Are Digital Distractions Monopolizing Reading Time?

Books do furnish a room, but according to many in the publishing industry, the fear is that emails, online video texts and tweets will prevent them being read.
by: Roger Tagholm

At the Writing in a Digital Age conference, Cory Doctorow didn’t just launch a broadside against Amazon – or, more specifically, DRM (digital rights management) – he included Apple too, pointing out that the company initially offered developers the chance to keep 100% of in-app revenue, until the day it became the leading smartphone platform. “Then it clawed back 30% of in-app sales, knowing that the platform it had built – on the investment of the app developers whose 30% they were about to consume – would give it the market power to put the screws on those creators.”

It was all reminiscent of Foyles Chairman Christopher Foyles’ speech at the new store in London last week in which he noted the behavior of dominant companies. “It’s part of the human condition: when a company has a monopolistic position, it will abuse it.”

It was ever thus through the ages. What to call this? Greed? Love of power? The Darwinism of the market? The business version of what Roth calls ‘the human stain’? It’s why, of course, countries have rules and regulations, checks and balances, to prevent such situations. But at last week’s conference, some speakers hinted at a much greater threat, one that wasn’t necessarily anything to do with monopolies, but one which has arisen almost without anyone noticing and which threatens the entire industry. It is, quite simply, the numerous enticements away from reading that the digital world brings.

Panelists Stephen Page, CEO of Faber; agent James Gill of United Artist; Diego Marano of Kobo Writing Life; and Steve Bohme of Nielsen, were each asked for what most excited or worried them looking ahead. Page said: “I’m worried about the loss of reading, its substitution by other things. In ancient times Latin was spoken by the elite and English was the vernacular, the language of the masses. Someone said the other day that video is becoming the new vernacular. I’m worried that reading will be for the elite, that video [and] YouTube will be the vernacular.”

It is an irony of the digital age that the very tools and devices developed to expand reading – and in many ways that hashappened – are the same tools that can reduce it. It’s the tablet as digital Trojan horse, invading our houses and kidnapping our book reading time.

Bohme said he was concerned about children’s access to smartphones and tablets for the same reason, and also noted the threat to the gift market posed by digital. “When everyone you know has a Kindle, why would you buy them a book?”

Gill was worried about the decline of the high street, the lack of visibility for books. It was left to Marano to add a positive note (well, Kobo was a conference sponsor). “I’m excited about what technology can do for the reader. The key word is flexibility. The publishing industry has not been good at embracing that, but technology helps foster it.

The fears about You Tube and the many distractions of the online world may be overstated – and there are echoes of all the talk of TV killing radio, and video killing cinema, both of which proved understandable but misguided. Nonetheless, anyone with teenage – and younger – children cannot help notice the glittering allure of devices and their constant distractions and temptations.  

Indeed, arguably everyone recognizes the compulsion to check a message, send a response, to fill up all that dead time which might once have been spent reading. Books do furnish a room, but it seems texts and tweets can prevent them being read.

from: Publishing Perspectives

Being a Better Online Reader

by: Maria Konnikova

Soon after Maryanne Wolf published “Proust and the Squid,” a history of the science and the development of the reading brain from antiquity to the twenty-first century, she began to receive letters from readers. Hundreds of them. While the backgrounds of the writers varied, a theme began to emerge: the more reading moved online, the less students seemed to understand. There were the architects who wrote to her about students who relied so heavily on ready digital information that they were unprepared to address basic problems onsite. There were the neurosurgeons who worried about the “cut-and-paste chart mentality” that their students exhibited, missing crucial details because they failed to delve deeply enough into any one case. And there were, of course, the English teachers who lamented that no one wanted to read Henry James anymore. As the letters continued to pour in, Wolf experienced a growing realization: in the seven years it had taken her to research and write her account, reading had changed profoundly—and the ramifications could be felt far beyond English departments and libraries. She called the rude awakening her “Rip van Winkle moment,” and decided that it was important enough to warrant another book. What was going on with these students and professionals? Was the digital format to blame for their superficial approaches, or was something else at work?

Certainly, as we turn to online reading, the physiology of the reading process itself shifts; we don’t read the same way online as we do on paper. Anne Mangen, a professor at the National Centre for Reading Education and Research at the University of Stavanger, in Norway, points out that reading is always an interaction between a person and a technology, be it a computer or an e-reader or even a bound book. Reading “involves factors not usually acknowledged,” she told me. “The ergonomics, the haptics of the device itself. The tangibility of paper versus the intangibility of something digital.” The contrast of pixels, the layout of the words, the concept of scrolling versus turning a page, the physicality of a book versus the ephemerality of a screen, the ability to hyperlink and move from source to source within seconds online—all these variables translate into a different reading experience.

The screen, for one, seems to encourage more skimming behavior: when we scroll, we tend to read more quickly (and less deeply) than when we move sequentially from page to page. Online, the tendency is compounded as a way of coping with an overload of information. There are so many possible sources, so many pages, so many alternatives to any article or book or document that we read more quickly to compensate. When Ziming Liu, a professor at San Jose State University whose research centers on digital reading and the use of e-books, conducted a review of studies that compared print and digital reading experiences, supplementing their conclusions with his own research, he found that several things had changed. On screen, people tended to browse and scan, to look for keywords, and to read in a less linear, more selective fashion. On the page, they tended to concentrate more on following the text. Skimming, Liu concluded, had become the new reading: the more we read online, the more likely we were to move quickly, without stopping to ponder any one thought.

The online world, too, tends to exhaust our resources more quickly than the page. We become tired from the constant need to filter out hyperlinks and possible distractions. And our eyes themselves may grow fatigued from the constantly shifting screens, layouts, colors, and contrasts, an effect that holds for e-readers as well as computers. Mary Dyson, a psychologist at the University of Reading who studies how we perceive and interact with typography and design online and in print,
has found that the layout of a text can have a significant effect on the reading experience. We read more quickly when lines are longer, but only to a point. When lines are too long, it becomes taxing to move your eyes from the end of one to the start of the next. We read more efficiently when text is arranged in a single column rather than multiple columns or sections. The font, color, and size of text can all act in tandem to make our reading experience easier or more difficult. And while these variables surely exist on paper just as they do on-screen, the range of formats and layouts online is far greater than it is in print. Online, you can find yourself transitioning to entirely new layouts from moment to moment, and, each time you do so, your eyes and your reading approach need to adjust. Each adjustment, in turn, takes mental and physical energy.

The shift from print to digital reading may lead to more than changes in speed and physical processing. It may come at a cost to understanding, analyzing, and evaluating a text. Much of Mangen’s research focusses on how the format of reading material may affect not just eye movement or reading strategy but broader processing abilities. One of her main hypotheses is that the physical presence of a book—its heft, its feel, the weight and order of its pages—may have more than a purely emotional or nostalgic significance. People prefer physical books, not out of old-fashioned attachment but because the nature of the object itself has deeper repercussions for reading and comprehension. “Anecdotally, I’ve heard some say it’s like they haven’t read anything properly if they’ve read it on a Kindle. The reading has left more of an ephemeral experience,” she told me. Her hunch is that the physicality of a printed page may matter for those reading experiences when you need a firmer grounding in the material. The text you read on a Kindle or computer simply doesn’t have the same tangibility.

In new research that she and her colleagues will present for the first time at the upcoming conference of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media, in Torino, Italy, Mangen is finding that that may indeed be the case. She, along with her frequent collaborator Jean-Luc Velay, Pascal Robinet, and Gerard Olivier, had students read a short story—Elizabeth George’s “Lusting for Jenny, Inverted” (their version, a French translation, was called “Jenny, Mon Amour”)—in one of two formats: a pocket paperback or a Kindle e-book. When Mangen tested the readers’ comprehension, she found that the medium mattered a lot. When readers were asked to place a series of events from the story in chronological order—a simple plot-reconstruction task, not requiring any deep analysis or critical thinking—those who had read the story in print fared significantly better, making fewer mistakes and recreating an over-all more accurate version of the story. The words looked identical—Kindle e-ink is designed to mimic the printed page—but their physical materiality mattered for basic comprehension.

Wolf’s concerns go far beyond simple comprehension. She fears that as we turn to digital formats, we may see a negative effect on the process that she calls deep reading. Deep reading isn’t how we approach looking for news or information, or trying to get the gist of something. It’s the “sophisticated comprehension processes,” as Wolf calls it, that those young architects and doctors were missing. “Reading is a bridge to thought,” she says. “And it’s that process that I think is the real endangered aspect of reading. In the young, what happens to the formation of the complete reading circuitry? Will it be short-circuited and have less time to develop the deep-reading processes? And in already developed readers like you and me, will those processes atrophy?”

Of course, as Wolf is quick to point out, there’s still no longitudinal data about digital reading. As she put it, “We’re in a place of apprehension rather than comprehension.” And it’s quite possible that the apprehension is misplaced: perhaps digital reading isn’t worse so much as different than print reading. Julie Coiro, who studies digital reading comprehension in elementary- and middle-school students at the University of Rhode Island, has found that good reading in print doesn’t necessarily translate to good reading on-screen. The students do not only differ in their abilities and preferences; they also need different sorts of training to excel at each medium. The online world, she argues, may require students to exercise much greater self-control than a physical book. “In reading on paper, you may have to monitor yourself once, to actually pick up the book,” she says. “On the Internet, that monitoring and self-regulation cycle happens again and again. And if you’re the kind of person who’s naturally good at self-monitoring, you don’t have a problem. But if you’re a reader who hasn’t been trained to pay attention, each time you click a link, you’re constructing your own text. And when you’re asked comprehension questions, it’s like you picked up the wrong book.”

Maybe the decline of deep reading isn’t due to reading skill atrophy but to the need to develop a very different sort of skill, that of teaching yourself to focus your attention. (Interestingly, Cairo found that gamers were often better online readers: they were more comfortable in the medium and better able to stay on task.) In a study comparing digital and print comprehension of a short nonfiction text, Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith found that students fared equally well on a post-reading multiple-choice test when they were given a fixed amount of time to read, but that their digital performance plummeted when they had to regulate their time themselves. The digital deficit, they suggest, isn’t a result of the medium as such but rather of a failure of self-knowledge and self-control: we don’t realize that digital comprehension may take just as much time as reading a book.

Last year, Patricia Greenfield, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues found that multitasking while reading on a computer or a tablet slowed readers down, but their comprehension remained unaffected. What did suffer was the quality of a subsequent report that they wrote to synthesize their reading: if they read the original texts on paper or a computer with no Internet access, their end product was superior to that of their Internet-enabled counterparts. If the online readers took notes on paper, however, the negative effects of Internet access were significantly reduced. It wasn’t the screen that disrupted the fuller synthesis of deep reading; it was the allure of multitasking on the Internet and a failure to properly mitigate its impact.

Indeed, some data suggest that, in certain environments and on certain types of tasks, we can read equally well in any format. As far back as 1988, the University College of Swansea psychologists David Oborne and Doreen Holton compared text comprehension for reading on different screens and paper formats (dark characters on a light background, or light characters on a dark background), and found no differences in speed and comprehension between the four conditions. Their subjects, of course, didn’t have the Internet to distract them. In 2011, Annette Taylor, a psychologist at the University of San Diego, similarly found that students performed equally well on a twenty-question multiple-choice comprehension test whether they had read a chapter on-screen or on paper. Given a second test one week later, the two groups’ performances were still indistinguishable. And it’s not just reading. Last year, Sigal Eden and Yoram Eshet-Alkalai found no difference in accuracy between students who edited a six-hundred-word paper on the screen and those who worked on paper. Those who edited on-screen did so faster, but their performance didn’t suffer.

We need to be aware of the effects of deeper digital immersion, Wolf says, but we should be equally cautious when we draw causal arrows or place blame without adequate longitudinal research. “I’m both the Cassandra and the advocate of digital reading,” she says. Maybe her letter writers’ students weren’t victims of digitization so much as victims of insufficient training—and insufficient care—in the tools of managing a shifting landscape of reading and thinking. Deep-reading skills, Wolf points out, may not be emphasized in schools that conform to the Common Core, for instance, and need to meet certain test-taking reading targets that emphasize gist at the expense of depth. “Physical, tangible books give children a lot of time,” she says. “And the digital milieu speeds everything up. So we need to do things much more slowly and gradually than we are.” Not only should digital reading be introduced more slowly into the curriculum; it also should be integrated with the more immersive reading skills that deeper comprehension requires.

Wolf is optimistic that we can learn to navigate online reading just as deeply as we once did print—if we go about it with the necessary thoughtfulness. In a new study, the introduction of an interactive annotation component helped improve comprehension and reading strategy use in a group of fifth graders. It turns out that they could read deeply. They just had to be taught how. Wolf is now working on digital apps to train students in the tools of deep reading, to use the digital world to teach the sorts of skills we tend to associate with quiet contemplation and physical volumes. “The same plasticity that allows us to form a reading circuit to begin with, and short-circuit the development of deep reading if we allow it, also allows us to learn how to duplicate deep reading in a new environment,” she says. “We cannot go backwards. As children move more toward an immersion in digital media, we have to figure out ways to read deeply there.”

Wolf has decided that, despite all of her training in deep reading, she, too, needs some outside help. To finish her book, she has ensconced herself in a small village in France with shaky mobile reception and shakier Internet. Faced with the endless distraction of the digital world, she has chosen to tune out just a bit of it. She’s not going backward; she’s merely adapting.

from: New Yorker

Why Do Some Authors Just Fade Away?

by: lightninglouie

Well, duh, obviously tastes change. Most of the bestselling authors from forty or fifty years ago have already been forgotten, since they and their core audiences have grown elderly or died. But what about classic genre writers?

Consider the case of Robert Heinlein. For forty years, he was the science fiction writer, a hugely influential, dominant, and generally beloved figure who shaped or created entire subgenres of fantastic literature, from urban fantasy to military space opera. He was controversial, but almost universally admired, and tremendously popular, becoming the first SF writer to reach the New York Times Bestseller List withStranger in a Strange Land in 1961. But since his death in 1988, his popularity and significance have dwindled. According to Jonathan Strahan, one of the major editors in the SF field, very few young writers in their twenties and thirties have read Heinlein or are familiar with his work, beyond maybe seeing Verhoeven's Starship Troopers movie. It's not likely that Heinlein is going to go out of print any time soon, but it's harder to find a lot of his stuff in bookstores, besides bestsellers likeStranger and Troopers. It's not like when I was a teenager in the '80s, and even mall stores would have, say, Glory Road or Door Into Summer on the shelves.

As a counterexample, look at H.P. Lovecraft. He was never popular or even respected in his time, and his work wasn't even collected in book form until several years after his death. Even when he did become popular in the '60s and '70s, he was still considered a pulpy hack writer by many critics and a lot of fans. But today, he's more popular and respected than ever. Cthulhu is a recognizable pop culture figure (even Autocorrect knows he's legit!), and you can buy nice annotated editions of Lovecraft's work from Penguin Classics and Library of America. Not bad for a guy who died in total poverty and obscurity almost eighty years ago.

Maybe you could argue that these are simply reflections of larger trends. One argument goes that after Vietnam and Watergate, folks stopped looking to the stars in hope and began to look upon Space Age technology with dread and anxiety. But as far as I can tell, people still read Heinlein's contemporaries like Asimov and Bradbury. And while Lovecraft is bigger than ever, horror literature's popularity cratered in the early '90s and has never recovered the sales it enjoyed during the '70s and '80s. So there's something more complex going on beyond demographics or changes in social attitudes.

from: Observation Deck

U.S. libraries become front line in fight against homelessness

by: Ian Simpson

(Reuters) - George Brown, a homeless man in Washington, has a simple answer when asked how often he uses a public library.

"Always. I have nowhere else to go," Brown, 65, said outside the U.S. capital's modernist central library after a morning reading sociology books. "When it's hot, you come here to stay out of the heat. When it's cold, you come here to stay out of the cold."

Brown is among the hundreds of thousands of homeless people who have put the almost 9,000 U.S. public libraries, the most of any country in the world, in the forefront of the battle against homelessness.

Moving beyond their old-fashioned image as book custodians where librarians shush people for talking too loud, libraries have evolved to serve as community centers, staffed with social workers and offering programs from meals to job counseling.

Homelessness is an especially acute issue for libraries as the United States slowly emerges from the 2007-2009 recession and deals with stubborn poverty, experts said.

Libraries are magnets for the homeless since they are public, free, centrally located and quiet. They also are safe, a major draw given that 337 homeless people have been killed in hate crimes in the last 15 years, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless.

"(Libraries) are on the front line whether they want to or not," said Jeremy Rosen, director of advocacy at the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, an advocacy group.

The upturn in homeless outreach is part of an overall 47 percent increase in library programs from 2004 to 2011, according to a June report by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.


OCCASIONAL COMPLAINTS

Libraries' openness is not without critics. Donald Root, head of the main Philadelphia library, said he has received occasional complaints from patrons about homeless people who are smelly, loud, asleep or who appear mentally ill. Other library officials reported similar experiences.

In online comments in a Yelp review, San Francisco's main library drew complaints from patrons about homeless people who were sleeping, bathing in restrooms, made sexual comments or were monopolizing computer terminals.

"Amazing library ruined by the army of homeless that come to sleep and shower here," one patron wrote.

Libraries can have their own guidelines, like Washington's six-page rule book barring alcohol, bare feet, oversize bags and an odor that can be smelled six feet (two meters) away.

Rules for behavior have been influenced by a 1991 appeals court decision that said libraries were limited public forums, allowing them to put limits on patrons' behavior.


VARIETY OF PROGRAMS

About 610,000 Americans were homeless in January 2013, almost half of them in big cities, according to a one-night head count by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Hundreds of programs to help the homeless have been set up in libraries across the United States.

The Queens Library in New York City offers a summer reading club and is developing an online application to help people find services.

Greensboro, North Carolina, libraries have offered haircuts, meals, blood pressure screening, and job and business counseling, said Brigitte Blanton, director of the city's libraries.

Philadelphia's central library, where scores of homeless people line up before opening every day, features a cafe staffed by homeless people. The homeless also police bathrooms to ensure that they are not used for bathing or washing clothes.

Libraries in Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington have hired social workers.

"Someone told me before I started working here, 'Oh, librarians are just social workers.' And I laughed about it, and it's true," said Jean Badalamenti, the Washington libraries' social worker.

A Madison, Wisconsin, library, installed a parking lot for shopping carts and other baggage.

"What some of the libraries are doing is phenomenal," said David Pirtle, who was once homeless and now gives speeches for the National Coalition for the Homeless.

He said libraries were more welcoming than a decade ago, when some sought to limit access for the homeless. The homeless also are more willing to work with librarians and security officers, Pirtle said.



(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Scott Malone and Eric Beech)

from: Reuters

Libraries battle bed bugs in books

by: Bethany Barnes

The vampire in the teen romance your daughter checked out from the library is fictional — but there could be a bloodsucker lurking in the book’s binding that isn’t make believe.

A bed bug was spotted in a Las Vegas-Clark County Library District bin two weeks ago in the service center where 18,000 library items are sorted daily, said Karen Bramwell-Thomas, the district’s public relations manager. The stowaway was captured with tape, but some UNLV students think there might be a way to kill the creatures before they get past the book drop.

UNLV undergraduate engineering students Jack Cheney, Nicole Ramos and Vachara Maneeraj created a solar-powered book drop that roasts bed bugs to death. The project was part of UNLV’s engineering senior design competition in May. All engineering students must collaborate for a year to produce a product using their engineering skills.

Inspiration came when Shawn Gerstenberger, dean of the School of the Community Health Sciences, spoke to the students during the fall 2013 semester about the public health challenge of bed bugs sneaking into library books.

Hotels and apartments are better known hosts of bed bug battles, but the pests also are a problem for public spaces — like libraries — as the creatures are excellent hitchhikers.

Libraries have had to close because of infestations, and some places have protocol that requires destroying books that come into contact with the bugs.

Knowing heat destroys bed bugs, the students decided to see if they could craft an inexpensive solution using solar power.

The result was an insulated wooden black box with a Plexiglas top that barbecues the bugs.

The cooking comparison isn’t hype — returned books land on an actual grill, a cautionary measure for the unlikely scenario in which a bug tries to escape.

If a bed bug tries to crawl out of a book, it will fall through the grill into a powdery abrasive earth mixture, which will stick to the bug and slice up its exoskeleton, ensuring its demise, Ramos said.

TESTING THE BUG BOX

How do they know it works?

The students ordered 75 bed bugs online, through a supplier that ensured the bugs were for academic use, and tested the deadly book drop.

Maneeraj remembers when the distinctive package was delivered to his home, complete with an ice pack so the creatures wouldn’t die in route. Excited, he raced into his garage so he could peer into the parcel away from any furniture.

Then he made the phone call to his teammates, “We got them.”

The students worked on a $1,000 budget, testing prototypes before building the final design, which the students said cost about $400.

Ramos said working on a project that forced them to apply their engineering skills to a real world situation reassured them that they would actually learned something.

The students said they are interested in shopping the project around and have applied for a patent.

While designed to slay bed bugs, the book drop could also be useful in snuffing out germs, such as those that cause the common cold, Ramos said.

Bed bug expert Dawn Gouge, a public health entomologist and associate professor at the University of Arizona, called the bed bug killing book drop “fantastic.” She suggested the drop be developed to work for everything someone might check out. Materials such as DVDs also are at risk, Gouge said.

Gouge called bed bugs a “national crisis.” Even in a scenario like renting a tux, there’s a risk.

“We’ve definitely had a lot of issues with librarians going, ‘What the heck is that?’ ” Gouge said, noting that over the past few years many libraries have trained staff about the pests, which Las Vegas-Clark County Library District started doing in 2010.

The pests are a problem for libraries everywhere, Gouge said. If a library says bed bugs aren’t a concern, it’s likely they are in denial or unaware of the issue, she said.

BE VIGILANT

While the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District recently had a bed bug encounter, Bramwell-Thomas said the district has only faced intermittent bed bug issues and has never had an infestation or needed to close one of its libraries because of bed bugs.

Henderson Libraries don’t have a protocol for bed bugs because the critters have never caused an issue, said Angela Thornton, executive director of Henderson Libraries, who added the book drop sounded fascinating.

North Las Vegas Library District staff are instructed to inspect returned items, said North Las Vegas Library District director Forrest Lewis. If there is any indication of bed bugs, the book would be sealed in a plastic bag and quarantined, he said.

Lewis said North Las Vegas libraries haven’t had any incidents with bed bugs but stay cautious because the insects have been problematic for libraries throughout the country.

Bed bugs shouldn’t stop anyone from going to the library, Gouge said. The public should be vigilant, she said, but there is a only a rare chance that someone will encounter a bed bug in a library book.

If a bed bug does find its way into your book, you would likely see it, Gouge said. Typically, it’s the well-fed adult bed bugs that survive in books, and those are easily seen with the naked eye, she said. Bed bug eggs, which could end up in the spine of a book, are also visible to the naked eye, she said.

The trick is being a careful reader and knowing what the bugs look like. Watch for the dark spots the bugs leave in their wake, she said. Gouge recommended that people inspect library books and their bindings.

Luckily for Las Vegans, summer reading can be easily debugged by leaving a book in a hot car.

Ramos said the students initially tested their idea by monitoring temperatures of books left in cars. Bed bugs die at 120 degrees, she said.

ABOUT BED BUGS

— Bed bugs are wingless and about the size of Abraham Lincoln’s head on a penny.
— The creatures can go several months without eating.
— The insects’ scientific name is cimex lectularius.
— It’s a myth that bed bugs are associated with unclean locations. Bed bugs can happen to the swankiest of places.
— Bed bugs aren’t known for spreading disease, though some people can have allergic reactions to the bug’s bites. It’s also possible for a person to show no signs of having been bitten, making it difficult for that person to realize they’ve got a problem.
— Bed bugs get their name because they set up lairs near where people sleep. Infestations tend to happen about 8 feet from where someone is sleeping.

Source: Centers For Disease Control and Prevention

from: Las Vegas ReviewJournal

NY Public Library Pilots Program to Rent Out Free Wifi

by: NY1 News

Coming up, in addition to books, how the New York Public Library is next working on lending out technology. NY1's Adam Balkin filed the following report.

Libraries are known for lending books. Libraries have recently also become known as a place to use computers and the internet. Now though, libraries are combining the two in their latest effort to try to close the so-called "Digital Divide"—made up of those who do and do not have access to the internet.

The New York Public Library recently completed a pilot project during which certain patrons were able to check out wireless routers giving them free, unlimited internet access at home.

“If you come in and you’re part of a program, an educational program, then you’re somebody that can be eligible to receive a device, if you do not have internet at home or if you do not have access to internet at home. And some of the families, through the pilot program, if they didn’t have any way to access the internet as well they were able to receive laptops as well," said New York Public Library's Paul Lee.

The library says while users are encouraged to use the router to, at least in part, continue online education programs started at the local branch…users are free to surf however they please.

Some of the people who’ve already checked them out say because they don’t use the internet that often, they never realized how useful and, in some cases, necessary it can be, not just for themselves but more so for their children.

One library patron, Maria Rangel, says because English is her second language, she has trouble helping her daughter learn to read and pronounce words properly in English, borrowing a computer and internet access though allows her daughter to log in to interactive reading lessons online.

“They show you how to read word by word and actually I don’t know how to pronounce any word so she’s starting to be my teacher, so it really helps for me and for my daughter because she’s growing, she’s feeling like she can be my teacher," Rangel says.

As for when wireless lending will become a permanent service, the New York Public Library says it plans to evaluate data from the pilot and have the program back full time this fall.

from: NY1

Librarian transforms school bus to deliver books to kids in need

by: Amy Nile

Seated on the entrance to the Snohomish Book Cafe Bus, Osmar Mendez, 2, looks at picture books during one of the converted school bus's weekly stops at the Three Rivers mobile home park in Snohomish. Ian Terry/The Herald

SNOHOMISH — She's a school librarian turned bus driver.

Jenny Granger is delivering books to kids around Snohomish to beat the “summer slide.” Between tests in June and September, there's a general drop in students' scores. Granger says a big factor is the fact kids don't read as much during the summer.

“We can complain about it or we can do something about it,” said Granger, a teacher and librarian at Snohomish's Emerson Elementary.

She has turned an old yellow school bus into a roving bookmobile. Now she's spending her summer break bringing the library to kids in trailer parks and to places with activities for children.

“These kids are coming from very needy households and they don't have a lot of books at home,” Granger said.

The rolling Book Cafe makes four stops on Tuesdays that coincide with the times and locations of subsidized summer lunch programs. Granger encourages kids to get on board and pick out books.

“I just get out of the way and let them go,” Granger said.

She pulls into to the Circle H trailer park, where more than a dozen barefoot and flip-flop-clad children stand awaiting her arrival. Several run up and give her hugs.

“The kids love it,” Granger said. “It's like hero status.”

Leslie Hernandez, who just finished fifth grade at Emerson, said she found a book she previously borrowed but had to return before she finished it. She was excited to read the rest of the story.

“I love to get new books,” she said. “I don't like reading books twice.”

The kids can take as many titles as they can read in a week. They can hold onto the books or bring them back.

“If they love them, keep them,” Granger said. “The commitment is to read them.”

Inside the bus, the books are shelved in wooden boxes similar to those in a record store. That way kids can see the illustrations on the front as they sort through titles.

“I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover but kids are very graphic,” Granger said.

She made the bus look cartoonish with a set of hot pink eyelashes over the headlights.

Granger volunteers her time for the bookmobile. The school district allowed her to use the bus, which was about to be surplused. Snohomish Education Foundation gave her $5,000 to retrofit the bus, buy supplies and pay for gas. People around town have also pitched in thousands of books.

“This whole thing was Jenny's vision,” said Kristin Foley, a spokeswoman for the district. “It's been her passion and her dream.”

Granger started trying to get students to read more over the summer three years ago. She opened the library for a few hours each week during the break.

“It was great for the kids who came, but they weren't the ones we were worried about,” Granger said.

Last year, she tried the traveling approach in a red van from the 1970s. But more volunteer labor was needed to lug tubs of books in and out at each stop.

“We sweated and died in the heat,” Granger said. “There had to be a better way. It's a little crazy that this is what I'm doing with my day off.”

While the food program goes to areas determined by the federal government, the bookmobile could include more stops in the future.

“It doesn't matter where you live. Some families just don't read,” said Misha Dacy, a librarian at Seattle Hill Elementary.

Granger's next mission is to have ebooks available. She has a plan in the works that will allow kids to download to their devices from inside the bus. She's not sure when the technology will arrive but she is expecting it soon.

“It's an awkward conversation because people say if kids can't afford books then why do they have devices,” she said. “Well, the reality is they do.”

The bus started making its rounds in late June. Granger said interest is strong. She's had to stop her route halfway through to restock books.

“What this bus has done for our community is tremendous,” said Foley, the district spokeswoman. “The kids are so excited. It's heartwarming.”

from: HeraldNet

EveryLibrary Launches Fund To Aid Libraries In Crisis

by: Ian Chant

Most libraries know what its’ like to struggle with finding funding. Getting a levy or tax hike passed is hard work. Living through lean times that freeze hiring and stifle collection development can be trying. But when the rug gets pulled out from under you suddenly, it can be even worse. In order to provide some assistance when eleventh hour budget cuts come knocking, EveryLibrary, the political action committee devoted to strengthening the place libraries have at the civic table, is working on a new program with just these sorts of dilemmas in mind—the Rapid Response Fund, a pot of cash meant to give libraries facing sudden budget cuts the tools to rally supporters quickly and fight back.

According to EveryLibrary founder John Chrastka, situations that could benefit from the aid of the Rapid Response fund come up with troubling regularity in libraries around the nation. While city councils and other officials who control local purse strings have a regular order that generally functions to keep funding levels predictable, there are instances where those groups, or just a single member, can disrupt that order and call established budgets into question.

Chrastka pointed to last year’s attempt by a Parish Council member in LaFourche Parish, Louisiana to divert funds earmarked for the local library towards the building of a new jail instead as one high profile example, but said that EveryLibrary was receiving calls for help from libraries in similar predicaments every month.

Those weren’t the kinds of calls EveryLibrary was initially built to field, though. The original vision for EveryLibrary was not to respond to these kinds of sudden funding issues, Chrastka told LJ, saying that the organization has previously concentrated on building strategic plans in the long term for its partner libraries. But when he started seeing situations like these crop up more and more, it became clear that the PAC needed a more nimble arm to offer help to libraries that needed a quick burst of support, rather than a strategic plan rethought from the ground up.

While the Rapid Response fund itself is new, it’s based on a model that EveryLibrary has seen success with in the past in places like Miami-Dade County, where the mayor announced budget changes that would have severely impacted Miami-Dade libraries last fall, near the end of the budget negotiation cycle. EveryLibrary helped to get funds to local grassroots library advocates, and in the closing days, ran a series of ads on social media that helped draw attention to the library’s plight and played a role in securing $7 million in stopgap funding in the budget for libraries. While it didn’t solve the problems in Miami-Dade, Chrastka said, “putting money in fast helped them live to fight another day.”

According to Ben Bizzle, a 2013 LJ Mover & Shaker and director of technology at the Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library who also serves as a strategic advisor to EveryLibrary, intensive marketing on social media is likely to be one of the main tools used by Rapid Response, as it’s easy to deploy on the fly and can make a quick, effective call to action. “The best way to reach people at the eleventh hour these days is from social media,” Bizzle told LJ, saying its a lesson taken from the good results many libraries have had goosing attendance with social media reminders in the days just prior to an event.

It’s also a cost-effective means of getting the word out to voters, advocates, and stakeholders. ”It doesn’t take a lot of money from our contributors for us to be able to make big financial differences in these libraries,” Bizzle pointed out. Rapid Response will be funded by individual contributions, as well as assistance from corporate sponsors.

To be eligible for Rapid Response help, libraries will have to meet a series of criteria, proving that their funding crisis was unexpected, that it can still be averted, that there are more than 100 hours until a vote or final decision, and that the library has a legitimate advocacy group ready to ensure the investment of funds will be met with boots on the ground action. It’s also a one-time-only action that libraries can call on in crisis. “If this is blowing up in your face every year, we need to do bigger planning,” said Chrastka.

from: LibraryJournal

Amazon Launches Subscription Service For E-Books

by: Alan Greenblatt

Amazon launched a new subscription service for e-books and audiobooks on Friday called Kindle Unlimited.

The service, which will cost subscribers $9.99 per month after a free initial 30-day trial, offers access to more than 600,000 e-books and about 2,000 audiobooks. The reading and listening experiences can be linked through a syncing service.

Such "all you can eat" subscription models have become common for music and video. Amazon now enters into a space already occupied by unlimited reading services such as Scribd, Oyster and Entitle.

Major publishers commonly charge these services a bulk fee upfront for access to their catalogs, plus additional fees each time a user reads a book, according to TechCrunch. They reserve new releases for single sales.

"Amazon is likely looking for a better deal from publishers, or for greater access to current titles, which could be why they aren't included in these test pages," TechCrunch reports.

Amazon has had contentious relations with publishers throughout the e-book era.

Among the titles Amazon has on offer are Life of Pi, the Hunger Games trilogy and the Harry Potter series. Readers can access books through Kindle or any device that has a Kindle app.

"The company already lets users of its Prime premium service to borrow one book each month for no extra charge," CNN notes.

from: NPR

New Jane Austen waxwork uses forensic science to model 'the real Jane'

Forensic artist Melissa Dring has taken three years to construct the figure, making use of contemporary eye-witness accounts
by: Alison Flood

Criminally good likeness... Jane Austen Centre's new waxword of Jane. Photograph: Alastair Johnstone/SWNS.COM

The Jane Austen Centre claims to have drawn on forensic techniques and eye-witness accounts to create the closest ever likeness of the Pride and Prejudice novelist.

Their waxwork went on display at the centre in Bath on Wednesday morning. It has taken three years to create, with forensic artist Melissa Dring taking as her starting point the sketch done by Austen's sister Cassandra in 1810, the only accepted portrait of the writer other than an 1870 adaptation of that picture. She then used contemporary eyewitness descriptions of the novelist to come up with her own likeness.

Austen's nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, described his aunt as "very attractive". "Her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appearance expressive of health and animation. In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well-formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face," he wrote in his memoir.

Caroline Austen, his sister, had it that "as to my Aunt's personal appearance, hers was the first face that I can remember thinking pretty … Her face was rather round than long – she had a bright, but not pink colour – a clear brown complexion and very good hazle [sic] eyes … Her hair, a darkish brown, curled naturally – it was in short curls around her face."

The Jane Austen Centre said its new waxwork had been "created by a specialist team using forensic techniques which draw on contemporary eye-witness accounts", and that it is the closest "anyone has come to the real Jane Austen for 200 years", reported the BBC.

"[Cassandra's portrait] does make it look like she's been sucking lemons," Dring told the BBC. "She has a somewhat sour and dour expression. But we know from all accounts of her, she was very lively, very great fun to be with and a mischievous and witty person."

Dring said the new statue was "pretty much like her". "She came from a large … family and they all seemed to share the long nose, the bright sparkly brown eyes and curly brown hair," she said. "And these characteristics come through the generations."

from: Guardian

For sale: the £3m library that time forgot

Books so rare they were unknown to scholars are among the treasures uncovered in a family library, in a collection going under the hammer at Christie's for £3 million.

by: Anita Singh

When the descendants of Allan Heywood Bright inherited his library, they knew it contained books of note.

After all, Mr Heywood Bright and his forebears were noted bibliophiles and the collection had been built up steadily since the 1800s.

However, they had no idea just how special the library would turn out to be. Experts called in to catalogue the dusty volumes were astonished to find medieval treasures so rare that they were unknown to scholars.

They include the only complete copy of The Mirror of Recluses, a medieval text composed in the early 15th century.

The British Library holds an incomplete version but scholars had no idea that the full version, which is over one-third longer, remained in existence.

It includes a previously unknown prologue which opens: “Here bygynneth the boke that is callid in Englysch the Mirrowr of Recluses.”

The pre-sale estimate of £50,000-£80,000 pales in comparison to that of The Missal of Ludwig of Teck, illustrated by a Master of the Prayerbook at the Habsburg Court between 1430 and 1435.

The beautifully illustrated liturgical text had never been heard of before. It is expected to sell for up to £800,000 when the collection comes up for sale at Christie’s in London on July 16.

“Nobody had any idea these books existed. They are bombshell discoveries,” said Thomas Venning, head of Christie’s book department, who described it as the most exciting find of his career.

“We approached each viewing with a sense of caution and also with a sense of wonder. We didn’t know what was going to come up.

“Many of these books are being brought to scholarly attention for the first time.”

The collection has a pre-sale estimate of £3 million but Venning said: “Nobody knows how much it will fetch because it is the unknown element that makes it so special.”

Other highlights include a previously unknown work by Catherine d’Amboise, a French Renaissance author; works of Plato bound for King Charles II; and an illuminated history of the ancient world presented to the King of Naples.

The collection was started by Joseph Brook Yates, a Liverpool banking and shipping magnate who died in 1855. He was also a social reformer who founded a hospital in the city, and president of the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society.

He left his books to his grandsons, Henry Yates Thompson and Samuel Ashton Thompson Yates, who were also notable figures in the city – the latter name lives on at Liverpool University, where the laboratory buildings are named after him.

Henry donated 52 books to the British Library’s Department of Manuscripts but the rest remained at the family seat of Thingwall Hall in Knotty Ash.

Two generations on, the family found another bibliophile in Heywood Bright, a Liberal politician, who resided at Thingwall and added to the collection before his death in 1941.

The collection of 365 books and manuscripts is being sold under the title Yates, Thompson and Bright: A Family of Bibliophiles by one of Heywood Bright's grandchildren, who kept them at home in Herefordshire.

The Christie’s specialist explained: “They are selling partly for practical reasons, because they are moving house. Also, the current generation are not active collectors.

“They knew there were precious books in there but they were not prepared for the rediscoveries we made. The collection had remained largely undisturbed since Allan Heywood Bright’s death 70 years ago.”

from: Telegraph

Amazon and Hachette take ebooks battle into public domain

The stand-off between the internet retail giant and the publishing corporation has drawn both sides into open contention over commercial terms
by: Alison Flood

The extraordinary stand-off between Amazon and Hachette saw battle lines further entrenched on Tuesday as both parties took to the public arena to insult and accuse each other.

While titles from Hachette writers including JK Rowling and James Patterson continue to be given long delivery times by Amazon, a sanction imposed by the retailer as the pair fail to agree on new ebook terms, on Tuesday a letter from Amazon proposed giving Hachette authors "100% of the sales price of every Hachette ebook we sell". The retailer suggested that both Amazon and Hachette forgo "all revenue and profit from the sale of every ebook until an agreement is reached", saying this might "take authors out of the middle of the Hachette-Amazon dispute (actually it would be a big windfall for authors) and would motivate both Hachette and Amazon to work faster to resolve the situation".

The letter was first sent to a select few authors, and then to Hachette itself, reported the New York Times. It was printed in full by the website Gigaom.

Hachette told US press that accepting the offer would be suicidal. "We call baloney," Amazon responded. "Hachette is part of a $10bn global conglomerate. It wouldn't be 'suicide'. They can afford it. What they're really making clear is that they absolutely want their authors caught in the middle of this negotiation because they believe it increases their leverage. All the while, they are stalling and refusing to negotiate, despite the pain caused to their authors. Our offer is sincere. They should take us up on it."

Both sides offered conflicting versions of the negotiations over terms. Amazon wrote in its letter that "we reached out to Hachette for the first time to discuss terms at the beginning of January for our contract which terminated in March. We heard nothing from them for three full months. We extended the contract into April under existing terms. Still nothing. In fact we got no conversation at all from Hachette until we started reducing our on-hand print inventory and reducing the discounts we offer customers off their list prices. Even since then, weeks have gone by while we waited for them to get back to us. After our last proposal to them on 5 June, they waited a week to respond at all, promising a counter-offer the following week. We are still waiting a month later."

Hachette, meanwhile, told the Wall Street Journal: "we made an offer in April that was the largest we ever made to any retailer, and in May made another that was higher still … both offers were rejected".

Both sides' public statements about their commercial negotiations follow an open letter from hundreds of mainstream writers, including Stephen King, Donna Tartt and Philip Pullman, calling on Amazon "in the strongest possible terms to stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business". A counter-petition from a group of major self-published authors asked readers not to boycott Amazon in the wake of the negotiations, saying that "all the complaints about Amazon should be directed at Hachette. It is Hachette who wants to charge you more while paying their authors less."

Douglas Preston, the bestselling author who launched the open letter, told the Guardian earlier this week that the writers were not "against" Amazon as a company.

"To say we're against Amazon is like saying people who protest the war are against America. You can be against the war and still be a patriotic citizen.  I would say to the honourable counter-petitioners that we're all on the same side – that is the side of books and literature and reading – and that we should not be framing this as some kind of culture war between self-published and traditionally-published authors. Are we not in the same (leaky) boat and should we not be bailing together? Most of the world out there does not give a damn about books," said Preston. "What we're asking Amazon is something quite simple: please don't hurt authors in your effort to gain leverage in a commercial negotiation with another large corporation."

from: Guardian

Mach and mascarpone: testing how vocabulary is gendered

A survey has shown an 'awesomely sexist' discrepancy between the English words understood by different genders
by: Alison Flood

Do you know what decoupage is? Tresses, taffeta, and mascarpone? Then you're statistically more likely to be female. If you're more confident identifying a golem, a paladin, or a scimitar, then you're more likely to be a man. That's according to research from the Center for Reading Research at the University of Ghent, highlighted by MobyLives, which analysed the results of half a million vocabulary surveys, and found that "some words are better known to men than to women and the other way around". And the words? Well, as MobyLives put it, "our vocabularies are awesomely sexist".

Here goes, with the numbers in brackets being the percentage of men who knew the word, and women. These are the 12 words with the largest difference in favour of men: codec (88, 48), solenoid (87, 54), golem (89, 56), mach (93, 63), humvee (88, 58), claymore (87, 58), scimitar (86, 58), kevlar (93, 65), paladin (93, 66), bolshevism (85, 60), biped (86, 61), dreadnought (90, 66). These are the 12 words with the largest difference in favour of women: taffeta (48, 87), tresses (61, 93), bottlebrush (58, 89), flouncy (55, 86), mascarpone (60, 90), decoupage (56, 86), progesterone (63, 92), wisteria (61, 89), taupe (66, 93), flouncing (67, 94), peony (70, 96), bodice (71, 96).

"While men indulged in souped-up military wet dreams, women apparently grew up in a Victorian beauty salon, wherein they flitted about in petticoats and worried if future husbands were taking notice of their domestic skills," writes MobyLives, rather brilliantly.

Well, I know what all the words on the female list mean, apart from bottlebrush (unless it's a brush for a bottle), but I'm struggling with codec and solenoid on the male list. Codec – something Dan Brown-ish, I'm thinking, and solenoid … something to do with tonsils, or is that adenoid? Just googled them – I'm wrong, and bottlebrush turns out to be a sort of plant.

So what does this all mean? These 24 words, write the researchers, "should suffice to find out whether a person you are interacting with in digital space is male or female". Well, thank goodness! If you don't believe someone when they tell you they're female online, then throw a quick vocabulary test their way, and you'll soon know the truth.

You can take the test yourself – it lasts about four minutes, and you have to correctly identify whether a word is real, or made up. (I got 71%, described, rather patronisingly, as "a high level for a native speaker". I said yes to 3% of the made-up words, and I didn't realise that the words glanderous – "a contagious, usually fatal disease of horses and other equine species"; huarache – "a flat-heeled sandal with an upper of woven leather strips"; and tolan - "a white crystalline derivative of acetylene" were actually real.)

Anyway, I'm rather disturbed to learn that even our vocabularies turn out to be gendered. I've cheered myself up, though, with the researchers' lists of words known in the UK and not the US, and vice versa; can you guess which of these is the UK list? Yob, naff, brolly, korma, bodge and gormless, or goober, boondocks, coonskin and sassafras?

And how about the 20 least-known words in English: "the words of which less than 3% of the participants in our test indicated they were English words. For comparison, the fake words were endorsed by 8.3% of the participants on average. So, these are words not only unknown to everyone but also unlikely to be 'mistaken' for a true English word."

They are wonderfully Jabberwockian: cacomistle and didapper, chaulmoogra and gossypol and genipap … I hadn't heard of a single one, but I'm going to see if I can drop a couple into conversation at some point today – not in a brummagem way, of course, just casually.

I'll also be peppering my idle chitchat with claymores and kevlar, in my own small attempt to tackle gender stereotyping. Or maybe MobyLives's blogger is right, and it simply "shows us that men just play more video games".

from: Guardian

Malorie Blackman: ‘I love gadgets, but e-reading has to be carefully handled’

Children’s Laureate enthusiastic about children reading digitally but thinks publishers should ‘proceed with caution’
by: Stuart Dredge

Author and Children’s Laureate Malorie Blackman is enthusiastic about the potential for children to read books digitally, but thinks the publishing industry should “proceed with caution” to ensure key benefit of reading aren’t lost.

“I love my gadgets – I used to be a programmer! – but I think we’re always going to need stories,” said Blackman, during an appearance at the Children’s Media Conference in Sheffield.

“Maybe the delivery mechanism will change: in 10 years time or maybe even less, most children and teenagers will be reading more electronic books than otherwise. But I think we have to proceed with caution.”

Blackman cited the importance of “reading with meaning” – children not just reading a story, but understanding it – and questioned whether some book-apps with “all the bells and whistles” further that aim, if children are distracted from the story itself.

“I do think it has to be carefully handled how you do that, but we’ll have more reading going on on electronic devices. That’s inevitable,” said Blackman, before citing a study suggesting that 17% of teenagers are embarrassed to be seen reading by their peers – with e-reading a possible solution to that.

Blackman is curating a Young Adult Literature Convention (YALC) as part of the London Film and Comic Con convention this month, in a deliberate effort to position books alongside other cultural forms that appeal to young people.

“For me it’s about embracing stories. If you’re into films and into TV and into computer games there’s absolutely no reason why you couldn’t be into books as well,” she said, before suggesting that no child should be lost to reading.

“It’s about finding out what they’re interested in. When I go into schools and ask ‘who doesn’t like reading?’ and a few hands go up, I just say ‘you haven’t found the right book yet!’” said Blackman.

“I firmly believe that there are books out there for every child. You just have to put the right book in that child’s hand. And that includes comics and graphic novels.”

Blackman told an anecdote from her childhood about a teacher snatching a Spider-Man comic out of her hand and tearing it up, on the grounds that it wasn’t proper literature.

“I would sit there with my Guardian newspaper and have my Batman comic hidden inside!” she said. “This snobbery about graphic novels and comics, we have to get past it. For some people that’s their way into reading. Anything that gets a child into reading? That’s valid.”

Clashes with teachers had cropped up earlier in Blackman’s speech, when she related the tale of sitting down with a careers teacher during her A-Levels to discuss her desire to become an English teacher.

“She looked at me and said ‘Black people don’t become teachers. Why don’t you become a secretary instead?’” said Blackman, to gasps from the audience. “‘And besides, I don’t think you’re going to get your English A-Level’. I remember looking at her and thinking I’ll show you, you old cow!”

And how. Blackman has published 60 books for children and young adults, as well as TV scripts and stage plays. She was awarded an OBE in 2008, and appointed as Children’s Laureate in 2013.

Blackman said her career has been inspired by memories of her voracious reading as a child, and what was missing from the books that she read.

“I didn’t read a single book that featured a black child like me. The first one I read was The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and that was when I was 21,” she said.

“I loved reading, and put myself in those stories, but I was very aware that I was not reflected in the descriptions I was reading of the characters in those books. I took on the message that this world I loved of literature wasn’t for me, because I couldn’t see myself reflected anywhere in it.”

Blackman’s career has been a journey in “writing all the books I’d loved to read as a child”, after a bumpy start characterised by rejection letters from publishers, and unsettling reactions from companies who were interested in publishing her work.

“One publisher said ‘We really like the story, but would you mind if we made your characters white? We already have a book that features a family that is black’,” said Blackman.

“I said ‘how many books do you have that feature a white family?’ and it went silent. Then they said ‘How about if we made them Asian…’.”

Blackman talked about the inspiration for some of her most popular books, including current affairs. Noble Conflict, for example, was driven by the actions of US army private Chelsea Manning (Bradley Manning at the time) and NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

“I loved the idea of a boy who thinks he’s working for the greater good: a guardian, a cross between a soldier and police, who thinks he’s on the right side and he isn’t,” said Blackman, about her 60th book.

She also talked about her history of confounding doubters within the industry. “I was told white children would never want to read a story featuring a black child, and I was told these stories would never get international sales, and it was all nonsense,” she said.

This is one reason Blackman took on the Children’s Laureate post, including a busy schedule of visiting schools around the UK and talking to children.

“It’s not just about encouraging BAME [Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic] children, but about working-class white children too: anyone who’s been told you can’t do this because of your background. It’s nonsense,” she said.

“You need to get out there and show everybody that these avenues are open to everybody, so that if you do have a careers teacher saying ‘that’s not for the likes of you’, our children will know differently.”

from: Guardian