of the copyright holder are not absolute – as the Justice Department has recently established – but they do currently include the right to treat libraries as resellers rather than a buyers. While I believe that libraries should promote a test case to challenge this law, the law will not change soon. In the meantime, though, thinking of eBooks as software points to a simpler, and surprising more equitable way to settle the current publisher dispute.
Solution: Charge Libraries Per Lend Based on Cost-per-Circ
There is one number that libraries can easily calculate which publishers will understand: the cost-per-circulation. This number is simple to calculate. It is the number of lends and divided by the cost of the books lent. This number is somewhere in the 50 cent to $1.00 range according to both publishers and libraries. It can be calculated separately by publisher and even split between bestsellers and older titles.
Even though libraries might naturally fear this, the per-use model has huge advantages to both libraries and publishers under the current copyright law.
Advantages to Publishers:
Measurability – Cost per circ is easily calculated. It requires no assumptions about borrower behavior. Calculating it requires only data that the least sophisticated library system already collects.
Flexibility – The ability to discount doesn’t disappear the moment a book is sold. Although libraries are not historically price sensitive, pricing becomes a valid tool for publishers as they manage the lifecycle of a book.
Equity – Publisher’s stated goal is to control the sale and avoid cannibalization. This model assures equity with current physical book sales.
Advantages to Libraries
Better Access – Every library could have instant access to every title sold by every publisher.
Lower Risk – Libraries would spend a fraction of their current cost for titles that attract few borrowers but still be able to catalogue them.
Better Financial Control – Libraries can make intelligent decisions about how to use limited resources. Rather than trying to predict borrower behavior they can react to it.
Fairness – Digital books would not increase the current cost per circ for the library.
Big Six publishers and libraries recognize that eBooks present new and difficult issues to each party. For better or worse, Big Six publishers are unlikely to adopt a pricing model for eBooks that mirrors how print books are sold to libraries. But current pricing and lending restrictions unfairly penalize libraries to the detriment of publishers and readers. A system based on actual use would more fairly allocate cost and risk as long as eBooks are not governed by the First Sale doctrine.
NOTE: This article is part 1 of a two-part series. The second part will focus on the future of libraries. The next part will cover concerns with technology, small publishers and self-published authors and how the publishing industry and libraries can symbiotically grow together.
from: Forbes
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Liz Mohn, the woman behind Penguin Random House
Liz Mohn, the woman behind media giant Bertelsmann, talks about the future of Penguin Random House - just don't ask her about Suzanne Mubarak, says Sophie Hardach.
by: Sophie Hardach
Liz Mohn is a quiet type of media tycoon. Her company, Bertelsmann, recently merged its publishing arm, Random House, with Penguin to form the world’s largest books publisher. It’s the German media giant’s first major deal since Mohn took over after her husband’s death in 2009, and has set off a flurry of speculation about the future of publishing. Some are simply relieved that Penguin has not ended up in the hands of Rupert Murdoch. Others fear that Bertelsmann, the conglomerate behind The X Factor, Fifty Shades of Grey and brash broadcaster RTL, will squash Penguin’s literary heritage. And then there are those who simply don’t like the thought of progressive Penguin marrying into a German company that for decades lied about its Nazi past.
In her first public comment on the merger, Mohn, who controls Bertelsmann together with her children, argued that authors will benefit from being part of a bigger group.
“Books do mean a lot to me: Bertelsmann grew big on books, and I myself grew up with them,” Mohn told me. “We will continue to publish books for a mass public as well as works for smaller readerships. The planned combination will give authors from all genres even more publishing options for the success of their books.”
Such options include ebooks, which Mohn believes will “coexist comfortably” with printed books rather than lead to their downfall. She also emphasised that each imprint would make its decisions independently. And Random House is not exactly a literary lightweight: Haruki Murakami, John Irving and Ian McEwan are among its authors.
However, encouraging independent decision-making is not quite the same as having a range of independent publishers. On a recent New York Times bestseller list, 11 out of 15 titles were published by an imprint belonging to either Penguin or Random House. Agents often try to raise an author’s advance through a bidding war, but why would imprints owned by the same group bid against each other?
Competition authorities may yet object to the merger. Murdoch himself has publicly challenged authors and agents to protest. After his own plans for Penguin were foiled, he turned to mocking Bertelsmann’s provincial home in northern Germany with the fury of a tycoon scorned: “Penguin headquarters to shift from exciting London to err Gutersloh, not far from Harsewinkel,” he sneered on Twitter.
The insult may have been lost on Mohn. At 71, she takes pride in her small-town origins and modest upbringing. Patience and quiet resilience have in fact been key ingredients in her rise from teenage secretary to global tycoon.
Liz Mohn, née Elisabeth Beckmann, was born during a Second World War air raid. Her mother was a milliner; her father became unfit for work after being hit by lightning. She left school at 14 and her prospects in life seemed dull – until she got a job as a secretary at Bertelsmann, where she met Bertelsmann heir Reinhard Mohn during a game of musical chairs at the company’s annual party.
She was a devout Catholic girl of 17 and not even allowed to go out alone at night. He was in his late thirties – and married with three children.
“Fate had brought us together, but in the late 1950s divorce was out of the question,” Liz Mohn writes in her memoir, Key Moments. In 1963, she became pregnant with their first child, Brigitte. To avoid a scandal, she married Joachim Scholz, a children’s books editor at Bertelsmann. She and Reinhard Mohn continued their relationship and went on to have two more children, Christoph and Andreas. Andreas has previously said that he thought Scholz was his real father until he was twelve, even though the editor slept in the cellar.
“Reinhard Mohn tried to spend as much time as he could with us, but the chance of our having a life together was slim,” Liz Mohn writes in her memoir, adding that Mohn would send her a letter every day during that time.
The two did not marry until 1982, having divorced their first spouses. Reinhard Mohn recognised Brigitte, Christoph and Andreas as his children and prepared them for roles in the Bertelsmann empire. None of the three children from his first marriage now holds a top position at the company.
“We were a family formed by the written word,” Andreas Mohn, who lives in Gütersloh, told me in a phone interview. When Andreas was about fourteen, Reinhard began taking him and his siblings on family trips to book fairs in Frankfurt and Jerusalem, where they would be introduced to authors and watch their father give speeches. At Christmas, Liz and Reinhard would read to them; on holidays, Reinhard would pore over catalogues and pick books for the Bertelsmann book club.
“You have certain skills when you’ve grown up with that, you delight in books and literature,” added Andreas Mohn.
Whether those skills are in fact sufficient to steer a global company has been the question at the heart of Bertelsmann since Reinhard Mohn’s death. It’s a question that will partly decide the future course of Penguin Random House. Mohn himself was a fifth-generation owner, but he was wary of letting his children assume they could automatically take over. Liz Mohn, on the other hand, has reinforced the family’s grip.
She, her son Christoph and her daughter Brigitte are on the board of the Bertelsmann Verwaltungsgesellschaft, which controls all voting rights in the group. Christoph is also the chairman of Bertelsmann’s supervisory board. The Mohns own only about one-fifth of the group on paper, with the charitable Bertelsmann Foundation holding roughly four-fifths, but they effectively rule. No major decision can be taken without their consent, and the family has, for example, prevented Bertelsmann from listing on the stock market. Forbes magazine puts the family’s net worth at $3.5billion.
While Mohn’s reserve marks a contrast to the stereotypical loud tycoon, critics see her influence as problematic precisely because it is less visible, and therefore harder to attack. Take, for example, her role as vice-chair of the Bertelsmann Foundation. Thomas Schuler, a journalist who has written two books about Bertelsmann and the Mohns, argues that the foundation was originally set up by Reinhard Mohn to prevent the company being ripped apart by inheritance tax. Schuler questions whether it was appropriate for the Foundation to become involved in topics such as media regulation in the past, given that Bertelsmann owns the RTL group – Europe’s biggest private broadcaster.
“Now the Foundation is putting a lot of emphasis on education, and education is exactly the area where the company is trying to expand internationally. I don’t quite believe Bertelsmann’s claim that the two are completely unrelated, there’s always a sort of parallel development,” Schuler said in a phone interview.
Bertelsmann is reportedly considering a bid for Springer Science+Business Media, a publisher of scientific journals, as part of a global push into education.
“On my many trips to China and India I’ve noticed that there is a conspicuous thirst for education in these countries, especially among young people,” Liz Mohn said. “Education is the key to social participation – and reading is the key to education.”
This interest in educational projects has not always served her well. In 1995, the Bertelsmann Foundation helped open the Mubarak Public Library, Egypt’s first public library, in Giza. The Foundation’s partner for the project was Suzanne Mubarak, then Egypt’s first lady. The two women developed a cultural exchange programme. In a speech in 2004, Mohn praised “dear Suzanne” for defining reading as a “human right”.
“Neither glory nor vanity nor prestige have led you,” Mohn gushed, “But the will and responsibility to do something for your country and your people.”
Mohn did not mention in her speech that the contents of the Mubarak Library were censored. The library has now apparently been renamed as Misr Public Library, as Egyptians try to erase a family name tainted by corruption and misrule.
“The Bertelsmann Stiftung [Foundation] has for years sponsored a number of measures to promote literacy and reading,” Liz Mohn replied when asked about the library. “The one you mention is one of many, many such projects; and that particular collaboration ended several years ago.”
There is no mention of “dear Suzanne” in her memoir. On the website of the Bertelsmann Foundation, however, the Mubarak Library is still advertised as a project that contributed “to developing freedom of speech”.
It’s not the first time the family has been haunted by past alliances. In 2002, Bertelsmann admitted to having lied about its activities during the Nazi era. The company had for decades presented itself as a brave opponent of the Nazis, when it had in fact published anti-Semitic texts and profited from its ties to the regime.
Bertelsmann’s 53 per cent stake in Penguin Random House could intensify the spotlight on the Mohn family. The next big reshuffle is expected in four years’ time, when Liz Mohn will pick either Christoph or Brigitte to succeed her as family spokesperson. Neither is likely to rebel against her firm ideas of what the job entails.
“Bertelsmann has a unique corporate culture that extends to the aspect of social responsibility as well,” she wrote to me. “As the family spokesperson I consider it as one of my most important jobs to preserve and continually develop this culture.”
from: Telegraph
by: Sophie Hardach
 |
Liz Mohn, the woman behind media giant Bertelsmann: 'books mean a lot to me'. Photo: Luca Teuchmann/WireImage
|
In her first public comment on the merger, Mohn, who controls Bertelsmann together with her children, argued that authors will benefit from being part of a bigger group.
“Books do mean a lot to me: Bertelsmann grew big on books, and I myself grew up with them,” Mohn told me. “We will continue to publish books for a mass public as well as works for smaller readerships. The planned combination will give authors from all genres even more publishing options for the success of their books.”
Such options include ebooks, which Mohn believes will “coexist comfortably” with printed books rather than lead to their downfall. She also emphasised that each imprint would make its decisions independently. And Random House is not exactly a literary lightweight: Haruki Murakami, John Irving and Ian McEwan are among its authors.
However, encouraging independent decision-making is not quite the same as having a range of independent publishers. On a recent New York Times bestseller list, 11 out of 15 titles were published by an imprint belonging to either Penguin or Random House. Agents often try to raise an author’s advance through a bidding war, but why would imprints owned by the same group bid against each other?
Competition authorities may yet object to the merger. Murdoch himself has publicly challenged authors and agents to protest. After his own plans for Penguin were foiled, he turned to mocking Bertelsmann’s provincial home in northern Germany with the fury of a tycoon scorned: “Penguin headquarters to shift from exciting London to err Gutersloh, not far from Harsewinkel,” he sneered on Twitter.
The insult may have been lost on Mohn. At 71, she takes pride in her small-town origins and modest upbringing. Patience and quiet resilience have in fact been key ingredients in her rise from teenage secretary to global tycoon.
Liz Mohn, née Elisabeth Beckmann, was born during a Second World War air raid. Her mother was a milliner; her father became unfit for work after being hit by lightning. She left school at 14 and her prospects in life seemed dull – until she got a job as a secretary at Bertelsmann, where she met Bertelsmann heir Reinhard Mohn during a game of musical chairs at the company’s annual party.
She was a devout Catholic girl of 17 and not even allowed to go out alone at night. He was in his late thirties – and married with three children.
“Fate had brought us together, but in the late 1950s divorce was out of the question,” Liz Mohn writes in her memoir, Key Moments. In 1963, she became pregnant with their first child, Brigitte. To avoid a scandal, she married Joachim Scholz, a children’s books editor at Bertelsmann. She and Reinhard Mohn continued their relationship and went on to have two more children, Christoph and Andreas. Andreas has previously said that he thought Scholz was his real father until he was twelve, even though the editor slept in the cellar.
“Reinhard Mohn tried to spend as much time as he could with us, but the chance of our having a life together was slim,” Liz Mohn writes in her memoir, adding that Mohn would send her a letter every day during that time.
The two did not marry until 1982, having divorced their first spouses. Reinhard Mohn recognised Brigitte, Christoph and Andreas as his children and prepared them for roles in the Bertelsmann empire. None of the three children from his first marriage now holds a top position at the company.
“We were a family formed by the written word,” Andreas Mohn, who lives in Gütersloh, told me in a phone interview. When Andreas was about fourteen, Reinhard began taking him and his siblings on family trips to book fairs in Frankfurt and Jerusalem, where they would be introduced to authors and watch their father give speeches. At Christmas, Liz and Reinhard would read to them; on holidays, Reinhard would pore over catalogues and pick books for the Bertelsmann book club.
“You have certain skills when you’ve grown up with that, you delight in books and literature,” added Andreas Mohn.
Whether those skills are in fact sufficient to steer a global company has been the question at the heart of Bertelsmann since Reinhard Mohn’s death. It’s a question that will partly decide the future course of Penguin Random House. Mohn himself was a fifth-generation owner, but he was wary of letting his children assume they could automatically take over. Liz Mohn, on the other hand, has reinforced the family’s grip.
She, her son Christoph and her daughter Brigitte are on the board of the Bertelsmann Verwaltungsgesellschaft, which controls all voting rights in the group. Christoph is also the chairman of Bertelsmann’s supervisory board. The Mohns own only about one-fifth of the group on paper, with the charitable Bertelsmann Foundation holding roughly four-fifths, but they effectively rule. No major decision can be taken without their consent, and the family has, for example, prevented Bertelsmann from listing on the stock market. Forbes magazine puts the family’s net worth at $3.5billion.
While Mohn’s reserve marks a contrast to the stereotypical loud tycoon, critics see her influence as problematic precisely because it is less visible, and therefore harder to attack. Take, for example, her role as vice-chair of the Bertelsmann Foundation. Thomas Schuler, a journalist who has written two books about Bertelsmann and the Mohns, argues that the foundation was originally set up by Reinhard Mohn to prevent the company being ripped apart by inheritance tax. Schuler questions whether it was appropriate for the Foundation to become involved in topics such as media regulation in the past, given that Bertelsmann owns the RTL group – Europe’s biggest private broadcaster.
“Now the Foundation is putting a lot of emphasis on education, and education is exactly the area where the company is trying to expand internationally. I don’t quite believe Bertelsmann’s claim that the two are completely unrelated, there’s always a sort of parallel development,” Schuler said in a phone interview.
Bertelsmann is reportedly considering a bid for Springer Science+Business Media, a publisher of scientific journals, as part of a global push into education.
“On my many trips to China and India I’ve noticed that there is a conspicuous thirst for education in these countries, especially among young people,” Liz Mohn said. “Education is the key to social participation – and reading is the key to education.”
This interest in educational projects has not always served her well. In 1995, the Bertelsmann Foundation helped open the Mubarak Public Library, Egypt’s first public library, in Giza. The Foundation’s partner for the project was Suzanne Mubarak, then Egypt’s first lady. The two women developed a cultural exchange programme. In a speech in 2004, Mohn praised “dear Suzanne” for defining reading as a “human right”.
“Neither glory nor vanity nor prestige have led you,” Mohn gushed, “But the will and responsibility to do something for your country and your people.”
Mohn did not mention in her speech that the contents of the Mubarak Library were censored. The library has now apparently been renamed as Misr Public Library, as Egyptians try to erase a family name tainted by corruption and misrule.
“The Bertelsmann Stiftung [Foundation] has for years sponsored a number of measures to promote literacy and reading,” Liz Mohn replied when asked about the library. “The one you mention is one of many, many such projects; and that particular collaboration ended several years ago.”
There is no mention of “dear Suzanne” in her memoir. On the website of the Bertelsmann Foundation, however, the Mubarak Library is still advertised as a project that contributed “to developing freedom of speech”.
It’s not the first time the family has been haunted by past alliances. In 2002, Bertelsmann admitted to having lied about its activities during the Nazi era. The company had for decades presented itself as a brave opponent of the Nazis, when it had in fact published anti-Semitic texts and profited from its ties to the regime.
Bertelsmann’s 53 per cent stake in Penguin Random House could intensify the spotlight on the Mohn family. The next big reshuffle is expected in four years’ time, when Liz Mohn will pick either Christoph or Brigitte to succeed her as family spokesperson. Neither is likely to rebel against her firm ideas of what the job entails.
“Bertelsmann has a unique corporate culture that extends to the aspect of social responsibility as well,” she wrote to me. “As the family spokesperson I consider it as one of my most important jobs to preserve and continually develop this culture.”
from: Telegraph
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Illustrator Proposes Marriage in His Children's Book Debut
by: Alexis Burling
There are as many ways to propose marriage as there are people who do it, from proclamations of love lit up on Jumbotrons to diamond rings stashed in whipped cream. For literary types, what could be more appropriate than popping the question in a book? Debut illustrator Sam Zuppardi did just that on the acknowledgments page of Gordon McAlphine’s Misadventures of Edgar and Allan Poe: The Tell-Tale Start, due out in January from Viking.
“Jade has been such a massive support all through the process of my starting to illustrate for children,” Zuppardi says of Jade Amers, his girlfriend of five years. “So putting something [for] her in this book felt really appropriate. Making it into an outright proposal was like one of those happy, light-bulb moments.”
But unlike many other such schemes, this one couldn’t be accomplished alone. Zuppardi had to enlist an army of helpers: his agent, Kelly Sonnack; his editor, Sharyn November; and author Gordon McAlpine were his key co-conspirators.
By mid-November, finished copies had arrived, and Zuppardi had his proposal tool. Now all he had to do was stay calm until the right moment. That, and buy a ring. “I waited for the book to arrive first before getting it,” he says. “I also needed the maximum 30 days’ warranty time in case she didn’t like it.”
After two weeks of anticipation and speculation, the email that his team of supporters was awaiting finally arrived, on December 3. (Drumroll, please.) Zuppardi wrote that the day before, he had taken Jade to Castle Howard, a picturesque countryside estate 40 minutes outside of York, England, where they live. On a bench overlooking a lake, he gave her the book – he says he had to point out the proposal specifically – got down on one knee, and produced the ring. Happily, she said yes.
“It was just a really nice romantic surprise,” Amers tells PW. “Unexpected, special, and unique.”
Zuppardi, naturally, is over the moon – and very grateful for the assistance. “Kelly, Gordon, Sharyn, and the team at Viking – it couldn’t have happened without them,” he says. “It was a magical day, as well as being a massive relief to finally be able to share the longest secret I’ve ever kept!”
In addition to his pending nuptials, Zuppardi has another milestone on the horizon. His debut picture book, The Nowhere Box, is scheduled to be published by Candlewick in fall 2013.
 |
| Illustrator Sam Zuppardi (r.) proposed to his girlfriend, Jade Amers, on the acknowledgments page of his children's book debut. |
“Jade has been such a massive support all through the process of my starting to illustrate for children,” Zuppardi says of Jade Amers, his girlfriend of five years. “So putting something [for] her in this book felt really appropriate. Making it into an outright proposal was like one of those happy, light-bulb moments.”
But unlike many other such schemes, this one couldn’t be accomplished alone. Zuppardi had to enlist an army of helpers: his agent, Kelly Sonnack; his editor, Sharyn November; and author Gordon McAlpine were his key co-conspirators.
Zuppardi hatched his plan this past May. After much deliberation, the proposal was tucked into the acknowledgements in the back of the book rather than showcased in the dedication at the front. “I thought it’d be nicer if it was kind of sneaky,” November recalls. “I also made the decision not to put it in the galleys. My feeling was, if you’re going to propose to your girlfriend this way, you’ve got to do it right.... You do it in the finished book.”
By mid-November, finished copies had arrived, and Zuppardi had his proposal tool. Now all he had to do was stay calm until the right moment. That, and buy a ring. “I waited for the book to arrive first before getting it,” he says. “I also needed the maximum 30 days’ warranty time in case she didn’t like it.”
After two weeks of anticipation and speculation, the email that his team of supporters was awaiting finally arrived, on December 3. (Drumroll, please.) Zuppardi wrote that the day before, he had taken Jade to Castle Howard, a picturesque countryside estate 40 minutes outside of York, England, where they live. On a bench overlooking a lake, he gave her the book – he says he had to point out the proposal specifically – got down on one knee, and produced the ring. Happily, she said yes.
“It was just a really nice romantic surprise,” Amers tells PW. “Unexpected, special, and unique.”
Zuppardi, naturally, is over the moon – and very grateful for the assistance. “Kelly, Gordon, Sharyn, and the team at Viking – it couldn’t have happened without them,” he says. “It was a magical day, as well as being a massive relief to finally be able to share the longest secret I’ve ever kept!”
In addition to his pending nuptials, Zuppardi has another milestone on the horizon. His debut picture book, The Nowhere Box, is scheduled to be published by Candlewick in fall 2013.
 |
| Zuppardi's proposal appeared at the back of Misadventures of Edgar and Allan Poe: The Tell-Tale Start. |
from: Publisher's Weekly
Monday, December 17, 2012
Rival to Booker Prize secures sponsorship
The new award will award its first prize in March 2014
by: Felicity Capon
The Literature Prize, set up as a rival to the Man Booker, has secured a sponsor.
The sponsor’s identity has not yet been announced, although the £40,000 prize will adopt the sponsor’s name when it is revealed in February 2013.
The first prize will consider books published between January and December 2013 and will be awarded in March 2014. It aims "to put great literature at the centre of people's lives".
The new award, set up by agent Andrew Kidd, will differ to the Booker, as there will be no restriction on a writer's country of origin. As the organisers say, “the sole criterion will be excellence”.
Kidd commented: "As with all book prizes, our main aim is to get more good books into the hands of readers, so we are delighted to have the opportunity to make that happen. The prize’s international scope, its openness to all forms of fiction, will I hope make for an exciting and surprising selection of books, and frankly I’m now just impatient to get started.”
The new prize was originally born out of controversy. It was announced less than a week before the 2011 Booker winner was decided, after the organisers of the new award accused the 2011 Booker judges of putting “readability over artistic achievement” in their judging criteria.
The chair of the 2011 Booker judging panel, Dame Stella Rimington, declared of the 2011 shortlist that she wanted people “to buy these books and read them, not buy them and admire them”. Kidd rejected this emphasis on "readability", intending the new award to "establish a clear and uncompromising standard of excellence."
"There's nothing wrong with readability, but not all writing sets out to do that. Some writers aspire to do something finer,” Kidd said.
The 2011 Booker shortlist was the fastest selling since records began and was defended by many as being a list that attracted new readers. One of the authors shortlisted, Stephen Kelman, commented “I think if they are bemoaning the fact there are some books here that actually have plots and are page-turners, then they’re barking up the wrong tree.”
The five judges of the new award will be drawn from a body of writers, critics and academics from the world of literature.
The award will be awarded annually for any work of fiction written in the English language and published in the UK.
from: Telegraph
by: Felicity Capon
The Literature Prize, set up as a rival to the Man Booker, has secured a sponsor.
The sponsor’s identity has not yet been announced, although the £40,000 prize will adopt the sponsor’s name when it is revealed in February 2013.
The first prize will consider books published between January and December 2013 and will be awarded in March 2014. It aims "to put great literature at the centre of people's lives".
The new award, set up by agent Andrew Kidd, will differ to the Booker, as there will be no restriction on a writer's country of origin. As the organisers say, “the sole criterion will be excellence”.
Kidd commented: "As with all book prizes, our main aim is to get more good books into the hands of readers, so we are delighted to have the opportunity to make that happen. The prize’s international scope, its openness to all forms of fiction, will I hope make for an exciting and surprising selection of books, and frankly I’m now just impatient to get started.”
The new prize was originally born out of controversy. It was announced less than a week before the 2011 Booker winner was decided, after the organisers of the new award accused the 2011 Booker judges of putting “readability over artistic achievement” in their judging criteria.
The chair of the 2011 Booker judging panel, Dame Stella Rimington, declared of the 2011 shortlist that she wanted people “to buy these books and read them, not buy them and admire them”. Kidd rejected this emphasis on "readability", intending the new award to "establish a clear and uncompromising standard of excellence."
"There's nothing wrong with readability, but not all writing sets out to do that. Some writers aspire to do something finer,” Kidd said.
The 2011 Booker shortlist was the fastest selling since records began and was defended by many as being a list that attracted new readers. One of the authors shortlisted, Stephen Kelman, commented “I think if they are bemoaning the fact there are some books here that actually have plots and are page-turners, then they’re barking up the wrong tree.”
The five judges of the new award will be drawn from a body of writers, critics and academics from the world of literature.
The award will be awarded annually for any work of fiction written in the English language and published in the UK.
from: Telegraph
Friday, December 14, 2012
Ten things you never knew about Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol
Find out about Dickens’s boozy breakfasts and the prototype for Scrooge in actor Clive Francis’s story of A Christmas Carol, a seasonal masterpiece.
by: Clive Francis
1 The great historian Thomas Carlyle went straight out and bought himself a turkey after reading Dickens’s tale of the redemption of Scrooge. Novelist William Thackeray, not always an admirer of Dickens, called A Christmas Carol a “national benefit”; one American entrepreneur gave his employees an extra day’s holiday. Publication had been a huge success, selling in excess of 6,000 copies. Dickens had began writing his “little Christmas book”, as he called it, in October 1843 and worked on it feverishly for six weeks, finishing it at the end of November, just in time for Christmas.
2 As he wrote, Dickens wept and laughed and wept again and would often take long night walks through London, covering anywhere between 15 or 20 miles “when all sober folks had gone to bed”. When he completed the book, he “broke out”, as he himself described it, “like a madman”.
3 The story is loosely based on Gabriel Grubb, a character in The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton, which appeared in Dickens’ first published novel, The Pickwick Papers. In the story, a gravedigger determined not to make merry at Christmas, is kidnapped by goblins and convinced to change his ways.
4 Two months after the publication of A Christmas Carol, Parley’s Illuminated Library pirated it. Dickens sued and won his case. The pirates, on the other hand, simply declared themselves bankrupt, leaving Dickens to pay £700 in costs, equal to £56,364 today.
5 Within six weeks of its publication, the book hit the London stage in an adaptation by Edward Stirling, which ran for more than 40 nights before transferring to New York’s Park Theatre. Also in the same city, a musical version was staged which was hampered badly on opening night, when brawling broke out, drowning out the bass drum that ushered Marley’s ghost as he rose through a trapdoor.
6 In 1853, 10 years after its publication, Charles Dickens gave the first public performance in Birmingham’s town hall. He performed it in front of a rapturous crowd of 2,000, all working people from the town, and it lasted just under three hours. Before this time, no great author had performed their works in public and for profit, which many thought beneath Dickens’ calling as a writer and a gentleman.
7 On performance days Dickens stuck to a rather bizarre routine. He had two tablespoons of rum flavoured with fresh cream for breakfast, a pint of champagne for tea and, half an hour before the start of his performance, would drink a raw egg beaten into a tumbler of sherry. During the five-minute interval, he invariably consumed a quick cup of beef tea, and always retired to bed with a bowl of soup.
8 He always presented himself to his audience in full evening dress, with a bright buttonhole, a purple waistcoat and a glittering watch-chain. His stage equipment consisted of a reading desk, carpet, gas lights and a pair of large screens behind him to help project his voice forward.
9 Without a single prop or bit of costume, Dickens peopled his stage with a throng of characters, it is said, “like an entire theatre company… under one hat”. The arrival of Scrooge always created a sensation; Dickens became an old man with a shrewd, grating voice whose face was drawn into his collar like an ageing turtle. During the Fezziwigs’ party, his fingers would dance along the reading table in a mad array of little hops and pirouettes. It is reported that the audience “fell into a kind of trance, as a universal feeling of joy seemed to invade the whole assembly”.
10 Dickens began with A Christmas Carol, and he ended with it. His last reading of the little book took place in London at St James’s Hall, on March 15, 1870. At the end of the performance, he told his audience: “From these garish lights, I vanish now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and affectionate farewell.” There was a stunned silence, broken by a tumult of cheering, hat-waving and the stamping of feet. With tears streaming down his face, Dickens raised his hands to his lips in an affectionate kiss and departed from the platform for ever. He died three months later, aged 58.
from: Telegraph
by: Clive Francis
1 The great historian Thomas Carlyle went straight out and bought himself a turkey after reading Dickens’s tale of the redemption of Scrooge. Novelist William Thackeray, not always an admirer of Dickens, called A Christmas Carol a “national benefit”; one American entrepreneur gave his employees an extra day’s holiday. Publication had been a huge success, selling in excess of 6,000 copies. Dickens had began writing his “little Christmas book”, as he called it, in October 1843 and worked on it feverishly for six weeks, finishing it at the end of November, just in time for Christmas.
2 As he wrote, Dickens wept and laughed and wept again and would often take long night walks through London, covering anywhere between 15 or 20 miles “when all sober folks had gone to bed”. When he completed the book, he “broke out”, as he himself described it, “like a madman”.
3 The story is loosely based on Gabriel Grubb, a character in The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton, which appeared in Dickens’ first published novel, The Pickwick Papers. In the story, a gravedigger determined not to make merry at Christmas, is kidnapped by goblins and convinced to change his ways.
4 Two months after the publication of A Christmas Carol, Parley’s Illuminated Library pirated it. Dickens sued and won his case. The pirates, on the other hand, simply declared themselves bankrupt, leaving Dickens to pay £700 in costs, equal to £56,364 today.
5 Within six weeks of its publication, the book hit the London stage in an adaptation by Edward Stirling, which ran for more than 40 nights before transferring to New York’s Park Theatre. Also in the same city, a musical version was staged which was hampered badly on opening night, when brawling broke out, drowning out the bass drum that ushered Marley’s ghost as he rose through a trapdoor.
6 In 1853, 10 years after its publication, Charles Dickens gave the first public performance in Birmingham’s town hall. He performed it in front of a rapturous crowd of 2,000, all working people from the town, and it lasted just under three hours. Before this time, no great author had performed their works in public and for profit, which many thought beneath Dickens’ calling as a writer and a gentleman.
7 On performance days Dickens stuck to a rather bizarre routine. He had two tablespoons of rum flavoured with fresh cream for breakfast, a pint of champagne for tea and, half an hour before the start of his performance, would drink a raw egg beaten into a tumbler of sherry. During the five-minute interval, he invariably consumed a quick cup of beef tea, and always retired to bed with a bowl of soup.
8 He always presented himself to his audience in full evening dress, with a bright buttonhole, a purple waistcoat and a glittering watch-chain. His stage equipment consisted of a reading desk, carpet, gas lights and a pair of large screens behind him to help project his voice forward.
9 Without a single prop or bit of costume, Dickens peopled his stage with a throng of characters, it is said, “like an entire theatre company… under one hat”. The arrival of Scrooge always created a sensation; Dickens became an old man with a shrewd, grating voice whose face was drawn into his collar like an ageing turtle. During the Fezziwigs’ party, his fingers would dance along the reading table in a mad array of little hops and pirouettes. It is reported that the audience “fell into a kind of trance, as a universal feeling of joy seemed to invade the whole assembly”.
10 Dickens began with A Christmas Carol, and he ended with it. His last reading of the little book took place in London at St James’s Hall, on March 15, 1870. At the end of the performance, he told his audience: “From these garish lights, I vanish now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and affectionate farewell.” There was a stunned silence, broken by a tumult of cheering, hat-waving and the stamping of feet. With tears streaming down his face, Dickens raised his hands to his lips in an affectionate kiss and departed from the platform for ever. He died three months later, aged 58.
from: Telegraph
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Lend eBooks To Your Friends With Ownshelf
by: Dianna Dilworth
Want to lend a copy of a book you love to your friend, but you only bought the eBook? Check out Ownshelf, a new service that will let you share ePUB titles with your friends across devices. The tool, which is currently in beta, lets you show friends your digital book shelves and look at your friends’ bookshelves, and borrow and loan titles from these digital bookshelves.
You can access the tool through Facebook. Like other apps, you have to give Facebook apps to login in. Using the shelf you can upload ePUB titles for lending to a select group of your personal friends. (It is not clear if you can only lend your digital copy to one person at a time, as with other eBook lending tools). Then you can see which of your friends is using Ownshelf and you can browse the digital books that they have uploaded.
Rick Marazzani, the founder of the startup, explained the idea of the new service to VentureBeat: ”Books have always been very personal. We own and cherish books and show them off in our homes on shelves next to family pictures. The bookshelf in the home is how we learn about our friends, get book recommendations, and borrow books our friends endorse. Ownshelf takes the bookshelf digital to browse, share, and get recommendations online.”
Barnes & Noble and Amazon also have tools to let you lend your eBooks out to friends.
from: GalleyCat
Want to lend a copy of a book you love to your friend, but you only bought the eBook? Check out Ownshelf, a new service that will let you share ePUB titles with your friends across devices. The tool, which is currently in beta, lets you show friends your digital book shelves and look at your friends’ bookshelves, and borrow and loan titles from these digital bookshelves.
You can access the tool through Facebook. Like other apps, you have to give Facebook apps to login in. Using the shelf you can upload ePUB titles for lending to a select group of your personal friends. (It is not clear if you can only lend your digital copy to one person at a time, as with other eBook lending tools). Then you can see which of your friends is using Ownshelf and you can browse the digital books that they have uploaded.
Rick Marazzani, the founder of the startup, explained the idea of the new service to VentureBeat: ”Books have always been very personal. We own and cherish books and show them off in our homes on shelves next to family pictures. The bookshelf in the home is how we learn about our friends, get book recommendations, and borrow books our friends endorse. Ownshelf takes the bookshelf digital to browse, share, and get recommendations online.”
Barnes & Noble and Amazon also have tools to let you lend your eBooks out to friends.
from: GalleyCat
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Disaster victims 'need books as well as food'
Supported by dozens of celebrated authors, Libraries Without Borders calls for action to supply 'nourishment for the mind'
by: Alison Flood
Books and "nourishment for the mind" should be an essential part of the emergency relief effort when disasters such as the Haitian earthquake occur, according to a call for action signed by four Nobel laureates, Libraries Without Borders and dozens of authors.
Stressing that "absolute priority" during a catastrophe should be given to the "basic needs" of food, water, shelter and health, the signatories to the appeal, led by Libraries Without Borders, believe that "more attention should be given to nourishing the mind as a second measure to help victims cope with catastrophe and move forward". The Nobel literature laureates JM Coetzee, Doris Lessing and Toni Morrison have all put their names to the call for action, alongside Nobel peace laureate FW de Klerk and authors including Jeffrey Eugenides, Junot Díaz, Michael Cunningham, Joyce Carol Oates and the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat.
Patrick Weil, chairman of Libraries Without Borders, said that the first email the humanitarian organisation received following the Haitian earthquake in 2010 was a request for books to reopen a destroyed library. It went on to send an emergency mission to the country to help Haitian organisations distribute books and educational resources to those without homes.
"The first priority is life, but when life is secure, what can people do if they are staying in a camp? They cannot do anything, and they can become depressed," said Weil. "Once life is secured, books are essential. They're not the first priority, but the second … They are so important. They're the beginning of recovery, in terms of reconnecting with the rest of the world, and feeling like a human being again."
Despite this, UN guidelines on internal displacement do not include "nourishment of the mind" as a fundamental necessity in post-disaster zones, said Weil, and the call to action Libraries Without Borders has put together challenges the UN and other international organisations to change this.
"While numerous international guidelines for humanitarian assistance do affirm the importance of basic education within humanitarian settings, these guidelines should also include access to books and information as a priority for disaster victims," says the appeal, which calls on international organisations to "expand reading, cultural and educational programmes, which activate the human spirit and help individuals cope with trauma", and to "make the provision of access to information and books a priority for international humanitarian relief".
Other signatories include the authors Dave Eggers, Marie Darrieussecq, Amin Maalouf, Alain Mabanckou and Amélie Nothomb, and academics including Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy at Princeton University.
"I saw personally how much comfort books can bring to young people living in internally displaced camps and tent cities through my involvement with an organisation called Li, Li, Li! where Haitian teachers and artists, who were sometimes displaced themselves, read books to children in the camps. Though people were in a lot of pain and were suffering a great deal, they were able, for an hour or so, to find some comfort in the pages of a book," said Danticat. "I have great belief in the power of words, written or read, to help us begin healing. I have experienced it in my own life and I have also seen it in action."
Zachary Kaufman, chairman of the board of directors of the American Friends of the Public Library of Kigali, was "deeply involved" in building Rwanda's first-ever public library, and said that literacy and access to information were "critical … to countries recovering from conflict and other humanitarian crises".
"Unbiased resources help communities prevent or at least mitigate and recover from tragic events," said Kaufman. "Nourishing the mind is as important as nourishing the body in pursuing a path to progress and peace."
Todd Landman, professor of government and director of the institute for democracy and conflict resolution at the University of Essex, agreed. "People living under conditions of duress during times of humanitarian crises need as much access to books, knowledge and information as is humanly possible in order to provide hope, inspiration and the ability to thrive and survive," he said.
Oates called the issue "urgent", because "there can be no democracy without access to books and education – no culture without literature. Books are a crucial part of what makes us human, the most precious of our resources."
Anyone who wishes to add their voice to the campaign can sign up to it at www.urgencyofreading.org
from: Guardian
by: Alison Flood
 |
| People reach out to catch books, donated by the Cuban government, in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. Photograph: Ramon Espinosa/AP |
Stressing that "absolute priority" during a catastrophe should be given to the "basic needs" of food, water, shelter and health, the signatories to the appeal, led by Libraries Without Borders, believe that "more attention should be given to nourishing the mind as a second measure to help victims cope with catastrophe and move forward". The Nobel literature laureates JM Coetzee, Doris Lessing and Toni Morrison have all put their names to the call for action, alongside Nobel peace laureate FW de Klerk and authors including Jeffrey Eugenides, Junot Díaz, Michael Cunningham, Joyce Carol Oates and the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat.
Patrick Weil, chairman of Libraries Without Borders, said that the first email the humanitarian organisation received following the Haitian earthquake in 2010 was a request for books to reopen a destroyed library. It went on to send an emergency mission to the country to help Haitian organisations distribute books and educational resources to those without homes.
"The first priority is life, but when life is secure, what can people do if they are staying in a camp? They cannot do anything, and they can become depressed," said Weil. "Once life is secured, books are essential. They're not the first priority, but the second … They are so important. They're the beginning of recovery, in terms of reconnecting with the rest of the world, and feeling like a human being again."
Despite this, UN guidelines on internal displacement do not include "nourishment of the mind" as a fundamental necessity in post-disaster zones, said Weil, and the call to action Libraries Without Borders has put together challenges the UN and other international organisations to change this.
"While numerous international guidelines for humanitarian assistance do affirm the importance of basic education within humanitarian settings, these guidelines should also include access to books and information as a priority for disaster victims," says the appeal, which calls on international organisations to "expand reading, cultural and educational programmes, which activate the human spirit and help individuals cope with trauma", and to "make the provision of access to information and books a priority for international humanitarian relief".
Other signatories include the authors Dave Eggers, Marie Darrieussecq, Amin Maalouf, Alain Mabanckou and Amélie Nothomb, and academics including Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy at Princeton University.
"I saw personally how much comfort books can bring to young people living in internally displaced camps and tent cities through my involvement with an organisation called Li, Li, Li! where Haitian teachers and artists, who were sometimes displaced themselves, read books to children in the camps. Though people were in a lot of pain and were suffering a great deal, they were able, for an hour or so, to find some comfort in the pages of a book," said Danticat. "I have great belief in the power of words, written or read, to help us begin healing. I have experienced it in my own life and I have also seen it in action."
Zachary Kaufman, chairman of the board of directors of the American Friends of the Public Library of Kigali, was "deeply involved" in building Rwanda's first-ever public library, and said that literacy and access to information were "critical … to countries recovering from conflict and other humanitarian crises".
"Unbiased resources help communities prevent or at least mitigate and recover from tragic events," said Kaufman. "Nourishing the mind is as important as nourishing the body in pursuing a path to progress and peace."
Todd Landman, professor of government and director of the institute for democracy and conflict resolution at the University of Essex, agreed. "People living under conditions of duress during times of humanitarian crises need as much access to books, knowledge and information as is humanly possible in order to provide hope, inspiration and the ability to thrive and survive," he said.
Oates called the issue "urgent", because "there can be no democracy without access to books and education – no culture without literature. Books are a crucial part of what makes us human, the most precious of our resources."
Anyone who wishes to add their voice to the campaign can sign up to it at www.urgencyofreading.org
from: Guardian
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Who's Tracking Your Reading Habits? An E-Book Buyer's Guide to Privacy, 2012 Edition
by: Cindy Cohn and Parker Higgins
See the chart here
The holiday shopping season is upon us, and once again e-book readers promise to be a very popular gift. Last year's holiday season saw ownership of a dedicated e-reader device spike to nearly 1 in 5 Americans, and that number is poised to go even higher. But if you're in the market for an e-reader this year, or for e-books to read on one that you already own, you might want to know who's keeping an eye on your searching, shopping, and reading habits.
Unfortunately, unpacking the tracking and data-sharing practices of different e-reader platforms is far from simple. It can require reading through stacked license agreements and privacy policies for devices, software platforms, and e-book stores. That in turn can mean reading thousands of words of legalese before you read the first line of a new book.
As we've done since 2009, again we've taken some of the most popular e-book platforms and combed through their privacy policies for answers to common privacy questions that users deserve to know. In many cases, these answers were frustratingly vague and long-winded. In nearly all cases, reading e-books means giving up more privacy than browsing through a physical bookstore or library, or reading a paper book in your own home. Here, we've examined the policies of Google Books, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, Sony, Overdrive, Indiebound, Internet Archive, and Adobe Content Server for answers to the following questions:
•Can they keep track of searches for books?
•Can they monitor what you're reading and how you're reading it after purchase and link that information back to you? Can they do that when the e-book is obtained elsewhere?
•What compatibility does the device have with books not purchased from an associated eBook store?
•Do they keep a record of book purchases? Can they track book purchases or acquisitions made from other sources?
•With whom can they share the information collected in non-aggregated form?
•Do they have mechanisms for customers to access, correct, or delete the information?
•Can they share information outside the company without the customer's consent?
Click here or on the image below to see the 2012 chart.
from: Electronic Frontier Foundation
See the chart here
The holiday shopping season is upon us, and once again e-book readers promise to be a very popular gift. Last year's holiday season saw ownership of a dedicated e-reader device spike to nearly 1 in 5 Americans, and that number is poised to go even higher. But if you're in the market for an e-reader this year, or for e-books to read on one that you already own, you might want to know who's keeping an eye on your searching, shopping, and reading habits.
Unfortunately, unpacking the tracking and data-sharing practices of different e-reader platforms is far from simple. It can require reading through stacked license agreements and privacy policies for devices, software platforms, and e-book stores. That in turn can mean reading thousands of words of legalese before you read the first line of a new book.
As we've done since 2009, again we've taken some of the most popular e-book platforms and combed through their privacy policies for answers to common privacy questions that users deserve to know. In many cases, these answers were frustratingly vague and long-winded. In nearly all cases, reading e-books means giving up more privacy than browsing through a physical bookstore or library, or reading a paper book in your own home. Here, we've examined the policies of Google Books, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, Sony, Overdrive, Indiebound, Internet Archive, and Adobe Content Server for answers to the following questions:
•Can they keep track of searches for books?
•Can they monitor what you're reading and how you're reading it after purchase and link that information back to you? Can they do that when the e-book is obtained elsewhere?
•What compatibility does the device have with books not purchased from an associated eBook store?
•Do they keep a record of book purchases? Can they track book purchases or acquisitions made from other sources?
•With whom can they share the information collected in non-aggregated form?
•Do they have mechanisms for customers to access, correct, or delete the information?
•Can they share information outside the company without the customer's consent?
Click here or on the image below to see the 2012 chart.
from: Electronic Frontier Foundation
Monday, December 10, 2012
Librarians or Baristas?
by: Matthew Reisz
Large bright badges offering help to customers may have become a common sight in coffee shops.
But the wearing of them by librarians at the University of Oxford has been seen as the latest insult in a row over changes taking place among the dreaming spires' famous research collections.
Anger has been growing in the past few months over developments at the Bodleian Libraries that have led to vast humanities collections being rehoused, including the History Faculty Library being incorporated into the main collections. Matters came to a head last week with a discussion in Congregation -- Oxford's academic "parliament" -- about "the libraries and their future."
Sarah Thomas, Bodley's librarian, described how "since 2000 six new libraries have been constructed and 19 libraries have been merged into larger units." But Hugh Doherty, a fellow in history at Jesus College, Oxford, worried that current trends threatened to turn "a multiplicity of integrated libraries, specialized, browsable and staffed, into a series of flagship book depositories, clean, cheap and faceless."
Georgy Kantor, tutorial fellow in ancient history at St. John's College, Oxford, warned that "if we do not take care with how we're changing our libraries," the university risked their losing their "attractiveness."
Kate Tunstall, university lecturer in French, wanted to see "an end to any downgrading and dematerializing of the humanities in the libraries."
However, the changes are not without their supporters.
Frances Cairncross, rector of Exeter College, Oxford and a curator of the university libraries, said that before she started as a curator, the New Bodleian had been "a perilous firetrap," while "two million books were stored at huge expense in salt mines in Cheshire."
But away from the discussion, it is the suspicion that Oxford is being transformed by consumerism that seems to provoke the most ire.
Gill Evans, emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge and a regular user of Oxford's collections, noticed at the start of term that staff in the reading rooms with "embarrassed expressions" were sporting big yellow badges saying "ask me."
"They were issued with T-shirts too, though a fair few of those could be seen discreetly hung over the back of chairs."
But the library responded that the badges and T-shirts were not worn under duress and were designed to "enhance the visibility of staff" and aid "apprehensive" users. "We wanted to find a simple way to reduce that apprehension and encourage readers to seek assistance when needed," a spokeswoman said.
from: Times Higher Education
Large bright badges offering help to customers may have become a common sight in coffee shops.
But the wearing of them by librarians at the University of Oxford has been seen as the latest insult in a row over changes taking place among the dreaming spires' famous research collections.
Anger has been growing in the past few months over developments at the Bodleian Libraries that have led to vast humanities collections being rehoused, including the History Faculty Library being incorporated into the main collections. Matters came to a head last week with a discussion in Congregation -- Oxford's academic "parliament" -- about "the libraries and their future."
Sarah Thomas, Bodley's librarian, described how "since 2000 six new libraries have been constructed and 19 libraries have been merged into larger units." But Hugh Doherty, a fellow in history at Jesus College, Oxford, worried that current trends threatened to turn "a multiplicity of integrated libraries, specialized, browsable and staffed, into a series of flagship book depositories, clean, cheap and faceless."
Georgy Kantor, tutorial fellow in ancient history at St. John's College, Oxford, warned that "if we do not take care with how we're changing our libraries," the university risked their losing their "attractiveness."
Kate Tunstall, university lecturer in French, wanted to see "an end to any downgrading and dematerializing of the humanities in the libraries."
However, the changes are not without their supporters.
Frances Cairncross, rector of Exeter College, Oxford and a curator of the university libraries, said that before she started as a curator, the New Bodleian had been "a perilous firetrap," while "two million books were stored at huge expense in salt mines in Cheshire."
But away from the discussion, it is the suspicion that Oxford is being transformed by consumerism that seems to provoke the most ire.
Gill Evans, emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge and a regular user of Oxford's collections, noticed at the start of term that staff in the reading rooms with "embarrassed expressions" were sporting big yellow badges saying "ask me."
"They were issued with T-shirts too, though a fair few of those could be seen discreetly hung over the back of chairs."
But the library responded that the badges and T-shirts were not worn under duress and were designed to "enhance the visibility of staff" and aid "apprehensive" users. "We wanted to find a simple way to reduce that apprehension and encourage readers to seek assistance when needed," a spokeswoman said.
from: Times Higher Education
Friday, December 7, 2012
Bookmobile drives home the love of reading
by: Brian Babcock
The Santa Clara County Library wants to reach its patrons no matter where they live.
And a new, smaller and upgraded bookmobile will help them do just that, library staff has said.
"There is a long history of bookmobile service in this district," said county librarian Nancy Howe. "The county library district covers a large geographical area, and we use the bookmobile to extend the reach of service to residents that either live far away from one of our eight locations or have limited mobility.
"The bookmobile staff provide personal library service to some of our most isolated residents."
The county library serves residents in Campbell, Cupertino, Gilroy, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Milpitas, Monte Sereno, Morgan Hill, Saratoga and unincorporated areas of Santa Clara County. More than 360,000 people have a county library card.
But not everyone who lives in the area can make it to the library. And that's where the bookmobile comes in.
The idea is that the bookmobile brings the library to its patrons, instead of the other way around. And it has almost everything a library does: books (including new titles), DVDs, magazines, books on CD and even a librarian. Patrons can even put books on hold and pick them up at the bookmobile when it visits their cities.
The first county bookmobile was purchased in 1953. The newest bookmobile replaces a 20-year-old vehicle that was bigger and tougher to navigate
some of the windy and steep roads in places like Mt. Hamilton and the Santa Cruz mountains.
The new bookmobile has three solar panels on the roof, which generate enough power to run the lights and computers, eliminating the need to use the generator at each stop. It also has a fan on the roof and skylights, which will help with light and cooling, and a wheelchair lift entrance.
"Our current strategic measurable goal is to have the highest percentage of district residents with active library cards," Howe said. "Underlying this measure is the belief that library services are at the heart of a community, supporting lifelong learning, cultural enrichment and transforming lives."
The county library has been making a concerted effort to reach out to Monte Sereno residents, parking the bookmobile at city hall every other Friday. And since Monte Sereno residents pay taxes to the county library, bookmobile librarian Karen Apland said the library should do all it can to serve them.
"They pay us, so we want to give them as much of an opportunity to use us as possible," Apland said. "We want to bring the bookmobile to them as much as we can. We want to serve them."
And at least one Monte Sereno resident appreciates it.
Beverly McCleve said she's been to see the bookmobile during one of its stops in the city and expects to use it in the future.
"It's very handy," McCleve said. "It's nice to know that it comes every two weeks. It's a good schedule. It's great that I can pick something up at one of the libraries and drop it off at the bookmobile."
For more information on the bookmobile, visit sccl.org/bookmobile.
from: Mercury News
The Santa Clara County Library wants to reach its patrons no matter where they live.
And a new, smaller and upgraded bookmobile will help them do just that, library staff has said.
"There is a long history of bookmobile service in this district," said county librarian Nancy Howe. "The county library district covers a large geographical area, and we use the bookmobile to extend the reach of service to residents that either live far away from one of our eight locations or have limited mobility.
"The bookmobile staff provide personal library service to some of our most isolated residents."
The county library serves residents in Campbell, Cupertino, Gilroy, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Milpitas, Monte Sereno, Morgan Hill, Saratoga and unincorporated areas of Santa Clara County. More than 360,000 people have a county library card.
But not everyone who lives in the area can make it to the library. And that's where the bookmobile comes in.
The idea is that the bookmobile brings the library to its patrons, instead of the other way around. And it has almost everything a library does: books (including new titles), DVDs, magazines, books on CD and even a librarian. Patrons can even put books on hold and pick them up at the bookmobile when it visits their cities.
The first county bookmobile was purchased in 1953. The newest bookmobile replaces a 20-year-old vehicle that was bigger and tougher to navigate
some of the windy and steep roads in places like Mt. Hamilton and the Santa Cruz mountains.
The new bookmobile has three solar panels on the roof, which generate enough power to run the lights and computers, eliminating the need to use the generator at each stop. It also has a fan on the roof and skylights, which will help with light and cooling, and a wheelchair lift entrance.
"Our current strategic measurable goal is to have the highest percentage of district residents with active library cards," Howe said. "Underlying this measure is the belief that library services are at the heart of a community, supporting lifelong learning, cultural enrichment and transforming lives."
The county library has been making a concerted effort to reach out to Monte Sereno residents, parking the bookmobile at city hall every other Friday. And since Monte Sereno residents pay taxes to the county library, bookmobile librarian Karen Apland said the library should do all it can to serve them.
"They pay us, so we want to give them as much of an opportunity to use us as possible," Apland said. "We want to bring the bookmobile to them as much as we can. We want to serve them."
And at least one Monte Sereno resident appreciates it.
Beverly McCleve said she's been to see the bookmobile during one of its stops in the city and expects to use it in the future.
"It's very handy," McCleve said. "It's nice to know that it comes every two weeks. It's a good schedule. It's great that I can pick something up at one of the libraries and drop it off at the bookmobile."
For more information on the bookmobile, visit sccl.org/bookmobile.
from: Mercury News
Thursday, December 6, 2012
In Soviet Russia, Book Reads You
The creepiness of software that monitors students’ e-reading.
by: Evgeny Morozov
There are good reasons to be excited about the immense potential of digital technologies to help spread knowledge. For instance, “massive open online courses” (or MOOCs) have rightly been the center of much media attention. Thanks to for-profit ventures like Coursera and Udacity and nonprofit initiatives like edX (a collaboration of Harvard and MIT that now also includes the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Texas), thousands of lectures have become available at no cost—and soon, some students might even be able to get academic credit.
The learning experience it delivers may not match the thrill of being in the classroom with a virtuoso instructor but, in the absence of other options in much of the developing world, this is good enough. MOOCs look so appealing because they add heaps of curated content to the millions of YouTube clips and lecture texts that already circulate online but in a mostly chaotic manner. They take away the risk of watching a professor on YouTube only to discover that he is a disreputable crank. But to focus on the content alone would be to miss the other, less obvious side to the ongoing digitization of formal education: The very infrastructure of learning is changing as well—and in ways that are less unambiguously positive.
Take a company like CourseSmart, an undisputed leader when it comes to the provision of textbooks and other course materials in the digital form. Founded in 2007 by several giants of textbook publishing (including such heavyweights as Pearson and McGraw-Hill Education), CourseSmart provides more than 20,000 textbooks in electronic format (roughly 90 percent of all textbooks published in North America). The textbooks can be read on computers, tablets, and smartphones, in both online and offline modes. The company has global ambitions as well: It has recently announced expansion into the Middle East and North Africa.
In early November, the company unveiled its latest innovation—an online tracking system called CourseSmart Analytics. Since its textbooks are digital, CourseSmart can track how much time each student spends with each page of the book, what chapters they skip, what passages give them trouble, and so forth. By aggregating this information, the company produces an “engagement score” for each student, which is then communicated to the teacher. So far, Villanova University, Rasmussen College, and Texas A&M University at San Antonio have signed on to take part in the experiment. Their enthusiasm for this scheme makes sense: It might help teachers identify difficult material in the textbooks so they can be sure to go over it in class. The system's next version will also feature a special dashboard so publishers can see student interaction with their textbooks, which would help them present material in a more accessible manner.
But there's also something eerie about this scheme. Imagine a literature class in which students are assigned to read about George Orwell's 1984 using electronic textbooks that spy on them as they read. Or consider a history class in which students use such “smart” textbooks to learn about the history of surveillance in the Soviet Union. Students who were pretending to learn the tenets of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union—along with the teachers who were pretending to teach them—may have been violating some of their school's policies, but it's hard to fault them for being ”unengaged.”
Such perversity aside, it's important to ask how the very existence of such self-monitoring textbooks would affect the development of students' critical thinking, even if it succeeds in dealing with their laziness. Being “critical” also means learning how to discriminate between different texts and, occasionally, swimming against the intellectual currents of the time and refusing to read the assigned texts. Not everyone can be a maverick and publicly live up to one's reluctance to read an obnoxious text—sometimes, resistance is passive and less heroic.
Other students may already know the material and have no need to read the entire chapter. Their engagement score, predictably, would be low, but it would say nothing about their knowledge. Besides, once engagement scores are incorporated into learning assessments schemes by school administrators and government authorities, there would be strong incentives to game the system—perhaps, simply by having students flip the electronic pages as often as possible (unless students' eye movements are monitored). This would raise the engagement scores but, once again, tell us nothing about the quality of education. Whatever might be ailing our schools today, it's probably not the lack of quantified goals and targets.
The problem with CourseSmart's engagement score is that it subjects learning to the logic of gamification, getting students to read not because they are motivated to explore a given subject but because it will help them bolster their score. Granted, the very process of grading already introduces some of those very gamification incentives. But engagement scores, disconnected from the actual knowledge and measuring only how often this knowledge is accessed, might amplify the most utilitarian and competitive aspects of modern education. Would students be as keen to read a paper book if it doesn't reflect positively on their engagement score?
It's also easy to imagine quite a few governments—and especially those in countries like Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe—wanting to know what sections of history books students find particularly boring or exciting. Will authoritarian governments get dashboards of their own, like publishers and teachers do? Will students with low engagement scores on key events of the national history be invited to talk with the local equivalent of the KGB?
But even in democratic countries, it's important to investigate what happens with all the data generated by students: all those clicks, page flips, and underlinings. This data may seem trivial but once merged with other data—say, their Facebook friends or their Google searchers—it suddenly becomes very valuable to advertisers and potential employers. This goes back to the threat of electronic textbooks—or, rather, the infrastructure through which they are provided—fostering more conformity. If there's a small chance that your reading habits might one day be reflected in your overall “online” file—the one that employers will look at after interviewing you for an entry-level position—the odds are that students will think twice about reading something subversive or not reading something conventional.
And this doesn't just apply to companies like CourseSmart that handle the purely virtual electronic textbook end of the chain. It applies—even more so—to the likes of Amazon and Apple, which manufacture the gadgets on which such textbooks are accessed and often sell the books themselves. These big technology firms also affect not just what students learn but how they learn it. Amazon, for example, has recently launched a new platform called Whispercast, which allows schools that use its Kindle e-reader in the classroom to limit or turn off their functionality. Thus, they can block access to social networking sites or to the Internet altogether. They are even able to disable Kindle features that they find distracting.
All of this might prove useful in the short term, but it seems that students—the supposed beneficiaries of the “digital revolution”—might be getting shortchanged by the revolutionary rhetoric. The era when students can look up anything they wanted on their tablet or e-reader—say, an unknown word or a historical figure—may be over before it has even begun in earnest.
This may help solve the distraction problem—undoubtedly, a big plus. But it might also inhibit the development of highly interactive, mixed ways of learning that could, when properly used, satisfy—and even expand—the insatiable curiosity of the most promising but difficult students. Highly monitored electronic textbooks and heavily controlled e-readers are unlikely to give us another Einstein.
This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.
from: Slate
by: Evgeny Morozov
 |
| Students use iPads during an English class in 2011 Photo by Lex Van Lieshout/AFP/Getty Images |
The learning experience it delivers may not match the thrill of being in the classroom with a virtuoso instructor but, in the absence of other options in much of the developing world, this is good enough. MOOCs look so appealing because they add heaps of curated content to the millions of YouTube clips and lecture texts that already circulate online but in a mostly chaotic manner. They take away the risk of watching a professor on YouTube only to discover that he is a disreputable crank. But to focus on the content alone would be to miss the other, less obvious side to the ongoing digitization of formal education: The very infrastructure of learning is changing as well—and in ways that are less unambiguously positive.
Take a company like CourseSmart, an undisputed leader when it comes to the provision of textbooks and other course materials in the digital form. Founded in 2007 by several giants of textbook publishing (including such heavyweights as Pearson and McGraw-Hill Education), CourseSmart provides more than 20,000 textbooks in electronic format (roughly 90 percent of all textbooks published in North America). The textbooks can be read on computers, tablets, and smartphones, in both online and offline modes. The company has global ambitions as well: It has recently announced expansion into the Middle East and North Africa.
In early November, the company unveiled its latest innovation—an online tracking system called CourseSmart Analytics. Since its textbooks are digital, CourseSmart can track how much time each student spends with each page of the book, what chapters they skip, what passages give them trouble, and so forth. By aggregating this information, the company produces an “engagement score” for each student, which is then communicated to the teacher. So far, Villanova University, Rasmussen College, and Texas A&M University at San Antonio have signed on to take part in the experiment. Their enthusiasm for this scheme makes sense: It might help teachers identify difficult material in the textbooks so they can be sure to go over it in class. The system's next version will also feature a special dashboard so publishers can see student interaction with their textbooks, which would help them present material in a more accessible manner.
But there's also something eerie about this scheme. Imagine a literature class in which students are assigned to read about George Orwell's 1984 using electronic textbooks that spy on them as they read. Or consider a history class in which students use such “smart” textbooks to learn about the history of surveillance in the Soviet Union. Students who were pretending to learn the tenets of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union—along with the teachers who were pretending to teach them—may have been violating some of their school's policies, but it's hard to fault them for being ”unengaged.”
Such perversity aside, it's important to ask how the very existence of such self-monitoring textbooks would affect the development of students' critical thinking, even if it succeeds in dealing with their laziness. Being “critical” also means learning how to discriminate between different texts and, occasionally, swimming against the intellectual currents of the time and refusing to read the assigned texts. Not everyone can be a maverick and publicly live up to one's reluctance to read an obnoxious text—sometimes, resistance is passive and less heroic.
Other students may already know the material and have no need to read the entire chapter. Their engagement score, predictably, would be low, but it would say nothing about their knowledge. Besides, once engagement scores are incorporated into learning assessments schemes by school administrators and government authorities, there would be strong incentives to game the system—perhaps, simply by having students flip the electronic pages as often as possible (unless students' eye movements are monitored). This would raise the engagement scores but, once again, tell us nothing about the quality of education. Whatever might be ailing our schools today, it's probably not the lack of quantified goals and targets.
The problem with CourseSmart's engagement score is that it subjects learning to the logic of gamification, getting students to read not because they are motivated to explore a given subject but because it will help them bolster their score. Granted, the very process of grading already introduces some of those very gamification incentives. But engagement scores, disconnected from the actual knowledge and measuring only how often this knowledge is accessed, might amplify the most utilitarian and competitive aspects of modern education. Would students be as keen to read a paper book if it doesn't reflect positively on their engagement score?
It's also easy to imagine quite a few governments—and especially those in countries like Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe—wanting to know what sections of history books students find particularly boring or exciting. Will authoritarian governments get dashboards of their own, like publishers and teachers do? Will students with low engagement scores on key events of the national history be invited to talk with the local equivalent of the KGB?
But even in democratic countries, it's important to investigate what happens with all the data generated by students: all those clicks, page flips, and underlinings. This data may seem trivial but once merged with other data—say, their Facebook friends or their Google searchers—it suddenly becomes very valuable to advertisers and potential employers. This goes back to the threat of electronic textbooks—or, rather, the infrastructure through which they are provided—fostering more conformity. If there's a small chance that your reading habits might one day be reflected in your overall “online” file—the one that employers will look at after interviewing you for an entry-level position—the odds are that students will think twice about reading something subversive or not reading something conventional.
And this doesn't just apply to companies like CourseSmart that handle the purely virtual electronic textbook end of the chain. It applies—even more so—to the likes of Amazon and Apple, which manufacture the gadgets on which such textbooks are accessed and often sell the books themselves. These big technology firms also affect not just what students learn but how they learn it. Amazon, for example, has recently launched a new platform called Whispercast, which allows schools that use its Kindle e-reader in the classroom to limit or turn off their functionality. Thus, they can block access to social networking sites or to the Internet altogether. They are even able to disable Kindle features that they find distracting.
All of this might prove useful in the short term, but it seems that students—the supposed beneficiaries of the “digital revolution”—might be getting shortchanged by the revolutionary rhetoric. The era when students can look up anything they wanted on their tablet or e-reader—say, an unknown word or a historical figure—may be over before it has even begun in earnest.
This may help solve the distraction problem—undoubtedly, a big plus. But it might also inhibit the development of highly interactive, mixed ways of learning that could, when properly used, satisfy—and even expand—the insatiable curiosity of the most promising but difficult students. Highly monitored electronic textbooks and heavily controlled e-readers are unlikely to give us another Einstein.
This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.
from: Slate
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
In China, 25 Million People Use Only Their Cell Phones to Read Books
Mobile reading may revive entire genres of literature, such as mid-length novels and poems, which have fallen out of favor.
by: Peter Osnos
On vacation in China earlier this month, I stopped by Shanghai's seven-story downtown "Book City," bustling with activity on a weekday afternoon that, as a publisher, I found exceptionally gratifying. Perusing the ground floor front tables I saw stacks of copies in Chinese reflecting the multiple interests Chinese readers have in American themes. Days after the U.S. elections, books about Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were featured. I noted a translation of George W. Bush's presidential memoir, Decision Points, and Henry Kissinger's recent bestseller, On China. Whether any of these were "adapted" (i.e., censored) for the Chinese audience, I can't say, but they were certainly prominently available. Basketball biographies are clearly big sellers, including Linsanity, about Jeremy Lin, last season's Taiwanese-American star for the New York Knicks. And a book by Harvard medical school professors, Positive Psychology, was billed as "cracking the secret of happiness."
Among the fiction books, Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling's adult novel, Casual Vacancy, is evidently so recognizable that the Chinese version carries its name in English and has the same jacket as the American edition.
A week's visit to Beijing and Shanghai hardly represent a methodical survey of the subject, but Chinese publishing at a glance seems to lend itself, as so much else in the country does, to superlatives. In an interview with the English-language Hong Kong based monthly, China Economic Review, Gabrielle Coyne, CEO of Penguin Group's Asia-Pacific division, said that its business in English-language books and partnerships with Chinese publishers grew by 120 percent last year. Overall, according to the magazine, China now has the world's largest output of books, a statistic that seems entirely feasible, given China's population of 1.4 billion and its surging, well-educated middle class.
While the scale of traditional print publishing is vast, the evolution of electronic reading apparently reflects what has been happening in the United States in key respects. In her interview, Coyne focused on the complex development of the digital market "so that people can read where they want to read -- be it tablet or mobile phone or any e-reader device." Piracy in China has always been rampant, despite official promises to expand copyright protection, and the problem is still an obstacle to licensing digital rights. "We talk very openly with [General Administration for Press and Publication] and the minister about our concerns," Ms. Coyne said. "When we first started the monitoring process about 18 months ago, the figures were pretty staggering ... but digital piracy is not growing here and there's a real understanding that the consumer is prepared to pay. ... I don't think [piracy] will ever be completely eliminated from markets such as China. But it's heartening that the government understands the importance of it."
I was especially interested in the prevalence of smartphones and reading devices, and the numbers of these are reported to be enormous. According to a Chinese firm called Analysys International, China has more than 400 million mobile Internet users, which would make it the largest smartphone market in the world. While discussions have been underway about release of the Kindle, it is not available yet. (Amazon's distribution of printed books is very large, with 13 warehouses around the country using couriers to deliver books as fast as the day they are ordered online). Apple tablets are available from the company's stores (which are packed) as well as from one of the country's leading telecommunications providers. There are also locally produced e-readers. Reading on mobile phones is said to be particularly widespread.
Clifford Coonan, the Irish Times correspondent in Beijing, in a thorough takeout reported that "almost half of Chinese adults read books in different forms and about 25 percent of readers -- some 220 million people read electronic media. Of these, almost 120 million people use their mobile phone to read. And almost 25 million people only use their cellphones to read books." Coonan quotes Zhang Yiwu, a respected literature professor at Peking University, who said "the appearance of mobile phone literature may revive the declining mid-sized novel and poem in China." Coonan notes that the concept came from Japan, but for Chinese readers it has the advantage of avoiding censorship, which remains a factor in traditional book formats. "Tens of thousands of writers publish their works for free online," he writes, "to be downloaded by readers on to their phones."
On my last visit to China, in 2009, I wrote enthusiastically about the variety of Chinese and international titles I found in the capital's biggest bookstore, with an emphasis on books by and about leading business figures, mainly Americans. Significantly, I made no mention of electronic reading, because at the time it must have seemed to be so much less of a factor in China, or the United States for that matter. But in late 2012, the digital age has fully arrived in China, and that momentum clearly includes books. I hope those big city bookstores go on drawing crowds, but I came away from this short trip awed by the prospect of hundreds of millions of Chinese readers with access to an increasing range of online global literature and information.
from: The Atlantic
by: Peter Osnos
On vacation in China earlier this month, I stopped by Shanghai's seven-story downtown "Book City," bustling with activity on a weekday afternoon that, as a publisher, I found exceptionally gratifying. Perusing the ground floor front tables I saw stacks of copies in Chinese reflecting the multiple interests Chinese readers have in American themes. Days after the U.S. elections, books about Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were featured. I noted a translation of George W. Bush's presidential memoir, Decision Points, and Henry Kissinger's recent bestseller, On China. Whether any of these were "adapted" (i.e., censored) for the Chinese audience, I can't say, but they were certainly prominently available. Basketball biographies are clearly big sellers, including Linsanity, about Jeremy Lin, last season's Taiwanese-American star for the New York Knicks. And a book by Harvard medical school professors, Positive Psychology, was billed as "cracking the secret of happiness."
Among the fiction books, Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling's adult novel, Casual Vacancy, is evidently so recognizable that the Chinese version carries its name in English and has the same jacket as the American edition.
A week's visit to Beijing and Shanghai hardly represent a methodical survey of the subject, but Chinese publishing at a glance seems to lend itself, as so much else in the country does, to superlatives. In an interview with the English-language Hong Kong based monthly, China Economic Review, Gabrielle Coyne, CEO of Penguin Group's Asia-Pacific division, said that its business in English-language books and partnerships with Chinese publishers grew by 120 percent last year. Overall, according to the magazine, China now has the world's largest output of books, a statistic that seems entirely feasible, given China's population of 1.4 billion and its surging, well-educated middle class.
While the scale of traditional print publishing is vast, the evolution of electronic reading apparently reflects what has been happening in the United States in key respects. In her interview, Coyne focused on the complex development of the digital market "so that people can read where they want to read -- be it tablet or mobile phone or any e-reader device." Piracy in China has always been rampant, despite official promises to expand copyright protection, and the problem is still an obstacle to licensing digital rights. "We talk very openly with [General Administration for Press and Publication] and the minister about our concerns," Ms. Coyne said. "When we first started the monitoring process about 18 months ago, the figures were pretty staggering ... but digital piracy is not growing here and there's a real understanding that the consumer is prepared to pay. ... I don't think [piracy] will ever be completely eliminated from markets such as China. But it's heartening that the government understands the importance of it."
I was especially interested in the prevalence of smartphones and reading devices, and the numbers of these are reported to be enormous. According to a Chinese firm called Analysys International, China has more than 400 million mobile Internet users, which would make it the largest smartphone market in the world. While discussions have been underway about release of the Kindle, it is not available yet. (Amazon's distribution of printed books is very large, with 13 warehouses around the country using couriers to deliver books as fast as the day they are ordered online). Apple tablets are available from the company's stores (which are packed) as well as from one of the country's leading telecommunications providers. There are also locally produced e-readers. Reading on mobile phones is said to be particularly widespread.
Clifford Coonan, the Irish Times correspondent in Beijing, in a thorough takeout reported that "almost half of Chinese adults read books in different forms and about 25 percent of readers -- some 220 million people read electronic media. Of these, almost 120 million people use their mobile phone to read. And almost 25 million people only use their cellphones to read books." Coonan quotes Zhang Yiwu, a respected literature professor at Peking University, who said "the appearance of mobile phone literature may revive the declining mid-sized novel and poem in China." Coonan notes that the concept came from Japan, but for Chinese readers it has the advantage of avoiding censorship, which remains a factor in traditional book formats. "Tens of thousands of writers publish their works for free online," he writes, "to be downloaded by readers on to their phones."
On my last visit to China, in 2009, I wrote enthusiastically about the variety of Chinese and international titles I found in the capital's biggest bookstore, with an emphasis on books by and about leading business figures, mainly Americans. Significantly, I made no mention of electronic reading, because at the time it must have seemed to be so much less of a factor in China, or the United States for that matter. But in late 2012, the digital age has fully arrived in China, and that momentum clearly includes books. I hope those big city bookstores go on drawing crowds, but I came away from this short trip awed by the prospect of hundreds of millions of Chinese readers with access to an increasing range of online global literature and information.
from: The Atlantic
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Mystery book sculptor returns for Book Week Scotland
by: Alison Flood
Scotland's mystery book sculptor has been up to her old tricks again this week, leaving a series of literary-themed sculptures in secret locations.
The sculptor – all that has been revealed about her is that she is female, and that she loves books – made her first startling appearances last year, leaving intricate paper models of a tiny Ian Rankin in a cinema, a model of a gramophone and a coffin and a detailed paper tree around Edinburgh. Now, to mark Book Week Scotland this week, she has been enticed into making a comeback, with five new sculptures inspired by classic Scottish stories hidden around the country.
Each day this week, a clue has been released that leads to one of the sculptures. On Monday, Emma Lister, a teaching assistant at Glasgow University, found a piece inspired by Alasdair Gray's Lanark at Glasgow School of Art, and on Tuesday Stranraer student Jemma Dornan tracked down a sculpture based on Robert Burns's poem Tam o'Shanter in the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway. Wednesday saw a class of pupils from Eriskay Primary School find the third sculpture, inspired by Compton Mackenzie's classic novel Whisky Galore, at the island's Am Politician Lounge Bar, and on Thursday Stephen Ryan found a Peter Pan book sculpture in the birthplace of his creator JM Barrie, Kirriemuir. The final sculpture will be unveiled on Friday afternoon, with each successful detective winning their own sculpture to take home.
"I am so excited, as I am very interested in the book as an art object," said Lister. "I only discovered the competition [on Monday] and decided to take a chance. I am a big Alasdair Gray fan – he's my favourite author and Lanark is one of my favourite books. I'll treasure my sculpture."
With more than 350 free events from authors including Iain Banks, Val McDermid, Christopher Brookmyre and Debi Gliori, Book Week Scotland is the country's first national celebration of reading. "Book Week Scotland is an ideal time to celebrate these unique pieces of art, inspired as they are by a love of books, reading, and libraries," said Scottish Book Trust chief executive Marc Lambert. "We are delighted that the artist has agreed to come out of retirement, if not hiding, to give booklovers across Scotland a chance to own one of these amazing homages to literature."
We will publish a gallery of the sculptures as soon as the final one is revealed.
from: Guardian
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| Mystery book sculptor's homage to Whisky Galore. Photograph: Chris Scott |
Scotland's mystery book sculptor has been up to her old tricks again this week, leaving a series of literary-themed sculptures in secret locations.
The sculptor – all that has been revealed about her is that she is female, and that she loves books – made her first startling appearances last year, leaving intricate paper models of a tiny Ian Rankin in a cinema, a model of a gramophone and a coffin and a detailed paper tree around Edinburgh. Now, to mark Book Week Scotland this week, she has been enticed into making a comeback, with five new sculptures inspired by classic Scottish stories hidden around the country.
Each day this week, a clue has been released that leads to one of the sculptures. On Monday, Emma Lister, a teaching assistant at Glasgow University, found a piece inspired by Alasdair Gray's Lanark at Glasgow School of Art, and on Tuesday Stranraer student Jemma Dornan tracked down a sculpture based on Robert Burns's poem Tam o'Shanter in the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway. Wednesday saw a class of pupils from Eriskay Primary School find the third sculpture, inspired by Compton Mackenzie's classic novel Whisky Galore, at the island's Am Politician Lounge Bar, and on Thursday Stephen Ryan found a Peter Pan book sculpture in the birthplace of his creator JM Barrie, Kirriemuir. The final sculpture will be unveiled on Friday afternoon, with each successful detective winning their own sculpture to take home.
"I am so excited, as I am very interested in the book as an art object," said Lister. "I only discovered the competition [on Monday] and decided to take a chance. I am a big Alasdair Gray fan – he's my favourite author and Lanark is one of my favourite books. I'll treasure my sculpture."
With more than 350 free events from authors including Iain Banks, Val McDermid, Christopher Brookmyre and Debi Gliori, Book Week Scotland is the country's first national celebration of reading. "Book Week Scotland is an ideal time to celebrate these unique pieces of art, inspired as they are by a love of books, reading, and libraries," said Scottish Book Trust chief executive Marc Lambert. "We are delighted that the artist has agreed to come out of retirement, if not hiding, to give booklovers across Scotland a chance to own one of these amazing homages to literature."
We will publish a gallery of the sculptures as soon as the final one is revealed.
from: Guardian
Monday, December 3, 2012
Independent Bookstores Find Their Footing
by: Lynn Neary
In recent years, the start of the holiday shopping season has meant nothing but gloom for independent bookstores. But this year, the mood seems to be lifting, and a lot of booksellers are feeling optimistic. Even President Obama kicked off his Christmas shopping at a neighborhood bookstore in Northern Virginia.
Even so, booksellers are still having trouble enticing customers to plunk down cash for expensive hardcovers when e-books are so popular. Steve Bercu has been in the book business for 40 years. His store, BookPeople in Austin, Texas, has survived the threat of big chains, competition from Amazon and now the popularity of e-books. These days, Bercu says the brick-and-mortar bookstores that are still standing have a loyal following.
"People choose to come to this store to do their Christmas shopping on a regular basis. It's a place you can bring your family; it does not have the overwhelming intensity of a shopping mall; it's a single store," he says. "And it's just part of the season here in Austin."
The holidays, Bercu adds, are definitely the season for hardcovers. Any other time of year, you might settle for a paperback or prefer the convenience of an e-book. But at this time of year, customers are looking for something special for someone special — that novel that won the National Book Award, or maybe the biography everyone is talking about, or one of those glossy coffee-table books filled with beautiful photos and artwork.
"Anything that anyone has ever thought of as a coffee-table book pretty much only works as a coffee-table book," Bercu says. "I can't imagine anybody's gonna put ... any kind of e-readers on the coffee table and hope people look at it; it just doesn't look the same."
Daniel Goldin of Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee agrees that e-books are no threat to the Christmas dominance of coffee-table books. But Goldin says art and photography volumes actually aren't doing that well at his store this year. This holiday season, Goldin says, cookbooks are the new black. "And I don't mean cheap cookbooks," he says. No one wants to spend $60 on an art book — but a $60 cookbook will fly off the shelves.
"We know people aren't particularly cooking out of those books," Goldin says, "so it's the equivalent experience. It's people buy the book to have the book, to show off the book, to enjoy the book, to be enraptured by the book," but only maybe to make one of the recipes.
Some hardcover books require a harder sell, Goldin continues. Customers have to be persuaded that a bound book has a value that can't be found in an e-book. "I think the key is to convince them that this is one that's a keeper," he says. "We're seeing some wonderful, physical books, especially in hardcover, that are just beautiful, and we'll make a case for that. We'll kind of have a customer weigh a book, put it in their hands, and say, 'Look at the quality of this paper ... that book won't be yellowed, and it won't be brittle. That book will look great in 10, 20 years.' "
"I think the smarter publishers are realizing that the way the physical book matters is in the design of it," says Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, one of the founders of Brooklyn's Greenlight Bookstore. She says Greenlight has started a First Editions Club for customers who want to build their own collection of books that will last.
"It works a little like a wine of the month, or a chocolate of the month club," she says. "You sign up for a six-month or a 12-month subscription, and then the booksellers at Greenlight will select new titles — fiction or nonfiction — that they think are great and might be valuable in the long term, and subscribers get a first edition of that book signed by the author.
But booksellers aren't taking any chances. They know lots of people have an e-reader on their Christmas lists, so hundreds of independent bookstores have signed up to sell Kobo e-readers and e-books this Christmas — right along with all those beautiful hardcovers.
from: NPR
In recent years, the start of the holiday shopping season has meant nothing but gloom for independent bookstores. But this year, the mood seems to be lifting, and a lot of booksellers are feeling optimistic. Even President Obama kicked off his Christmas shopping at a neighborhood bookstore in Northern Virginia.
Even so, booksellers are still having trouble enticing customers to plunk down cash for expensive hardcovers when e-books are so popular. Steve Bercu has been in the book business for 40 years. His store, BookPeople in Austin, Texas, has survived the threat of big chains, competition from Amazon and now the popularity of e-books. These days, Bercu says the brick-and-mortar bookstores that are still standing have a loyal following.
"People choose to come to this store to do their Christmas shopping on a regular basis. It's a place you can bring your family; it does not have the overwhelming intensity of a shopping mall; it's a single store," he says. "And it's just part of the season here in Austin."
The holidays, Bercu adds, are definitely the season for hardcovers. Any other time of year, you might settle for a paperback or prefer the convenience of an e-book. But at this time of year, customers are looking for something special for someone special — that novel that won the National Book Award, or maybe the biography everyone is talking about, or one of those glossy coffee-table books filled with beautiful photos and artwork.
"Anything that anyone has ever thought of as a coffee-table book pretty much only works as a coffee-table book," Bercu says. "I can't imagine anybody's gonna put ... any kind of e-readers on the coffee table and hope people look at it; it just doesn't look the same."
Daniel Goldin of Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee agrees that e-books are no threat to the Christmas dominance of coffee-table books. But Goldin says art and photography volumes actually aren't doing that well at his store this year. This holiday season, Goldin says, cookbooks are the new black. "And I don't mean cheap cookbooks," he says. No one wants to spend $60 on an art book — but a $60 cookbook will fly off the shelves.
"We know people aren't particularly cooking out of those books," Goldin says, "so it's the equivalent experience. It's people buy the book to have the book, to show off the book, to enjoy the book, to be enraptured by the book," but only maybe to make one of the recipes.
Some hardcover books require a harder sell, Goldin continues. Customers have to be persuaded that a bound book has a value that can't be found in an e-book. "I think the key is to convince them that this is one that's a keeper," he says. "We're seeing some wonderful, physical books, especially in hardcover, that are just beautiful, and we'll make a case for that. We'll kind of have a customer weigh a book, put it in their hands, and say, 'Look at the quality of this paper ... that book won't be yellowed, and it won't be brittle. That book will look great in 10, 20 years.' "
"I think the smarter publishers are realizing that the way the physical book matters is in the design of it," says Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, one of the founders of Brooklyn's Greenlight Bookstore. She says Greenlight has started a First Editions Club for customers who want to build their own collection of books that will last.
"It works a little like a wine of the month, or a chocolate of the month club," she says. "You sign up for a six-month or a 12-month subscription, and then the booksellers at Greenlight will select new titles — fiction or nonfiction — that they think are great and might be valuable in the long term, and subscribers get a first edition of that book signed by the author.
But booksellers aren't taking any chances. They know lots of people have an e-reader on their Christmas lists, so hundreds of independent bookstores have signed up to sell Kobo e-readers and e-books this Christmas — right along with all those beautiful hardcovers.
from: NPR
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