Paperless public libraries switch to digital

by: Bill Hicks

The phrase "bookless libraries" arrives with a dull, oxymoronic thud, enough to get the blood of any bibliophile boiling.

It's the sort of thud made in the 1980s by doomed reports promising a "paperless office". Anyone who remembers that much-mocked slogan might well shrug off this latest idea as overheated punditry.

Or perhaps they should think again, as the world's first completely paperless public library is scheduled to open this summer in Bexar County, Texas, in the United States.

Bexar County's so-called BiblioTech is a low-cost project with big ambitions. Its first branch will be in a relatively poor district on the city of San Antonio's South Side.

It will have 100 e-readers on loan, and dozens of screens where the public will be able to browse, study, and learn digital skills. However it's likely most users will access BiblioTech's initial holding of 10,000 digital titles from the comfort of their homes, way out in the Texas hinterland.

It will be a truly bookless library - although that is not a phrase much to the liking of BiblioTech's project co-ordinator, Laura Cole. She prefers the description "digital library" - after all, there will be books there, but in digital form.

'Not even a bookstore...'

"For us this was just an obvious solution to a growing problem," she says.

That problem was "explosive" population growth around San Antonio, in suburbs and satellite towns way outside the city limits.


The BiblioTech library in San Antonio, Texas, will offer 10,000 digital titles



"We've had to look to how we provide services to these unincorporated areas," she said.

"While the city does a beautiful job in providing public libraries, these can only easily be used by people living there".

San Antonio's book-rich public libraries will be unaffected by the project.

Bexar County, by contrast, never had a public library service. "I think we're at an advantage there," Ms Cole said. "They've never had a library with books - there's not even a bookstore here."

This sets it apart from earlier bookless library experiments at Newport Beach, California, and Tucson, Arizona - which both reverted to offering real as well as e-books, by public demand.

As well as offering digital books to 1.7m people, the $1.5m BiblioTech project has a big community education remit. It will partner with local schools and run digital literacy courses and will stay open late into the evenings.

The iLibrary

The project's instigator, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, sees it as a pilot for a county-wide scheme. Other sources of funding will be sought to build up the services.

Interestingly, Judge Wolff is a keen collector of first editions, the bibliophile ushering in the bookless future: "But the world is changing and this is the best, most effective way to bring services to our community."

Judge Wolff has cited Apple founder Steve Jobs as inspiration for the BiblioTech.

But the project has also gained impetus from the success of the University of Texas San Antonio (UTSA) bookless engineering school library which opened three years ago, the first paperless academic library. UTSA's director of libraries Dr Krisellen Maloney has worked with the BiblioTech team and sits on its advisory board.

Outside Texas, bookless libraries have also made most ground in the academic sector, with the swiftest change in science, maths and engineering libraries.

The first such facility in the UK is likely to be at Imperial College, London, which last year announced that over 98% of its journal collections were digital, and that it had stopped buying print textbooks.

Even so, it was still paying around £4m per year in subscriptions to publishers, even after concerted efforts to negotiate better digital deals for universities.

Touching history

It's clear that bookless libraries are not a cheaper option for cash strapped colleges and local authorities. Producing digital versions of text books can be even more costly, given that users will expect more regular updating and interactive features.



The New York Public Library is also increasingly lending e-books



There are some libraries which will never go bookless, because their collections contain books that are important historical artefacts in themselves.

Although many of these rare texts are being digitised under schemes such as that run by Google, these books as physical objects remain essential resources for researchers.

Christopher Platt, director of collections and circulation at the New York Public Library (NYPL), argued that accessing a digital version of a book was sometimes not enough.

"People travel from all over the world to our library, not just to access an item, but to touch it and feel it to get a sense of it that speaks to the overall importance of the work," he said. "This is not sentimentality, it's an important fact."

However the NYPL is also embracing the digital world with enthusiasm and is deeply committed to offering digital material.

Last year the library made 880,000 e-book loans - a fivefold increase over 2008, Mr Platt said. The library has 91 branches around the city, he added: "If you look at e-book loans as a virtual branch, it would regularly be number two or three in terms of monthly usage."

On the shelf

Contrary to some reports, the NYPL is not reducing its holdings of books - although some 1.5 million books in the stacks of its famous Central Library building on 42nd Street in Manhattan will be relocated in underground vaults as part of a refurbishment scheme beginning this year.



Books in their physical form are also important for researchers



The space will be used to create a "spectacular" new public library , but it will not be bookless. "In fact, far more books will be visible than ever in the past," Mr Platt said.

But bookless does not mean cheap. Publishers were charging libraries up to five times the normal hardback price for an e-book of a popular title, he said. And certain types of book - illustrated children's titles, how-to manuals - simply did not work as well as e-books, especially when some library e-readers were still text-only.

This was just one of many reasons, he felt, that bookless libraries would not be sweeping the board just yet.

A major issue was to obtain guarantees of a consistently good reader experience across all platforms and technologies - something which NYPL, along with 200 other big libraries across north America, and increasingly elsewhere, is working towards in a new coalition, readersfirst.org.

Library closures

In the UK, however, the major issue was not so much bookless libraries but library-less boroughs. Authors have been particularly active in campaigns to resist funding cuts that are leading to public library closures.



The British Library is bringing together printed books and digital archives

Children's author Alan Gibbons is a passionate believer in the role of libraries, especially school libraries, but he's also a keen user of the panoply of "e" and "i" prefixed devices.

But he has misgivings about the notion of a bookless library. "We have to manage the change intelligently. The danger is that reading becomes utterly atomised". Otherwise there could be the "obliteration of minority and mid-list authors".

He argues that the library space and the librarian are crucial elements. Books could be replaced by e-readers, but virtual space could not replace library buildings. "The only issue for me is how new readers are made, and I don't see that happening in social networks."

Working in international schools in China and Thailand, Mr Gibbons noted that even in the most elite schools where very child was given an iPad, the school library, stocked with real books, was seen as an essential resource.

Christopher Platt at New York Public Library has another take on the bookless future: "It's still early game. We've been 100 years getting the print stuff right, so it could be a while before we get the e-stuff right."

from: BBC

Teenage Tweetland

YA authors and publishers reach out to young readers where they live: online and on their smartphones

by: Karen Springen

Last year Nikki Wang, a 13-year-old from Texas, spent her birthday and allowance money on more than 100 YA books, and she plans to do the same again this year. Almost always, she chooses her titles based on what she sees on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and in blog posts by her favorite authors, including A.G. Howard, Gina Rosati, and Tiffany Schmidt. “They’re a fun bunch,” she says. “And they usually end up giving me hints about what’s to come.” Recently Senshi author Cole Gibsen tweeted to Wang that two characters “aren’t finished with each other.” “I’m definitely dying for the next book after that tidbit!” says Wang, who fills her Goodreads “to-read” shelf with wished-for titles. “I’d always imagined authors to be rock stars and hard-to-reach people. Now they’re still basically rock stars, but more approachable.”


Like Wang, who writes a blog called Fiction Freak, most teens live on social media—which, unlike advertisements, is essentially a free way for publishers and authors to reach them, and the friends, librarians, and booksellers who influence them. “You can have the best book in the world, and if no one knows about it, it’s not going to be a success,” says Brittany Geragotelis, self-published success–turned–Simon & Schuster author of Life’s a Witch and What the Spell. But, she points out, staying abreast of social media is no mean feat. “When I tell people everything I do, they get so discouraged. I’m on Facebook, Twitter, Wattpad, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest! You are going to be able to hit different people with different interests on different sites.”

Using all of these platforms sounds demanding, and it is, says Simone Elkeles, author of Perfect Chemistry. “You spend 25% of your time writing and 75% of your time interacting with your fans, or at least I do.” Cynthia Leitch Smith, author of the Feral and Tantalize series, devotes two and a half hours every morning to social media and says she typically replies within 48 hours to comments and questions from teen readers, about topics like “what their vision is for the sequel, and whether I can name a character after their cat!”

Not all authors are so eager to embrace digital communication. “I’m more of a quiet, introspective person who finds all of the stimulation intake of social media and output quite distracting,” says Sundee Frazier, author of The Other Half of My Heart. “I’m not the sort of person who can just fire off tweets. My first priority is writing my stories.”
The very private Suzanne Collins is also among those who tend to steer clear of the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr; but other industry heavyweights loom large on social media. More than 1.4 million people follow author John Green on Twitter, and 1.1 million subscribe to the Vlogbrothers channel he shares with his brother on YouTube. Neil Gaiman, who writes for children and teens as well as for adults, has more than 1.8 million Twitter followers, and more than a million readers for the blog he established a dozen years ago. “Tapping an author’s interest and running with that is much more effective than spreading them across five social networks, maybe three [of which] they’re not very comfortable with,” says Alison Presley, online marketing manager at Chronicle Books. But finding a medium that works, whatever that medium may be, is key, she says. “At one point, social media was seen as a ‘nice to have’ by authors. It’s not a ‘nice to have’ any more. Fans really expect to have that direct connection to authors.”

That’s especially true for newcomers. “For a debut author, social media can make or break a campaign,” says Jason Wells, executive director of publicity and marketing at Abrams Books for Young Readers; he cited the five-month countdown to the publication of Splintered, which featured a Spotify playlist for the book, Pinterest boards dedicated to the characters, signed-galley giveaways, and frequent tweets by author A.G. Howard.

Social media boosts visibility for established authors, too. “It’s completely changed my career,” says Mitali Perkins, author of Bamboo People. “I write serious, global, ethnic fiction. My blog, Facebook, and Twitter allowed me to showcase that my voice is wider—that there’s humor. And I’ve [formed] relationships with librarians, with booksellers. Now I have these people who beautifully and earnestly will handsell my book.”
Whereas readers once sent letters to authors, today’s fans reach out electronically. “If [Beverly Cleary, now 97] had been born 50 or 60 years later, she would have used social media,” says Eliza Dresang, Beverly Cleary professor for children and youth at the University of Washington. While many of the most active authors on the social networks tend to be younger, some are veterans like Judy Blume (who has more than 88,000 Twitter followers) and R.L. Stine (with more than 72,500 Twitter followers). “It really comes down to an author’s comfort level,” says Courtney Wood, associate director of online marketing at Penguin.

Many authors find strength in numbers, promoting one another’s launches and books. P.J. Hoover, author or Solstice (due out in July), set up a Texas Sweethearts & Scoundrels Facebook page, Twitter account, and blog with other local writers. The Lucky 13s—a group of several dozen authors with 2013 debuts—connect via their blog, Facebook page, and Twitter account; members include Better Nate Than Ever author Tim Federle, and Caroline Carlson, whose Magic Marks the Spot is a middle-grade buzz pick at BEA. The collective approach can also help authors gain followers and confidence. “There’s a lot of rejection as a writer, and then feeling rejected on a social media platform is no fun,” says Sarah Christensen Fu, a social media and online marketing consultant.

Which platform is best? “We’re looking for where the audience is,” says Angus Killick, v-p and associate publisher of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group. “A while ago we were all focused on Facebook and only Facebook. Now teens are hopping around. We have to make sure we’re covering as many bases as possible so if everybody suddenly changes to another platform, we’re already there.” Many authors just gravitate toward their favorites. “I never think about, ‘Oh, what platform should I be on?’” says Martha Brockenbrough, author of Devine Intervention, who favors Facebook “for comedy and occasional research” and Twitter “for newsy, actionable stuff and real-time conversations.” The questions for her are, “Where do I feel comfortable? Where can I contribute to a dialogue? Where can I be positive? What do I have time for?”

These days there are almost as many social media campaigns as there are YA books being published. Here’s a look at the various platforms, and how some authors and publishers are using them.

Blogs

Though blogs are ancient in social media terms—people were writing them back in the 20th century—they remain a popular home base for both authors and fans. In fact, many if not most social media roads tend to lead back to authors’ own Web sites. Online stars like Maureen Johnson (who has more than 78,000 Twitter followers, and has tweeted more than 59,000 times) always post links to their own pages on their Twitter profiles and on other sites, using social media to drive readers to their blogs. To promote new releases, they also go on blog tours (virtual visits), in which dedicated fans interview them. Publishers pitch in, too: for each of the 16 blogs Dark Triumph author Robin LaFevers visited, Houghton Mifflin provided countdown widgets and books for giveaway.

Authors also provide e-mail contact information on their blogs, using them as a way to directly communicate with readers. Entice author Jessica Shirvington says she lets the messages built up for 10 days, and then spends a whole morning replying. Author Janet Gurtler’s new novel, How I Lost You, is about best friends; since she started running interviews with YA authors talking about their own young friendships, traffic to her blog has tripled. As part of her effort, which will end on June 8 (National Friendship Day), she links to their blogs and Goodreads pages.

Facebook

“All teens are on Facebook,” says Jo Beaton, marketing and publicity director for Zest Books. “They more or less have to have Facebook profiles just like they have to have e-mail addresses.” But unlike newer social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, Facebook is not specifically designed for use on phones and it’s not as visual, Beaton notes. “We’re not putting a lot of effort into Facebook. I don’t believe Facebook has as much of a cachet to teens as it did several years ago.” Teen blogger Wang agrees: “Facebook is really just for school friends.”

Another issue: Facebook caps regular profiles at 5,000 fans, which means authors often need to create alternative “fan” pages. But readers want to hear personal details as well as publishing news, says Elkeles, who includes non-book-related content on her page. In April, she wrote a post about a seizure that her dog had. “[Readers] want to feel a part of your life,” she says. “I like it because I’m an extrovert. I love the interaction. It motivates me to write.”

No one is ignoring the power of Mark Zuckerberg’s site (the official Hunger Games Facebook page alone boasts some 4.7 million fans). But publishers are trying to use it wisely. For example, they know they’re more likely to get their content to show up prominently in newsfeeds if they get frequent “likes,” tags, comments, or “shares” from followers and if they post more photos and videos, which boosts them in Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm. That’s one reason Facebook is the home of so many contests and pictures, especially now that it owns Instagram (a favorite of such authors as Sarah Dessen and Veronica Roth). On Scholastic’s This Is Teen page (with 98,678 “likes”), a fan can win a tote bag filled with novels by authors including Maggie Stiefvater, Paul Rudnick, and Libba Bray, a manuscript critique by an author (Meg Cabot has done it), or a trip to New York City for a photo op with Andrew Jenks, author of Andrew Jenks: My Adventures as a Young Filmmaker. The publisher also hosted a March Madness–style voting bracket—not pegged to a specific book—on its This Is Teen Facebook page, in which fans determined the “2013 Best Literary Character of All Time.”

Twitter

More than 200 million people, including YA authors Maureen Johnson, Libba Bray, Barry Lyga, Marie Lu, Cory Doctorow (and many others), use Twitter. “Sticking to the 140-word limit—it’s like poetry,” says Perkins. And sometimes, it’s lucrative poetry: she tweeted an offer of five free Skype visits across the country for Bamboo People. One winner was a San Antonio, Tex., school that ended up buying hundreds of copies of the book.

Another devotee is author Amanda Hocking, who describes herself as an “obsessive tweeter” on her Twitter profile. But she is judicious. “If you’re tweeting too much, you’re going to annoy people,” she says. “You [also] have the chance to alienate people. I try to be careful and not post super-political or inflammatory things. I stick to benign things like celebrities and pop culture.” More than 22,000 people follow Hocking on Twitter. “It helps turn a casual reader into a more devoted fan,” she says. “I don’t think new readers find me that much via Twitter. I think it’s about keeping the readers I have engaged.”

These big-time tweeters and book fans mark their calendars for “Twitter parties.” On May 6, for example, they exchanged bon mots at #TheEternityCureParty for the second book in Julie Kagawa’s Blood of Eden series. “Twitter parties are a fun, crazy way to interact with readers and fans,” says Kagawa. “They’re not location-restricted, so a lot more people can join in. Plus I can do them in my pajamas.”

Many publishers, such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, tweet links to places fans can go to read chapters from new titles. Twitter is “a means to drive [readers] to another spot where you can put more information,” says Roshan Nozari, HMH’s social media manager. Retweets help quantify the success of a Twitter promotion, but they aren’t the whole story: it’s easier to measure retweets and hashtag posts than point to their direct correlation with sales. Scholastic’s “I read YA” campaign got 300 #IreadYA tweets within five hours of its launch; the campaign also includes promotions with Figment, at bookstores, and in ad buys. “It’s hard to isolate social media specifically [as] a driver of sales on the titles we’re promoting because we are almost always running those campaigns as part of a bigger plan,” says Stacy Lellos, v-p of trade marketing and multiplatform publishing at Scholastic.

As with other social media, authenticity—real or perceived—is key to Twitter success. “You can’t control whether people buy the book, but you can control whether or not they’ve heard of it,” says author Kendare Blake (Anna Dressed in Blood). “But if [you’re] too promotional, people will say, ‘I wish she didn’t just tweet about release dates.’” Twitter has occasionally stepped in to help authors hone their presence. “We encourage authors to share their process, to talk about how they’re crafting a story, how they’re creating a character,” says Andrew Fitzgerald, manager of content and programming at Twitter, who will speak at BEA later this month. Twitter shares its best practices at the URL dev.twitter.com/media/authors; these include tips like the following: “Pick one thing in your daily routine and tweet about it: a word you love (or hate), the weather, the first sentence you write each day.”

The latest Twitter twist: in January, the platform debuted Vine, a mobile app that lets users create and tweet six-second videos—“alternatively called no-budget book trailers,” says Fitzgerald. Beautiful Creatures coauthor Kami Garcia posted footage from “Tea Party w/ Black Moon Winners @ Laduree @mstohl #beautifulcreatures,” which, like other Vine videos, loops over and over again. And HarperCollins used it for a sneak peek inside Lauren Oliver’s Requiem.

Among the highest-profile campaigns to date are the tweet-generated cover reveal and first-chapter reveal for Cassandra Clare’s Clockwork Princess last July. For the cover reveal, 30,000 tweets within two hours exposed, bit by bit, the book’s cover. A chapter reveal was completed in a similar fashion after the publisher reached its half-million-tweets goal in 24 hours. How will the publisher top those promotions? Matt Pantoliano, senior digital marketing manager for S&S Children’s Publishing, says, “I’m asking myself the same question.”

Tumblr

Of the 106 million blogs on Tumblr—which skews younger than Facebook—21% belong to kids under 18 and 30% belong to 18- to 24-year-olds, according to Quantcast, a company that measures Web traffic. On the multimedia-friendly site, authors like Rainbow Rowell, Holly Black, Laurie Halse Anderson, and Neil Gaiman share everything from animated GIFs and playlists of songs to listen to while reading a particular book to photos of nail art and of cakes they bake and decorate in honor favorite books. “Tumblr is kind of like a mix of everything,” says Becky Tsivin, 16, a sophomore at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill. She follows authors including Cassandra Clare, Libba Bray, Veronica Roth, and John Green, who has a community of some 200,000 fans on the platform. “Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr thrives on creation, collaboration, and mashing-up,” Green says. “And it’s cooler because your mom isn’t on it.”

Another way the platform differs from Facebook: Tumblr lets people write under invented names. So Ellis Weiner, the author of the Templeton Twins middle-grade series, writes the books’ Tumblr and responds to comments in character as the series narrator. “It’s delightfully in-world,” says Chronicle’s Presley. Other publishers are also using the platform to promote books in quirky ways. Bloomsbury invited fans to send in their own vintage family photos, or photos of themselves wearing vintage fashion, for a campaign for Lindsey Leavitt’s Going Vintage. According to Rachel Fershleiser, who handles Tumblr’s literary strategic outreach, “Your URL might be a reference to what you love. The focus is less on who you are than on your passions. The culture on Tumblr is a little bit intellectual, a little bit nerdy. We’ve got a huge community of teens who spend their spare time reading.”

YouTube

On YouTube, fans can comment on, and share, book trailers and other related videos. The site, launched in 2005 and bought by Google in 2006, has come a long way since the Mentos-and-Diet Coke experiment went viral. In 2010, Elkeles put up a video to promote book #2 in her Perfect Chemistry trilogy, Rules of Attraction, featuring Alexander Rodriguez (Katy Perry’s groom from her “Hot n Cold” video). “My fans just went nuts,” she says. No kidding: the video has been viewed almost half a million times.

“You have to give them some sort of content to engage with other than just, ‘I’m an author, and I have a book. Go buy it,’” says Matt Gielen, an audience-development strategist. To promote What the Spell by Gielen’s wife, Brittany Geragotelis, the pair hired an Emmy-winning makeup artist to star in five “magical makeover” videos. (In the book, the protagonist uses witchcraft to gain beauty and popularity.) The professional help paid off: more than 26,000 people viewed the couple’s “Khloe Kardashian Magical Makeover Tutorial.”

Publishers and authors are constantly seeking new ways to use the medium. On May 1, Scholastic launched a “you could be a part of the new official Catching Fire book trailer” campaign, which calls for entrants to post their own videos that complete sentences like, “The best thing about Catching Fire is...” To generate buzz over for Zest’s Dear Teen Me, a collection of stories written by 70 YA authors about their teenage selves, more than 50 of the authors contributed to video book trailers by holding up pieces of paper with handwritten advice for teens. Then the authors shared the trailers through their social networks. “I don’t think you could pay for that type of support,” says Beaton. “It was a way to harness that passion; we couldn’t do [it] in an ad.”

Having cute boys in a promotion doesn’t hurt, either. Since 2011, when Harlequin uploaded “behind the scenes” footage from the casting call for the cover of Julie Kagawa’s The Iron Knight, the video has racked up more than 36,000 views. “We’ve talked about doing it again,” says Amy Jones, director of retail marketing for nonfiction and YA at Harlequin. “[But] you can only play that card so many times. Things get old quickly.”

Goodreads

Goodreads’ 17 million members (half of them 30 and younger) have written 23 million book reviews. The platform’s most popular promotions are ARC and finished-novel giveaways, with 240,000 books distributed free through the site last year, says Patrick Brown, director of the author program. Goodreads, which Amazon bought in March, hosts some 30,000 online book groups, including several YA book clubs with more than 1,000 members each. One of these posts rules like “no cursing” and “don’t leetspeak—leetspeak means writing like this: ‘how r u?’” It holds author chats, too, with writers like John Green, Lauren DeStefano, and Ally Condie. Proof of popularity: fans keep posting questions, even though the one-day chat is long over.

Wattpad and Figment

Wattpad, with 15 million active readers (more than half of them under 25 years old), encourages writers to post stand-alone pieces, which builds “viral buzz around their books,” says Maria Cootauco, Wattpad’s engagement manager. “It’s like a YouTube for writers,” says Geragotelis, who signed a three-book, six-figure deal with Simon & Schuster after her novel Life’s a Witch got 18 million reads in a year. Though most of her fans follow her via Wattpad, she also boasts more than 17,000 Facebook fans. “Everything is interlinked, though I post different things on the different platforms,” she says. Another self-published book that debuted on Wattpad and spread through social-media buzz is The Kissing Booth by 17-year-old Beth Reekles; the book garnered 19 million reads and 40,000 comments online, and was recently acquired by Delacorte.

Established authors turn to Wattpad, too. Prior to the June 4 release of her latest book, Tidal, Hocking (who got her start with self-published e-books) and St. Martin’s put up a complete short story called “Forgotten Lyrics” and also posted extended excerpts of Wake and Lullaby, the first two books in her Watersong series. With Wattpad, authors can post from their mobile devices. If they set their accounts to do so, when they post new chapters or reply to readers, notices post to their Facebook and Twitter accounts as well. “It makes it so much easier for a book to go viral,” says Cootauco. Fans with the mobile app get text “push notifications” every time authors they’re following on Wattpad post new chapters of books. They can then click to read the chapters on their screens.

Figment—a free, share-your-writing-and-love-of-reading Web site geared toward teens—uses weekly newsletters to reach its 300,000-strong audience. In a March survey, the site found that 78.5% of its users also have Facebook accounts, 43.2% use Tumblr, and 38.2% use Twitter. It also found that 87.2% visit YouTube at least once a week, 32.8% go to Pinterest each week, and 30.3% look at Instagram.
Publishers are also starting their own online publishing platforms. In June, Macmillan is launching a crowdsourced site called Swoon Reads, where writers can submit manuscripts. The editorial board at Macmillan will read those with the highest ratings, with the first Swoon Reads novels coming out in 2014. “It’s kind of like a [public] slush pile,” says Killick.

Meanwhile, teen readers continue to flock to social media sites to follow their favorite authors’ writing progress and personal lives. Some writers love the interaction with fans, while others consider it a burden. Does a robust online presence help sell books? The answer is almost certainly yes. Yet as popular as these sites are, things change rapidly in the online world—and in the world of teenagers.

“We joke around when we’re doing marketing plans for books that are coming out in 2014,” says Tracy van Straaten, v-p of trade publicity at Scholastic. “We [make a note] to tell our sales team [to use] whatever social media thing is the hottest thing then. There’s going to be something that doesn’t exist now.”

from: Publisher's Weekly

Beyond Wizards and Vampires, to Sex

by: Leslie Kaufman

Vampire and wizard fans are apparently ready for characters who shed their robes and show a little more skin.

Publishers and authors say they are seeing a spurt in sales of books that fit into the young-adult genre in their length and emotional intensity, but feature slightly older characters and significantly more sex, explicitly detailed.

They’ve labeled this category “new adult” — which some winkingly describe as Harry Potter meets “50 Shades of Grey” — and say it is aimed at 18-to-25-year-olds, the age group right above young adult.

The goal is to retain young readers who have loyally worked their way through series like Harry Potter, “The Hunger Games” and “Twilight,” all of which tread lightly, or not at all, when it comes to sexual encounters. In the “Twilight” books, for instance, readers are kept out of the bedroom when Bella and Edward, the endlessly yearning lead characters, finally consummate their relationship.

Providing more mature material, publishers reason, is a good way to maintain devotion to books among the teenagers who are scooping up young-adult fiction and making it the most popular category in literature, with a crossover readership that is also attracting millions of adults. All while creating a new source of revenue.

This week Simon & Schuster’s Children’s Publishing released, in e-book format only, an “uncut and uncensored” version of “The Vincent Boys” and “The Vincent Brothers,” books for teenagers that were on the USA Today extended best-seller list when Abbi Glines self-published them in June.

The earlier versions of the books followed young-adult conventions and went to the edge of describing sex, and no further. The new uncut versions, labeled appropriate only for ages 17 and up, are explicit about sexual activity — with exclamations of rapture and all.

Other titles that have had recent success in the genre include “Losing It,” by Cora Carmack, about a college senior who decides to shed her virginity in a one-night stand; “Slammed,” by Colleen Hoover, about a high school senior who has a summer affair with a man who turns out to be her new poetry teacher; and “Easy,” by Tammara Webber, about a college freshman negotiating new love and a stalker.

“We are seeing a transitional generation,” concludes Ms. Glines, who started by publishing young-adult fiction and has slowly been adding steamier material as she has seen it drive up sales of her books. “They want a good narrative with the emotional intensity of teenagers, but they want sex, too.”

The material that Simon & Schuster added online was initially written by Ms. Glines for her original version of the “Vincent” books but was excised when she decided to sell to the young-adult market. While most works do not come with a ready-to-go sexual insert like that, publishers said that in the future books could commonly come in two versions and be marketed to both audiences.

Of course sex and coming of age are not new to fiction. Some critics have complained that “new adult” is just another marketing label to induce readers to buy more books. Pamela Spengler-Jaffee, a HarperCollins publicist who works with William Morrow, an adult division that has been signing new-adult authors at a frenetic pace, admits, “It is a convenient label because it allows parents and bookstores and interested readers to know what is inside.”

Beyond appealing to the maturing tastes of young readers, these more sophisticated books could potentially draw in the millions of older readers who have flocked to the young-adult category, publishers said. A study released in September by Bowker, a market research firm that studies publishing trends, showed that more than half the buyers of young-adult books were 18 or older, and the vast majority said they were purchasing for themselves.

While publishers like the concept of creating a new-adult category, its hybrid nature has been problematic. The books fall into an undefined territory between adult and children’s literature, and there is no obvious place for them in bookstores. Even within publishing houses, new-adult authors are being split between children’s and adult divisions.

But while publishers hesitated, a crop of young authors began forcing the issue: they began self-publishing novels on the Internet about 19-to-25-year-olds who are leaving home for the first time for jobs or college or a first real relationship. Online readers discovered some of these books and made them best sellers by word-of-mouth.

“Beautiful Disaster,” for example, is about a good girl with a dark past who encounters a bad boy with tattoos when she goes to college. It was self-published in 2011 by Jamie McGuire and sold more than 200,000 copies. Ms. McGuire was signed to a deal with Atria, an adult division of Simon & Schuster, earlier this year.

Elizabeth Chandler, a founder of Goodreads.com, a social networking site built around books and that has 13 million members, said she noticed new-adult fiction suddenly gaining popularity on her site in 2011. The number of readers who recommended books with a new-adult label has suddenly exploded, she said, from a negligible amount to more than 14,000 titles.

“You don’t see it in bookstores,” Ms. Chandler said, “and you don’t have an aisle for new adult, like you have for young adult. But the rise of self-published books has catered to this audience, and we definitely see it trending online.”

The books have so much potential that some popular young-adult authors are switching tracks to join up. Meg Cabot, author of the successful “Princess Diaries” series, is now writing about a young woman named Heather Wells, who is a resident assistant at a New York City college.

Ms. Cabot said that while she changed the settings and added some sex for good measure, the genre’s core was still about fantasy. “This is for a generation that is having an extended adolescence — maybe they would like to leave home but can’t, because they can’t find a job,” she said. “This is about escaping to a new life in New York — it is like going to boarding school with wizards, only aged up appropriately.”

from: NY Times

Which five authors are in running for the 2013 Nobel prize?

A tweet from the Swedish Academy has unleashed a flood of speculation about the five writers they are considering - could it be Don DeLillo's year, or perhaps it's Murakami's turn

by: Alison Flood

There's been a flurry of gossip over the Nobel prize for literature, thanks to GalleyCat and the Literary Saloon, who both highlighted this tweet from the Swedish Academy over the weekend, that "5 candidates have been selected for 2013 #NobelPrize in #Literature according to Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy".


Tantalising! Who do we think they could be? Will it be Philip Roth's year, now he's retired from the old writing business? I'd love it if it were, but I think it's unlikely, given that he's nothing new out - Steinbeck, for example, won in 1962, well after his most enduring works were published, but according to recently released records from the Nobel archives, the Academy felt that the publication of his novel The Winter of Our Discontent in 1961 showed that "after some signs of slowing down in recent years, [Steinbeck has] regained its position as a social truth-teller [and is an] authentic realist fully equal to his predecessors Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway". As Roth has ruled out any more novels, I think his "position as a social truth-teller" is going to have to rely on his past oeuvre - and I'm not sure that'll sway the Academy.

MA Orthofer at the Complete Review wonders if an African author will be in the running this year: "Will Chinua Achebe's passing and the nominations from more African academics nudge them towards some continental names - perennials like Nuruddin Farah or Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (or, dare I hope, someone like Ayi Kwei Armah)? " he asks.

There is strong support on the books desk, always, for Haruki Murakami, and at GalleyCat, meanwhile, there's a mention of Don DeLillo. Might it be America's turn this year? Which five names do you think are in the running? We'll find out the winner in October, but we'll have to wait 50 years to know who the final five were...so get guessing.

from: Guardian

When Words Sing

by: John Schwartz

If you spend a lot of time with audiobooks, you start paying close attention to the people who read them, and probably develop a stable of favorites. Listeners know that the best narrators can make a good book take wing and a merely decent book grow more engaging. They can carry us through the dry parts of nonfiction, and might get us to try something we otherwise might not have. (That’s how I ended up enjoying Elmore Leonard’s “Stick” — I wanted to hear the great Frank Muller.) A mediocre reading? Well, I stop listening, and if it’s a book I really need to read, I switch to paper.


The performer makes all the difference.


Simon Vance, a British actor, accompanied me through most of the sea novels of Patrick O’Brian with his steady versatility. ­AudioFile magazine calls him “the Englishman with the gorgeous voice and remarkable facility for characterization,” and those qualities were on fine display when I listened to his rendition of “David Copperfield” last year. After I finished the Dickens, I downloaded Hilary Mantel’s majestic “Bring Up the Bodies,” and was pleasantly surprised to hear Vance’s gentle and authoritative voice once again. It was like running into an old friend and knowing that we were about to have a long and satisfying visit. Similarly, Grover Gardner made the long weeks of listening to Robert Caro’s “Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson” feel like an adventure.

Occasionally I come across a delightfully unexpected name — as when I saw the audiobook of “My Beloved World,” the memoir by the Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, read by Rita Moreno. Rita Moreno! Anita from “West Side Story”! Running buddy of Oscar, Tony, Emmy and Grammy!

And now, Sonia. Moreno told me that Sotomayor asked her to narrate the audiobook, saying, “You’re the only one I want.” Moreno had followed Sotomayor’s career closely — when she heard that the first justice of Puerto Rican descent had been appointed to the Supreme Court, she burst into tears — and the two women have become friends. “I love her so much,” Moreno says.

“My Beloved World” was Moreno’s first full-length audiobook recording — she’s since read her own book, “Rita Moreno: A Memoir” — and it’s a wonder. She conveys Sotomayor’s moving life story in a performance that seems to flow from common experience, even though the women have had very different lives. The narration is largely unaccented, but whenever the story dips into Spanish, it does so with a confidence and joy that reminded me of the way that a bit of sofrito awakens a pot of stew. When Moreno describes how Sotomayor’s abuelita, or grandmother, transfixed the family with readings of Spanish poetry, she imbues the recitation with holy thunder.

Justice Sotomayor responded via e-mail to my questions, and said Moreno’s talent allowed her “to hear myself” and “to make my words sing and dance.” She added, “Anyone who listens to her rendition of my grandmother Abuelita’s poem knows how I felt listening as a child.”

There was another language Moreno had to master: legal phrases like “voir dire.” Some lawyers use what they imagine is the French pronunciation, dropping the initial “r,” while my Texas law school professors rhymed it with “floor pyre.” Black’s Law Dictionary tells us to pronounce that first “r,” and Moreno gets it right. Such issues made recording certain sections “a beast,” she recalled.

Other great readings come as a surprise. I didn’t know of John Benjamin Hickey when I downloaded “In One Person,” John Irving’s bildungsroman featuring a young bisexual man. His performance is a marvel of understatement. Hickey, who won a Tony for his portrayal of Felix in the Broadway revival of “The Normal Heart,” and has appeared in television shows like Showtime’s “Big C” and in movies like “The Ice Storm” and “Pitch Perfect,” does not invent a thousand voices in the manner of the great Jim Dale in the Harry Potter series. Instead, he changes his tone and accent just enough to make a dozen or so characters instantly identifiable, whether it’s Grandpa Harry’s diffidence and New England accent, the rich bully Kittredge’s snotty insolence or the arch contralto of Miss Frost, the transgender librarian. And is it possible that, with a hint of sass, Hickey is letting us know that one of the most macho characters will turn out to be very different from our first impression?

from: NY Times

Bestselling writers know that image counts

Robert Langdon, Harry Potter, Lisbeth Salander – you can picture them instantly. Visually memorable characters are making a welcome comeback to crime and thriller novels

by: John Dugdale

The Harris Tweed jacket of Dan Brown's protagonist Robert Langdon has understandably been mentioned in most reviews of Inferno, with critics noting how often Brown refers to it (not to mention its label: "Harris Tweed's iconic orb adorned with 13 buttonlike jewels and topped by a Maltese cross") and its elevation into playing a part in the plot – everything starts with the Harvard professor of "symbology" discovering a titanium case stitched into its lining.


Yet there's a jeering tone whenever reviewers pick up on what Langdon wears – invariably a turtleneck, khaki trousers and loafers with the jacket, whatever the context – that suggests a lack of appreciation of what Brown is doing, and of the subtle but significant role of clothing in thrillers and crime novels in general.

It's no accident that you can usually summon up an image of their protagonists (from Sherlock Holmes's pipe to Sarah Lund's Faroese jumper), because the writers strive to imprint in our minds a simple visual idea of the hero or heroine, often a single item of clothing or prop. And what they're eager to get across is both the garment's and the character's unsuitability, the one a metaphor for the other. Sleuths and spies are themselves compilations of symbols, as well as readers of them.


Langdon's taste for tweed in all weathers – mirroring, of all people, Agatha Christie's Jane Marple, as Brown is probably wryly aware – says several things about him: that he's a don, and a little stuffy and old-fashioned; more European than American in his interests and ways. Though not a conscious disguise, the outfit is deceptive: he resembles "Harrison Ford in Harris Tweed", The Da Vinci Code said, and can morph into an action hero who never falls short when required to prevent catastrophes.

Usually too old, too foppish, too bookish, too bohemian, or the wrong sex or nationality, classic crime-busters likewise tend to look all wrong. Poirot is a fussy "dandified" throwback to pre-1914 with patent-leather shoes; Marple wears sturdy skirts and likes to knit; Lord Peter Wimsey favours a Bertie Woosterish monocle, top hat and spats (all "jolly useful", he says, in order "to look like a bally fool").

Later, tougher types make seemingly misguided choices, too. Raymond Chandler called Philip Marlowe his "white knight in a trenchcoat", but a trenchcoat in California is as out of place as tweed in Tuscany. James Bond's Savile Row suits are right for a playboy diplomat but hopeless for fighting. Often, this misconceived garb ought to cause embarrassment but doesn't: Maigret's hefty, woolly overcoat is always getting soaked yet he never learns, George Smiley keeps on buying expensive but "really bad" clothes that are too big ("like skin on a shrunken toad").

With his habit of wiping his glasses on his tie, Smiley also epitomises another emblem of unsuitability. As with Len Deighton's Harry Palmer, another 60s spy meant to contrast with Bond, specs suggest someone too scholarly or nerdy for derring-do, let alone tangling with world-class evil-doers. But, by then, authors were starting to forget the importance of clothing. If you can visualise another protagonist between the 60s and the 90s (eg Morse, Adam Dalgliesh or VI Warshawski), it's probably the actor's face from a screen version, with what they wore making no impression.

That trend, however, has recently been reversed, with a slew of global bestsellers that (just coincidence?) all feature characters made visually memorable: Harry Potter in Hogwarts uniform and round glasses; Langdon saving the planet in his Harvard don costume; Lisbeth Salander in punky-goth outfits, with piercings and tattoos; giant Jack Reacher in workman's clothes he throws away after one use. It was an indication of how far the pendulum has swung back when Lee Child, Reacher's creator, recently devoted an entire article to how his macho hero dresses.


from: Guardian

At Brooklyn Library’s New Center, Books Are Secondary

by: Eli Rosenberg

The young couple burst through the great bronze doors of the main Brooklyn Public Library 15 minutes before closing time one recent Sunday with an unusual request: Was there somewhere they could recite their vows?


It was a blustery day, and the two — a military man and his fiancée, according to librarians — wanted a place they could finish their nuptials away from the chill at Grand Army Plaza.

Fortunately, the library had not long before opened a $3.25 million addition to its central branch, complete with conference rooms available to anyone with an adult library card. Librarians showed the couple to Room 5, the lack of a reservation notwithstanding.

“This may have technically been a violation of our meeting room policy,” Jesse Montero, the library’s coordinator of information services and public training, acknowledged of the impromptu ceremony, which added “wedding chapel” to the facility’s growing list of descriptions.

The four-month-old Shelby White and Leon Levy Information Commons replaced the branch’s media section, providing a wood-paneled center with space for 70 laptop users, a 36-seat classroom and 7 meeting rooms, including a digital studio with green screen, microphone and video equipment.

It quickly became popular with freelance writers and other creative minds, but its uses have been quite varied, like as a safe space for immigrants to learn about the naturalization process and for parents to hold meetings about charter schools. And yes, even as a warm environment for a wedding.

“This is a sanctuary. It’s beautiful,” said Freddy Quevedo, 64, a retired construction worker originally from Ecuador. He was attending a CitizenshipWorks event, where representatives of groups like the Immigration Advocates Network and Pro Bono Net helped prospective citizens fill out naturalization forms, with lawyers on hand for private counsel in the meeting rooms.

Equipped with a projector (new and working) and a cart of laptop computers (also new and working), the classroom has allowed the library to work with other nonprofit organizations and residents to offer a class on podcasting, hosted by BRIC Arts Media Bklyn, a primer on Medicare and a workshop on Revolutionary War genealogy with the Daughters of the American Revolution.

It’s this diversity of new uses, most of which have little to do with reading or books, that the library says is part of a larger campaign to maintain relevancy in an increasingly digital world.

“The business of being a public library is much more complicated today than it was when it was conceived,” said Linda E. Johnson, the president of the Brooklyn Public Library. “We’re still trying to level the playing field. It’s just not about books as much as it is about access to the Internet.”

The 5,500-square-foot space is among the first of its type for a public library, according to planners, who drew inspiration from the Research Commons at New York University’s Bobst Library, and took aesthetic cues from Apple stores.

The library benefited from the largess of Shelby White, a philanthropist, self-described “Brooklyn girl” and founding trustee of the Leon Levy Foundation, which awarded the library a $100,000 grant in 2009 to study the project, and $3.25 million in 2010 for its construction.

Not that the operation has gone off entirely without a hitch.

The wing initially suffered from slow Wi-Fi service — a striking flaw for laptop users — before an upgrade.

The commons have also suffered the occasional disruption, like when a packed meeting about a Citizens of the World charter school spilled out of a room and disturbed the quiet of the work area; the meeting had been overwhelmed by protesting parents.

But with $1 coffee in the library’s lobby, why would a freelancer spend time working in a cafe or home office again?

“It’s not what you expect when you walk in a library, but to have a professional, upscale place to meet with clients is incredible,” said Don Noble, 40, a film producer from Crown Heights who uses the commons every other day. “It’s good to get away from the house.”

from: NY Times

Reading increases empathy, study says

Academic development and civic engagement also positively affected.

by: Paul Irish

Forget the cliche of the introverted bookworm: A recent report suggests people who read more may have better social skills than those who don’t.


A recently released report commissioned by the National Reading Campaign (NRC) titled Towards Sustaining and Encouraging Reading in a Canadian Society found that reading increases empathy, academic development and even civic engagement.

The NRC, a volunteer group of writers, teachers, librarians, parents and publishers dedicated to making Canada a country of readers, analyzed close to 100 domestic and international studies on the subject of reading.

Sharon Murphy, lead author of the paper and associate professor of education at York University, says reading — especially fiction — shows preferred behaviour by example (through characters, plots and situations).

“It helps the reader understand relationships better and how to act in our society,” she says. “Readers can become civic minded … they understand the concept of volunteering and co-operating.”

She also said sitting down with a book increases empathy and, of course, academic development.

As well, the research discovered that if children were allowed to choose what to read as children — instead of being forced to read certain texts — they would be more likely to read as adults.

Ben McNally, owner of the Ben McNally Books on Bay and Richmond Sts., said the findings don’t come as a surprise but agrees it’s refreshing to hear the message when it may be needed most.

“Yes, reading is good … but don’t confuse reading with that flash of information you get off your phone or computer,” he says. “Even to comprehend basic news — what’s happening in your community — needs more than a casual glance at a screen. It’s ludicrous to believe you can really understand the issues without spending some time reading.”

McNally says social media and the internet have their place, but the benefits following the nuances, plots and character compositions of a good novel aren’t likely duplicated by Facebook.

The report also confirmed that boys and men don’t read as much as girls and boys.

“It’s not quite clear why,” said Murphy. “It could be that they’re doing more online activity (than females) and it’s certainly an area for a lot more documentation leading to a bigger study.”

Lisa Heggum, the Toronto Public Library’s Children and Youth Advocate, said the library has been an enthusiastic partner and advocate for the NCR sharing the same goals.

“The important research that the NRC is gathering shows that choice, variety and access to reading materials are critical in promoting reading for all ages,” she says. “Libraries are uniquely and ideally positioned to provide universal access to a broad range of materials.”

Rick Wilks, vice-chair of the NRC, says the findings confirm reading creates benefits through all the social interaction linked to reading, including people connecting through book clubs.

“It confirms our understanding of the individual and societal importance of reading, but perhaps more importantly, it confirms that getting people talking about their reading is the best way to encourage others to read,” he says.

from: Toronto Star

Libraries: Cathedrals of Our Souls

by: Caitlin Moran

This piece was previously published in The Times of London, and is included in Caitlin Moran's new book, Moranthology ($14.99, Harper Perennial).


Home educated and, by seventeen, writing for a living, the only alma mater I have ever had is Warstones Library, Pinfold Grove, Wolverhampton.

A low, red-brick box on grass that verged on wasteland, I would be there twice a day--rocking up with all the ardor of a clubber turning up to a rave. I read every book in there--not really, of course, but as good as: when I'd read all the funny books, I moved on to the sexy ones, then the dreamy ones, the mad ones; the ones that described distant mountains, idiots, plagues, experiments. I sat at the big table and read all the papers: in public housing in Wolverhampton, the broadsheets are as incongruous and illuminating as an Eames lamp.

The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books--but they were, of course, really doors: each book-lid opened as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the lock. I spent days running in and out of other worlds like a time bandit, or a spy. I was as excited as I've ever been in my life, in that library: scoring new books the minute they came in; ordering books I'd heard of--then waiting, fevered, for them to arrive, like they were the word Christmas. I had to wait nearly a year for Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire to come: even so, I was still too young to think it anything but a bit wanky, and abandoned it twenty pages in for Jilly Cooper. But Fleurs du Mal, man! In a building overlooked by a Kwiksave where the fags and alcohol were kept in a locked, metal cage, lest they be stolen! Simply knowing I could have it in my hand was a comfort, in this place so very very far from anything extraordinary or exultant.

Everything I am is based on this ugly building on its lonely lawn--lit up during winter darkness; open in the slashing rain--which allowed a girl so poor she didn't even own a purse to come in twice a day and experience actual magic: traveling through time, making contact with the dead--Dorothy Parker, Stella Gibbons, Charlotte Brontë, Spike Milligan.

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate "need" for "stuff." A mall--the shops--are places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthy's taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary, instead. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power.

Last month, after protest, an injunction was granted to postpone library closures in Somerset. In September, both Somerset and Gloucestershire councils will be the subject of a full judicial review over their closure plans. As the cuts kick in, protesters and lawyers are fighting for individual libraries like villagers pushing stranded whales back into the sea. A library is such a potent symbol of a town's values: each one closed down might as well be six thousand stickers plastered over every available surface, reading "WE CHOSE TO BECOME MORE STUPID AND DULL."

While I have read a million words on the necessity for the cuts, I have not seen a single letter on what the exit plan is: what happens in four years' time, when the cuts will have succeeded, and the economy gets back to "normal" again. Do we then--prosperous once more--go round and re-open all these centers, clinics and libraries, which have sat, dark and unused, for nearly half a decade? It's hard to see how--it costs millions of pounds to re-open deserted buildings, and cash-strapped councils will have looked at billions of square feet of prime real estate with a coldly realistic eye. Unless the government has developed an exit strategy for the cuts, and insisted councils not sell closed properties, by the time we get back to "normal" again, our Victorian and post-war and 1960s red-brick boxy libraries will be coffee shops and pubs. No new libraries will be built to replace them. These libraries will be lost forever.

And, in their place, we will have thousands more public spaces where you are simply the money in your pocket, rather than the hunger in your heart. Kids--poor kids--will never know the fabulous, benign quirk of self-esteem of walking into "their" library and thinking, "I have read 60 percent of the books in here. I am awesome." Libraries that stayed open during the Blitz will be closed by budgets.

A trillion small doors closing.

from: HuffingtonPost

Reading Around

On board a Freightliner M2 20K lorry, a mobile library devised by Alumnos47 and PRODUCTORA uses whatever changes it finds in the city to create its stage, turning imagination into collective memory.

by: María García Holley


At a time when digital information is replacing almost every kind of printed document, iPhones, iPads, Kindles and other similar portable devices have become books. It is hard to imagine the concept of a mobile library without immediately thinking of downloading its volumes from the Internet. Many people would regard it as an anachronism to think that a library could still have any relevance as an architectural typology in the face of the digital upheaval that has changed the ways we approach information and objects, transforming entire industries, such as the video, music and printing industries.

Unlike the idea of electronic books and digital collections, the A47 mobile library is a counter-current notion. It champions the physical nature of the printed book, which it supports with a full cultural programme. A truck carrying over 1,200 volumes of visual art and culture, the A47 travels the streets of Mexico City, providing the residents of various neighbourhoods in the capital with access to its contents.

The A47 Mobile Library is a project developed by the Fundación Alumnos47, a civil society organisation that brings learning communities together around contemporary artistic practices and visual culture. Given that the foundation's major project is to build a public contemporary art museum by around 2014, it seemed reasonable to use a mobile unit to activate the museum's existing collection until the building to house it is completed.

Alumnos47 and PRODUCTORA, A47 Mobile Library, Mexico City


Designing this unit turned into a veritable challenge. How do you take something so opposite to a piece of architecture as a lorry and turn it into not just a library, but a structure capable of hosting an entire spectrum of cultural activities? Looked at in this way, the archaic idea of building libraries started to regain a sense of modernity. Working on this premise, Mexican architecture studio PRODUCTORA came up with the design for a cultural centre within a 20 square metres space on board a Freightliner M2 20K lorry — a travelling building.

The lorry operates primarily as an itinerant collection of contemporary art books. However, beyond this use, every centimetre of its 20 square metre surface area is harnessed to maximum effect to achieve true functionality of space. The bookshelves have left their traditional form behind, instead being dismantlable trays floating above the library users, visually crowning the interior space. The free plan becomes a flexible, transparent platform that relates directly with the urban and social context. The lorry is a forum that can be used as a venue for an endless number of activities: book presentations, film clubs, poetry readings, workshops, as well as the opportunity to consult its bibliographic holdings.

The floor of the lorry comprises a series of mobile platforms giving access to the bookshelves, allowing the space to be re-arranged according to the different activities taking place. The micro perforated sheet surround acts as a permeable membrane that merges the outside and inside, making the space an exercise in honesty with its environment. From the street, one's view of the transparent intricacy that suspends the large solid volume allows a glimpse of the diverse range of titles inside, while also acting as an urban beacon through the night. This illumination — produced by the lorry's own integrated electricity generator — provides a reassuring glow when the streets fall dark, and announces the start of its nightly programme.


Famous names such as Lola Álvarez Bravo, Paul Strand, Roland Barthes and Laurie Anderson are among those to be discussed in the workshops that give purpose to this modern device. There are story readings and drawing sessions for children, while for adults there is the historiography and oral history of the colony. The raised platform of the A47 allows users to make use of the library in much the same way that an actor appropriates the stage.

Alumnos47 and PRODUCTORA, A47 Mobile Library, Mexico City

It is through this quest for new purposes that users experience the change in the idea of what a library means. Far from being an inert archive, the A47 mobile library is a living organism enabling new approaches that turn imagination into a collective memory. This is a lorry that uses whatever changes exist in the city to create its stage. A mechanical insect that, when night falls, can fold away its legs, stow away its stories and continue with its journey.

from: Domusweb

Author Gives Fake Writing Assignments to Online Cheaters

by: Jason Boog

Term paper writing companies flourish online, but few people ever get to read their handiwork.


South Park, Louie, and The Chris Rock Show writer Vernon Chatman sent surreal homework assignments to writers working in the cheating industry. He republished his homework assignments and the actual essays he received in the new book, Mindsploitation: Asinine Assignments for the Online Homework Cheating Industry. Here’s a sample request:

"My midterm thesis essay paper is an exploration of Alternate Endings To Great Works of Literature. All I need from you is to come up with some Alternate endings to some Great works of literature … Provide a new ending to Catcher In The Rye where Holden Caulfield turns into a crawfish and goes into some kind of retail business."

from: GalleyCat

How a Scottish farmer became crime fiction’s next big thing

James Oswald thinks up plots on his cattle and sheep farm, and has just won a six-figure deal

by: Tom Rowley

James Oswald is talking about his success as a crime writer when he suddenly becomes distracted and turns to the computer on his battered desk. His “lamb cam” shows a live feed from the shed some 500 yards across the fields. “I think that’s a little head,” he says, pointing excitedly.


We cut across a field of ewes to his polytunnel. Inside, a tiny newborn lamb is crouching next to a ewe. “Here comes the second one,” Oswald shouts, as it emerges and crouches on the straw while the ewe licks it warm. He creates a new pen so the ewe and its lambs won’t be disturbed by the rest of the flock. At last, Oswald is satisfied: “I’ll leave her to clean them up.

“I’ve been up since 5.30am,” he explains as we head back indoors. “As I was giving them hay earlier, I noticed one of them was struggling a bit and I had to help the lamb out. This is as hands-on as it gets.”

Oswald’s days are about to get even busier. On Thursday, his debut novel, Natural Causes, will be published, and two more are expected to hit bookshelves by next spring. He will have to juggle writing and farming with interviews and book-signings.

The 45-year-old already has experience of such success, however. In fact, he has become a self-publishing phenomenon, racking up 350,000 online sales for Natural Causes and its sequel, The Book of Souls, when he released them last year for download to e-readers such as the Kindle. The figures astonished publishing houses that are normally impressed by first-time authors who can sell 20,000 books, and Oswald was soon at the centre of a bidding war to publish his work in book form. Penguin won the auction, while the international rights have already been sold to six countries. The book has proved a critical success, too, making the shortlist for the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award.

So Oswald could be forgiven for relishing this moment in the limelight, booking a London venue for a glitzy bash on Thursday night. Instead, the book will be officially launched in… the Dundee Waterstones.


He points across to the city from his window, showing how convenient the party will be. His view is rather wider than that, however. His home overlooks the River Tay, some two miles wide as it reaches its mouth. Twenty minutes’ drive south of Perth, Oswald can see the Grampian mountains to the west on a good day, while the Tay stretches to the North Sea beyond Dundee to the east.

Oswald shares the study-cum-kitchen with three dogs; his partner, Barbara, will soon join him. Logs stand next to the wood-burning stove, and a whiteboard pinned above his desk is covered with scrawled ideas for future novels.

“I’ve always wanted to write,” says Oswald, perched on a black leather chair, incongruous among the dog blankets that clutter the floor. “I just love telling stories. My uncle told my mother when I was four that I’d be a writer because of the tall tales I used to tell. But you can’t be a full-time writer unless you’re really, really lucky, so you need to have a day job.”

He has worked on farms since he graduated from Aberdeen University in 1990, first doing odd jobs in Scotland before settling in rural Wales, working as an agricultural consultant.

He had just bought a house there with Barbara five years ago when two police officers knocked on his door one day at 3am to tell him his parents, David and Juliet, had died. Their pick-up truck had collided with a car on the A9 in an accident that also killed a Dutch man and his young son. Oswald inherited the 350-acre farm he had hungered for in the toughest of circumstances. “I’d always wanted to take over – but after my dad retired, not after an accident like that. It was enormously traumatic. I had no enthusiasm for anything at all. I certainly didn’t want to write, and I didn’t write for about two years.”

He moved to the farm and prepared to abandon his dream to tend his 12 Highland cattle and 50 New Zealand Romney sheep. In despondent mood, he realised the publishers had been right to turn down Natural Causes when his agent had hawked it around a few years previously.

But at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival a few weeks later, he got talking to Allan Guthrie, whose first e-book had just sold very successfully. “I hadn’t really cottoned on to the whole Kindle thing, but I just had to pay $80 for the cover to be designed and for a few beers for my friends for proofreading. I thought I’d give it one more go.”

Within weeks Oswald was shifting 2,000 copies a day. Readers loved his protagonist, Edinburgh’s Det Insp Tony McLean, who combines old-fashioned sleuthing with supernatural intuition, and Natural Causes soon topped Amazon’s e-book chart.

“Nothing gives you your self-confidence back like 350,000 people downloading your book,” he grins. “The sales figures are updated in real time and it was really addictive. I had to ration myself to only checking them after a day on the farm.”

Far from finding it a bind, he says his day job helps him to write. “If I’m on the tractor, it’s not mentally taxing so I can just think through plots. If I go for a walk and I lose the dogs because it’s all going off in my head, then that’s brilliant. My notebook is never far away, so I can scribble things down. It has all sorts of questionable stains on it.”

He was mending a fence in a hailstorm when his agent called with the result of the auction. “My fingers were barely working, but I managed to get the phone out. She said she’d done a six-figure deal. I thought, 'I can pay someone to come and do this fencing for me’.” He quickly frittered some of the money away on such luxuries as a new tractor.

The hefty advance suggests that Penguin considers Oswald in the same bracket as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. So surely he can give up the day job? “I could never move,” he insists. “For all that it is bloody hard work, there is something magical about lambing and calving. I could do my writing in a city staring out at a brick wall – but this is the view I want.”

from: Telegraph

Used e-books for sale? Not so fast

by Hector Tobar

Is it legal to sell a used e-book?


A Massachusetts start-up that hopes to start selling used e-books and other used digital content this summer suffered a legal setback in court recently when a federal judge ruled that it had infringed the rights of Capitol Records by facilitating the resale of copied digital music.

And now a judge in Germany has ruled that digital books can’t be resold by purchasers, ruling against a consumer group that was seeking the right for German readers to do so.

At issue is a very simple legal principle. You can resell a printed book because in doing so you’re not making a copy of it and thus not violating the author’s copyright. What you're not allowed to do is make a copy of the original work and sell that. Generally, when you buy a digital work of art, such as an MP3 or an e-book, what you download is considered an original and if you circulate it, you're making a digital copy.

The Boston start-up ReDigi believes it had solved that issues by giving digital content “physicality.” “ReDigi wants to take legally purchased e-books off your computer, digitally watermark them, and then store them on a cloud-based server,” Boston Magazine reports. In that cloud, the company argues, “it is effectively the right of ownership that is bought and sold.“

A federal judge disagreed.

But, as Boston Magazine writes: “Legal issues aside, many analysts feel these markets are almost inevitable. Amazon has acquired a patent for its own used-digital-media market. Already, each Amazon book page has a space for the price of a used Kindle edition. It’s still blank -- for now, anyway.”

Already, Amazon has a digital lending library, whose content continues to grow.

from: LA Times

A glimpse into Guantánamo Bay's library

From the well-thumbed – Danielle Steele – to the untouched classics, pictures posted by US journalists show the reading matter permitted in the world's most controversial prison

by: Nina Martyris

The Pentagon doesn't let journalists talk to prisoners in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, where more than half of the 166 detainees are currently on hunger strike, but reporters are granted access to the prison library – inspiring a blog from the New York Times reporter Charlie Savage that collects pictures of books uploaded by journalists reporting on Gitmo.

Prisoners aren't allowed to go the library, but they can put in requests for books they want to read. The books are thoroughly checked in case they are being used to exchange messages – any attempts to do so are punished with a suspension of the library facility.

The few thousand titles offer a strange mix of books ranging from the pulpy – Danielle Steele's The Kiss (in Arabic) – to the classic – six copies of David Copperfield – to the canonical – seven copies of Homer's Odyssey. The Steele book looks pretty well-thumbed but it's doubtful if anyone has borrowed Homer to pass the time, although some detainees have been there 11 years – longer than it took Odysseus to return to Ithaca via a perilous journey that included more than a spot of waterboarding at the hands of Poseidon.

Other books include seven copies of Pearl S Buck's The Good Earth, CS Lewis's Narnia series, Tolkien, Stieg Larsson's trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz, a Pashto-to-English dictionary, Captain America comic books, puzzle books, a Russian edition of a National Geographic magazine, Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Khaled Hosseini's maudlin hit The Kite Runner. Watership Down and Star Wars share shelf space with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Apart from the books, the video game Angry Birds is also available.

Earlier reports have said that the most popular books are Agatha Christie's mysteries, Kahlil Gibran and the Harry Potter novels. Harry Potter has also been used an in interrogation tactic. According to Fox News, members of Congress visiting the prison in 2005 observed how one interrogator tried to break down a prisoner by reading aloud from a Harry Potter novel for hours – the detainee turned his back and covered his ears to block out the sound.

Among the spy novels is a paperback copy of The Tailor of Panama, John le Carré's hilarious but stinging indictment of fraudulent intelligence gathering – a subject that cuts close to home in a prison of this kind. The 1996 novel was seen as a prescient foretelling of the weapons of mass destruction intelligence scam that paved the way for the US invasion of Iraq. President George Bush opened Guantánamo in 2002 as a important plank of his "war on terror". The 81-year-old le Carré, who has been scathing in his criticism of "Bush and his junta", recently told the New York Times that he keeps a rubber cartoon figure of the former president in his bathroom. He also said he was disappointed in Obama for not closing Guantánamo as he promised to do when he ran for office in 2008.

Obama did sign an executive order to close the prison in 2009 – it was one of the first things he did on entering office – but Congress remains implacably opposed to doing so. With the hunger strike making international headlines, Obama has renewed his call for closure, saying that "the notion that we're going to keep 100 individuals in no man's land in perpetuity" was not "sustainable".

Miami Herald journalist Carol Rosenberg posted a picture of an Arabic translation of Gabriel García Márquez's News of a Kidnapping. She said the book looked "well read". Incidentally, two years ago, this non-fiction book on how the Medellín cartel kidnapped a group of Colombians in the 1990s at the height of the drug war became a bestseller in Iran, after opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi told his compatriots that if they wanted to know what it was like for him to be under house arrest, they should read this book.

One of the most borrowed titles is the Arabic self-help book Don't Be Sad, published by the International Islamic Publishing House in Saudi Arabia. It advocates patience, hard work and keeping one's faith in Allah. In the foreword, the publisher states that the book is for everyone, Muslims and non-Muslims, though the solutions are offered from an Islamic perspective. Chapters have titles such as "Extract the honey but do not break the hive", "Isolation and its positive effects", and the quintessentially American "Convert a lemon into a sweet drink". According to Wikipedia, Christian anarchist Elbert Hubbard coined the phrase in 1915 and it was later popularised by Dale Carnegie.

The religious section – inmates are given a copy of the Qur'an to keep with them in their cells – includes Fatwas of the Pillars of Islam and the biography of the Prophet (in French) and several copies, also in French, of Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi. The Hindu spiritual teacher, who helped popularise yoga in America, was a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi – the most famous hunger striker of the 20th century.

from: Guardian