Delaware is first US state to introduce digital inheritance

by: Colm Gorey

The small east coast state of Delaware in the US has made history by being the first state to pass a law which will protect the right of family members to access the digital life of a deceased family member.

Known as the ‘Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets and Digital Accounts Act’, the piece of legislation will give a person’s heir the right to access and gain legal control of all of the deceased’s devices and digital accounts, much like any existing property that is usually transferred to someone following a loved one’s death, according to Ars Technica.

The bill makes Delaware the first state in the US, and potentially the world, to accept the right of inheritance in digital terms when previously there has been much trouble created by family members who have requested from tech companies and social networks access to accounts that have been lost because the deceased never gave them their passwords.

The bill was previously lobbied by an organisation called the Uniform Law Commission, which wanted to address shortcomings within the law that weren’t up to date with the fast pace of technology and privacy issues.

The terms of service of most websites are rather clear about the sharing passwords in that under no circumstances is anyone legally allowed to give their password to someone else to use their login, despite it being commonplace in some capacity by many.

While social media sites have not directly commented on the ruling, an attorney representing companies including Google, Yahoo! and Facebook has criticised the decision of Delaware’s lawmakers. Speaking to Ars Technica, director of the State Privacy and Security Coalition, Jim Halpert said, “This law takes no account of minimising intrusions into the privacy of third parties who communicated with the deceased.

“This would include highly confidential communications to decedents from third parties who are still alive - patients of deceased doctors, psychiatrists, and clergy, for example - who would be very surprised that an executor is reviewing the communications.”

from: Silicon Republic

Why Your Library May Soon Have Laser Cutters and 3-D Printers

by: Clive Thompson

Visit the downtown branch of the Chattanooga Public Library and you'll find the usual stuff: rows of books, magazines, and computers. But walk up to the fourth floor and there's something unexpected. It's a “makerspace”—complete with a laser cutter, a zine lab for making paper publications, and a 3-D printer. There's even a loom.

When it opened in spring 2013, the maker floor—formerly unused and filled with decrepit equipment—became a massive hit, and up to 1,200 patrons attended events there. “Normally you hold a library event and you get six people,” says Meg Backus, the systems administrator and chief maker for Chattanooga. But this new floor gives patrons access to new forms of literacy, ones they hunger after: design, programming, video editing, book writing, and website building. Consider it a glimpse into the future of libraries. They're becoming places to not just imbibe knowledge but create it—physically. Many people don't have access to classic hacker spaces, are intimidated by them, or can't afford them. “But here all you need is a library card,” says CJ Lynce, who runs a similarly equipped space at the Cleveland Public Library.

Chattanooga and Cleveland aren't the only cities giving this new kind of library a try. A survey by John Burke at Miami University found that 109 libraries in the US had a makerspace or were close to opening one. Others are hosting events like Wikipedia edit-a-thons, where residents plumb the library's resources to create articles about local history. (One library even has its own farm.) This ferment is attracting patrons; a Pew Internet survey found that these new modes bring in folks who normally shun libraries, typically men and people with limited education.

Ezra Reynolds is an example. As a kid he visited Chattanooga's main branch regularly but eventually stopped. Today he works assisting people with physical disabilities, and a year ago he adopted a son (now 2) whose arms end below the elbow. When Reynolds heard about the 3-D printer, he made his son a bunch of customized prostheses, including utensil- and pencil-holders. “This is what got me back in the door to the library after probably a 15-year hiatus,” Reynolds says. When he visits the library now, he often shares his new skills. This is another part of the trend: spaces where people interact. Older folks teach sewing to the younger ones, who in turn teach them laser etching.

But what about books? Public Library Association research shows that people have checked out slightly fewer materials in recent years. And Pew found that about a third of patrons are opposed to makerspaces if they displace books. But while I'm just as sentimental about the primacy of hard copy, the librarians aren't. As they all tell me, their job is helping with access to knowledge—not all of which comes in codex form and much of which is deeply social. Libraries aren't just warehouses for documents; they're places to exchange information. “Getting people in a room, talking and teaching each other, is huge,” Backus says. Nor are the makerspaces necessarily expensive. The Chattanooga project cost only $25,000.

You have to give the librarians credit. Stereotype says they're fusty, but the reality is absolutely the opposite. Over and over they've adapted to new information tools, from microfiche to CD-ROMs to the Internet. Now this—possibly the best example I've seen of how a storied institution embraces change.

from: Wired

Book News: Floating Library To Open On New York's Hudson River

by: Annalisa Quinn

• A floating pop-up library is opening on New York's Hudson River this fall. The creation of the artist Beatrice Glow, The Floating Library will appear "aboard the historic Lilac Museum Steamship berthed at Pier 25 on the Hudson River in New York City" from Sept. 6 to Oct. 3, according to the library's website. "The ship's main deck will be transformed into an outdoor reading lounge to offer library visitors a range of reading materials from underrepresented authors, artist books, poetry, manifestoes, as well as book collection, that, at the end of the lifecycle of the project, will be donated to local high school students with demonstrated need." This is not the first floating library — another, the brainchild of the artist Sarah Peters, appeared last year on Minneapolis' Cedar Lake.

from: NPR

Librarians Are A Luxury Chicago Public Schools Can't Afford

by: Becky Vevea

Two years ago, the Chicago Public Schools budgeted for 454 librarians. Last year, the budget called for 313 librarians, and now that number is down to 254.

With educators facing tough financial choices, having a full-time librarian is becoming something of a luxury in Chicago's more than 600 public schools.

It's not that there's a shortage of librarians in Chicago, and it's not mass layoffs. The librarians are being reassigned.

"The people are there, they're just not staffing the library; they're staffing another classroom," says Megan Cusick, a librarian at Nancy B. Jefferson Alternative School. She says all across the district, certified librarians are being reassigned to English classrooms, world languages or to particular grade levels in elementary schools.

"We got down to the point of saying, well, we have a classroom and it doesn't have a teacher," says Scott Walter, a parent at Nettelhorst Elementary, a popular school in the upper-middle-class Lake View neighborhood on the city's North Side.

He says when the district stopped funding specific positions and let principals and school councils decide how to spend their money, the numbers weren't adding up.

"Here's the position and she can be in a library or we can have a teacher in front of 30 kids. And no matter how much you love libraries, and as much as I do, you can't have a classroom without a teacher in front of it," Walter says.

Ultimately, Nettelhorst had to move its librarian, who is also a certified teacher, into a fourth-grade classroom.

In Illinois, all librarians must also have teaching certifications, and most have endorsements to teach specific grades and subjects.

There's no required amount of minutes for library instruction in the state, so schools won't face any repercussions if they don't have a librarian or a school library.

Scott Walter says Nettelhorst students are still able to check out books, because the clerk and parent volunteers help staff the library. Still, he says, it's a lose-lose.

"It feels [like] CPS [Chicago Public Schools] has set us up into a situation where we have to decide which finger we don't want," he says.

School officials wouldn't go on tape for this story. In a fact sheet sent to WBEZ, they touted the district's expanded virtual libraries available to all students. A spokesperson wrote, "we will not be satisfied until we have central and/or classroom-based libraries in every school."

At a school board meeting this summer, CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett addressed the issue and said the real problem is with hiring.

"It's not that we don't want to have librarians in libraries. Nobody can argue that point, but the pool is diminished," she says.

Cusick says if the hiring pool is empty, that's because so many librarians are being reassigned.

She says with so many librarians being transferred to the classroom something bigger is being lost. In the library, they teach kids how to do research, how to find and evaluate information, which she says is even more important in the digital age.

"Kids don't just know how to do that. It's not a skill that they develop just because they have an iPhone or because they have a computer at home, which many of our students don't have," she says.

Cusick and her colleagues don't want to see librarians added at the expense of other positions, like art teachers and physical education teachers. But they also don't want to see school libraries just become places where books are stored and meetings are held.

from: NPR

D.C. adds a social worker to library system to work with homeless patrons

by: Mark Jenkins

Among the many roles for which public libraries are appreciated, there’s one that can be problematic: de facto day shelter for homeless people. Downtown’s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library attracts many such patrons, and Jean Badalamenti understands why.

“The city drops folks from three shelters off here every morning and picks them up in the evening. So they come here because of that,” said Badalamenti, a social worker who in May became the D.C. Public Library’s first health and human services coordinator.

“But they would come here anyway,” she continued. “The library’s a great place to spend the day for anybody. You get access to computers, you can look for jobs, you can connect with your family and friends on Facebook and e-mail, use [photo software] and do lots of creative things.”

Libraries in other cities have addressed homelessness in various ways. Philadelphia has a cafe and Seattle a coffee cart run by workers who were previously homeless; Dallas produces podcasts of interviews with its homeless regulars. But as far as Badalamenti knows, D.C. is only the second U.S. city to hire a library social worker, following San Francisco.

There, several people work directly with homeless patrons, something Badalamenti is occasionally asked to do. “Sometimes staff will call me, just because I’m here, and say, ‘Can you come down?’ And I’ll go down and try to talk to someone. I’m happy to do that. I enjoy that,” she said.

“But that’s not really my job. I’m sort of the bigger picture person.”

A former Ward 4 advisory neighborhood commissioner who has a master’s degree in social work from Howard University and 25 years of experience, Badalamenti works in the library’s programs and partnerships office.

“I really was brought on to figure out how the library can engage more disenfranchised populations in the city,” she said. “And make connections with other organizations to help provide programming.”

Badalamenti knows the situation at MLK best, because her office is there, but she noted that there are homeless “hot spots” throughout the system, as there are in most cities, and in many suburban library systems as well. One of her tasks is introducing the issue to the approximately 100 new staffers hired last year when the library system expanded its hours.

“Those people haven’t necessarily worked in an urban environment before,” she said. “And so [we are] helping them understand what it means to be homeless, what people experience when they’re homeless. Just a sort of sensitivity training, but hopefully we’ll be doing some other kinds of training, even around de-escalation. Identifying folks who might be in a crisis, so the library can respond and be helpful.

“De-escalation,” she explained, means restoring calm: “If someone’s getting angry and frustrated, how do you de-escalate a confrontational situation or an emotional situation?”


The library has just begun a staff survey about interaction with patrons who might be homeless, Badalamenti said. “How’s it impacting your day? What do you need from us? What do you need so that you can do your job and be helpful to these folks — and every single other customer that comes through the door?”

She also hopes the city’s libraries can serve as a point of “coordinated entry” for people in need of social services. “Because the libraries tend to be gathering places for people without homes, it’s important to be part of the citywide conversation about how we’re going to address homelessness, health services and moving people out of homelessness,” she said.

Badalamenti doesn’t want to stigmatize homeless people, or suggest that their presence in the library is inherently a burden. “Every person who comes in who is homeless is not creating a problematic situation,” she said. “All customers, with and without homes, create lots of interesting situations.”


Although homelessness may seem to be an intractable issue, Badalamenti is upbeat. “I think it’s pretty amazing that DCPL saw a need. Instead of turning away from the problem . . . let’s embrace everybody who’s here. And let’s figure out how we can serve them better.”

from: Washington Post

Let’s Not Start Blaming Books for Dangerous Behaviors

by: Emily Temple

Recently, Salon reported on a study in the Journal of Women’s Healththat found young adult women (ages 18-24) who had read Fifty Shades of Grey to be “more likely than non-readers to exhibit signs of eating disorders and to have relationships with verbally abusive partners.” They are also “at increased risk of engaging in binge drinking and having multiple sex partners.” Multiple sex partners! Young adult women? Well, gee, I never!

According to the study:

Compared to participants who didn’t read the book, those who read the first “Fifty Shades” novel were 25 percent more likely to have a partner who yelled or swore at them; 34 percent more likely to have a partner who demonstrated stalking tendencies; and more than 75 percent more likely to have used diet aids or fasted for more than 24 hours.

Those who read all three books in the series were 65 percent more likely than nonreaders to binge drink — or drink five or more drinks on a single occasion on six or more days per month — and 63 percent more likely to have five or more intercourse partners during their lifetime.

Ignoring this weird sexism (when has having had five sex partners ever been held against 24-year-old men, I wonder) and the fact that using diet aids or fasting for more than 24 hours does not a eating disorder make, it’s important to point out that the study did nothing to discover whether these behaviors pre-existed the naughty reading habits or not. But apparently, it doesn’t matter. In a press release, lead researcher and Michigan State University Professor Amy Bonomi said, “If women experienced adverse health behaviors such as disordered eating first, reading Fifty Shades might reaffirm those experiences and potentially aggravate related trauma… Likewise, if they read Fifty Shades before experiencing the health behaviors seen in our study, it’s possible the books influenced the onset of these behaviors.”

Look, I’m no Fifty Shades of Grey apologist, but really? Setting aside the point that (from what I’ve heard) the abuse in the novels is consensual sex play, not actual abuse, this is just the old causation/correlation argument again. Does Fifty Shades of Grey make women engage in or accept abusive relationships? Does it make them binge drink? (Perhaps they need to binge drink because of how bad the book is.) Or perhaps it just turns out that sometimes, the kind of young woman who engages in these behaviors is also the kind of young woman who enjoys reading trashy, S&M-lite literature. Who knows?

Fortunately, novels have long been mostly exempt from the perennial argument that media can induce young people into dangerous behaviors. In fact, more often than not, you see books held up as a counter-example to those concerned about negative influences (mostly violence) in video games, movies or music. Last year, when Jim Carrey “distanced himself” from the violent Kick-Ass 2 in the wake of Sandy Hook, executive producer Mark Millar said he “never quite bought the notion that violence in fiction leads to violence in real life any more than Harry Potter casting a spell creates more boy wizards in real life.” Shakespeare is another one that gets held up a lot — Shakespeare is violent! Is he causing school shootings? Well, of course not — in part because literature is less visceral in some ways than film and video games and even music, so the arguments tend to be less visceral too. Books sometimes get mentioned as part of the list of media that could be a “risk factor,” but have mostly been off the hook. And that’s a good thing. If we start banning books with violence and sex in them (er, again), we’ll lose more than if we ban violent video games. Not that we should ban either, mind you.

“We recognize that the depiction of violence against women in and of itself is not problematic, especially if the depiction attempts to shed serious light on the problem,” Bonomi also said. “The problem comes when the depiction reinforces the acceptance of the status quo, rather than challenging it.” Well that’s definitely true. But let’s not make these sweeping claims about women based on their reading habits — it doesn’t help matters.

from: Flavorwire

The Bob spot: Cedar Rapids man is seeing America, one bookstore at a time

Bob Manson visited more than 30 indie bookstores last year
by: Alison Gowans

Bob Manson loves bookstores.

He loves them so much he’s traveled around the country, visiting more than 30 independent bookstores in 13 states in the last year.

He’s documenting his travels on a blog, http://theindiebobspot.blogspot.com/, with the aim of visiting every store featured in the book, “My Bookstore,” a collection of essays from 81 authors about their favorite independent bookstores.

Along the way he’s bought plenty of books, met shop owners and chatted with their customers.

“It’s just a ball doing this,” he says. “I’ve met so many great people.”

Manson, 57, lives in Cedar Rapids when he’s not exploring the nation’s bookstores. He retired from teaching band at Taft Middle School when the school district offered early retirement incentive packages a few years ago.

Happily for him, that has left him more time to indulge his lifelong passion for travel. He says the bookstore project gives him something to organize his trips around. It also inspires him to get off the beaten path. While many stores are in places like New York City or San Francisco, others are in small towns that require hours of driving to reach.

No two bookstores are alike, he says. He’s been to Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., where shoppers are given a map of the store when they walk in to help navigate the city-block sized building. He’s also been to plenty of small, family-run stores with only a handful of employees.

“It’s like a Chihuahua and a Saint Bernard — they’re both dogs, but they’re totally different,” he says. “A Barnes and Noble is kind of cookie cutter. Pretty much if you go into one, you see the same thing you’d see in another. But, boy, the independent bookstores are totally different.”

He says some of his favorite stores have been in buildings converted from other uses. Examples include Elliot Bay Books in Seattle, Washington, which used to be an auto repair shop, and the Tattered Cover in Denver, Colorado, which has a location in a former theater.

“You can see, OK, here’s the lobby, the theater boxes, the pit orchestra, the stage,” Manson says. “You can just see the theater, and now it’s filled with books.”

He’s also visited many bookstores not on his original list — shop owners keep telling him of other stores they love.

“There is a real brotherhood and sisterhood among these bookstore owners. They know what they’re challenges are, and they stick together,” he says.

He says despite the age of Amazon, he thinks brick-and-mortar independent bookstores will be around for a long time.

“I just got done visiting a store in Ann Arbor, Mich., that has only been open 16 months. I think that’s very encouraging,” he says.

from: The Gazette

Libraries Balk at OverDrive Changes

by: Andrew Albanese

In a letter to OverDrive CEO Steve Potash, the ReadersFirst coalition of libraries has protested a change that would require new users of OverDrive’s app to register accounts directly with OverDrive.

Stressing that “libraries, not the vendors we pay,” should own the customer relationship, the letter expresses “concern with the storage of private patron information” and posits that establishing the OverDrive account is not necessary and is "essentially a marketing opportunity" that could "erode the relationship that the library has with our patrons."

The letter comes in response to an email from OverDrive to library partners announcing changes coming to the OverDrive mobile app. While the good news is that the app would no longer require users to register for an Adobe ID (to navigate the DRM), new users would have to register for an OverDrive account.

In an email to members Monday, Jim Loter, director of Information Technology at the Seattle Public Library said the “ReadersFirst Leadership Group felt strongly that this change to OverDrive’s terms of service was a step in the wrong direction,” that might serve to “further cement the relationship of our patrons with OverDrive’s branded service instead of their local library.”

Loter added that Potash acknowledged the concerns expressed by ReadersFirst and that “he will respond to our message.”

Also on PW

from: Publisher's Weekly

Mobile libraries adapt with changing communities

by: Elaine Kelly-Canning

The dwindling availability of brick-and-mortar book stores, in the age of Amazon and evolving technologies, raises the question of what role libraries will play in the future of our communities.

The mobile library or “bookmobile” has a long history in Canada, facilitating literacy in areas with limited access to a library. Bookmobiles made their debut in most cities across Canada between 1920 and 1930. They were converted trucks or buses outfitted with inwardly-slanted shelves and would often carry up to 2,000 books. Each bookmobile was staffed by a travelling librarian who familiarized themselves with the literary tastes of the community to customize each stop.

However, due to diminished funding and increased brick-and-mortar infrastructure throughout the 1970s and ’80s, most of these services were eliminated around 1990. Cities that lost their bookmobile service often replaced it with outreach services for patrons with disabilities, providing audio books and magazines, e-text, and braille.

But some bookmobiles survived and are still on the road. Strathcona, outside Edmonton, is using a converted transit bus with custom-designed, portable shelving that allows staff to roll on specialized content, explains bookmobile manager Diana Balbar. Their design attracted two visiting librarians from the Netherlands who were documenting best practices in public libraries around the globe.

Ottawa and Edmonton are working on new buses and customized vans to keep up with rising demand. Edmonton is outfitting vans to promote digital literacy by providing computers and laptops (including software to edit films), a sound station with synthesizer keyboards, eBooks, and a device called a “MaKey MaKey” that connects to a banana or other object to make music.

The benefits of the service are unequivocal: it curtails kids’ screen time and gets them out engaging with their community, and it fills in the gaps in the public-school library system. The bookmobile reaches residents that have socio-economic, geographic, or other barriers that prevent them from accessing regular library services and offers a flexible and timely way to address these needs.


Cities with surviving bookmobile services, such as Toronto, Montréal, and Ottawa, claim an increase in readership and use of the service. Michelle Leung, communications officer at the Toronto Public Library, notes that it has adapted to changing community needs and anticipates that there will always be patrons with barriers to access. Canada’s ever-expanding cities might mean we’ll see a resurgence in the bookmobile service in years to come.

from: Spacing

Vancouver’s main library to undergo major reorganization

by: Tracy Sherlock

Vancouver’s downtown library — a nine-storey “Colosseum” that holds 1.3 million items and covers a full block at Georgia and Homer — is approaching its 20th anniversary, and with that will come some significant changes.

The downtown branch, which is known as the Central Library, is being rearranged to make it easier for people to find books, as well as to create space for a new Inspiration Lab.

The 3,000-square-foot Inspiration Lab will be on the library’s third floor, which will be transformed into a space where people will have access to equipment and reference material that will enable them to learn and experiment with traditional, digital and new media. The free, public space is designed to “nurture the talent and creativity of our city and be a hot spot where the next generation of Vancouver’s digital and creative community can get its start,” the library says.

Christina de Castell, the library’s director of resources and technology, said the lab will be a place where people can bring digital stories to life, using the library’s equipment. Examples might include converting old videotapes into digital family movies, or using one of five audio booths to have a grandparent’s voice narrate a family movie.

The equipment will be bookable and free of charge for the public, de Castell said, adding the library is also working with local technology companies to develop training and possibly an expert-in-residence to help people use the tools.

Fundraising is underway for the $750,000 lab and the library hopes to have it open early next year, de Castell said.

Even without the lab, the Vancouver Public Library was voted No. 1 in the world in a study by Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf last December. In 2012, it was used by an estimated 74 per cent of Vancouverites.

To accommodate the new space and to better organize the library’s holdings, levels three through six of the library are being reorganized, which is no small task. The move includes about 750,000 books, 800 bays of shelving and 50 computers and workstations.

The library promises the new layout will mean it is easier for people to find the books they want. The library is staying open during the move and there will be no changes to the children’s library (Lower Level), Special Collections (Level 7) or the fiction, multilingual, teens and DVD sections (all on Level 2).

Jenny Marsh, director of development at the Vancouver Public Library Foundation, said there is still at least one naming opportunity available for a donor to the lab. The library decided to try crowdfunding to raise money for eight iMac computers for the lab. The $16,000 campaign has raised more than $6,000 to date.

The library also has partnered with the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Writers Fest to seek the next Poet Laureate for the city. The position is honourary, with a flexible term of either two or three years, to begin in October. The poet acts as a champion for poetry, attending civic and public poetry events and completing a unique project. Nomination letter or letters of intent are welcome from published or performance poets who live in Vancouver are due today. 

from: Vancouver Sun

Florida university lets students buy titles for its e-book-only library

by: Mariella Moon

It's not uncommon for libraries to offer e-books in addition to dead-tree copies, but the newly opened Florida Polytechnic University takes its digital tome offerings a lot more seriously. The institution has decided to completely forego stocking its library with paper books and will instead rely solely on e-books, which its 550 students (the school is so new, it's not even licensed yet) can browse on tablets, laptops or e-readers. Now, here's the kicker: the students can browse any book they want using the school's proprietary software, but they can access it for free only once -- the second time someone clicks on it, he/she ends up purchasing it for the whole school. In fact, the university has set aside $60,000 for e-book purchases, leaving the library's catalog in its student body's hands.

Aside from that, the school's also discouraging students from printing out documents even though printers are available in the library, in an effort to move away from using paper. Students who still prefer holding hard copies, however, can always just borrow a book or two from the school's off-campus library, which it shares with another institution.

from: engadget

Fast-selling ‘new adult’ genre vying for shelf space in bookstores

by: Stephanie Chan

Author Kathleen Tucker had self-published three young-adult romances when she decided to try her hand at something aimed at a slightly older audience – with more sexually explicit content.

The results were better than anything she expected. A month after she self-published her novel Ten Tiny Breaths online in October, 2012, Ms. Tucker, based in Stouffville, Ont., had raked in more than $50,000 and sold more copies in a day than her three previous books had in a month combined.

Since then, countless authors have followed the same route, taking advantage of a new and growing genre of literature aimed at primarily female readers between 18 and 25. Known as “new adult,” the genre features mainly university or college-aged protagonists dealing with early twenties life, in particular romance and sexual relationships.

The segment of the book-buying market is hard to quantify as the wider industry has been slow to embrace the genre and the bulk of sales are made online. But a recent report by author and publishing data website authorearnings.com found that self-published books make up as much as 25 per cent of Amazon’s bestseller lists. The overwhelming majority of those were in the romance genre, many of which were new adult titles.

New adult has spawned a host of successes such as E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey and Colleen Hoover’s Slammed, with the former reportedly having earned $95-million (U.S.) between mid-2012 and mid-2013. Several authors, such as Ms. Hoover and new adult romance author Bella Andre, have also managed to negotiate with larger publishing houses for print-only deals while keeping e-book selling rights – a rare luxury that happens only when authors hold some clout.

New adult or NA was born out of a casual mention in a call for manuscripts sent out by New York-based publishing giant St. Martin’s Press in 2009. But the throwaway term caught the attention of the online book community and, finally last year, received its own Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) code, which assigns genres to books so that booksellers can more easily place them in sections.

It’s a far cry from new adult’s early days, when Ms. Tucker says friends tried to pitch ideas but received little attention. The genre was too new, she added, and many agents felt it was too soon to take the risk.

But mainstream publishers started to embrace the genre in 2012 after self-published new adult titles, such as Ms. Hoover’s Slammed, shot to the top of bestseller lists, proving that the success of Fifty Shades a year earlier wasn’t a one-off.

“I think … a lot of the interest is among romance publishers or contemporary publishers who have some interest in romance,” said Monica Pacheco, a literary agent with Toronto-based Anne McDermid & Associates. “I think in the last year, I’ve seen a little over 30 deals for it, and by and large, they were mostly romance.”

Thirty isn’t an astronomical number, but it’s an indication that interest in new adult is growing among traditional publishers, she added.

Ms. Tucker, who was signed to New York-based Simon & Schuster’s imprint Atria Books shortly after Ten Tiny Breaths came out, said the industry now sees her and others as hybrid authors, those who have some titles signed to big-name publishers, but who also release their own e-books on the side.

But while new adult is picking up traction in digital sales, large publishers are grappling with how to handle print versions of the books.

Margo Lipschultz, senior editor at Harlequin Enterprises Ltd., said that although new adult titles have made their way onto tables and featured spaces at the end of aisles, few retailers have gone so far as providing the genre with its own shelf space.

“I think they find the term a little confusing or not specific enough to capture a large readership,” she said, adding that Harlequin has been focusing resources on the genre after observing its digital sales success.

“We’re always looking to ensure that we are growing awareness among print readers,” she said. “That can entail anything from including bonus material that’s exclusive to print editions or just looking at ways we can partner with booksellers to ensure that we are shelving them in the right places.”

Other publishers have also made efforts to show traditional sellers that the market for new adult is healthy and thriving by bringing the authors to the stores. Atria has jumped full force into new adult and now plans to release 15-20 NA titles every year, compared with none before 2012.

“The thing is in … convincing booksellers that it’s not just a fad, it really does exist,” says Judith Curr, publisher and president of Atria. “They haven’t really seen people coming into the bookstores and asking for the books perhaps. Whenever it’s a new area, they ask, ‘If I really am going to dedicate shelf space to a new area, what am I going to take it from?’

“All of the readers who made [young adult] explode are now new adult readers potentially,” Ms. Curr says.

What is clear to her, however, is that new adult will have to expand outside of its current literary conventions if it hopes to continue its success. Authors such as Ms. Tucker, whose pen name is K.A. Tucker, and veteran Canadian author Kelley Armstrong, who predicted the wave of new adult way back in 2009, agree.

Already, Ms. Armstrong says, the writing community is quickly responding, with authors branching out into paranormal and suspense. She predicts that in the future, new adult books will be even meatier and plot-driven, though in her experience, publishers interested in the genre now are still mainly interested in what has worked for the past two years.

from: Globe and Mail

Books in translation take off in the U.K.; can they do the same in Canada?

by: Steven W. Beattie

Two of the year’s biggest bestsellers thus far have something in common – something that may come as a surprise to those who haven’t really considered it.

At first blush, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, an 800-page tome about income inequality, and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, a multi-volume autobiographical novel, may seem completely different from one another, and in most respects they are. One aspect they do share: neither was originally published in English. Piketty’s book first appeared in France in 2013 as Le Capital au XXIe siècle; Knausgaard’s six-volume opus, which runs to more than 3,000 pages and has so far had the first three volumes appear in English translation, was published in his native Norwegian between 2009 and 2011.

Conventional wisdom has it that books in translation are a tough sell, though this attitude may be changing, thanks to Piketty, Knausgaard, and such best-selling foreign authors as Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbø, Herman Koch, and Haruki Murakami. According to the Guardian, British readers lined up to get their hands on copies of Murakami’s latest, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. (The queues are testament to Murakami’s international rock-star status, and belie naysayers like Janet Maslin, who wrote in The New York Times that the new novel “is as short on explanations as it is long on overwrought adolescent emotion.”)

The Guardian article indicates that sales for books in translation have been highly robust in Britain lately, surprising publishers and booksellers alike:

In 2012, Hesperus Press, a tiny British firm, sensed potential in a comic Swedish novel that went on to become a European publishing phenomenon after major British and American companies rejected it. Hesperus bought the rights to Jonas Jonasson’s The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, which went on to sell more than 500,000 copies.

Chris White, fiction buyer for Waterstones, said that, blockbusters apart, there are “plenty of translated titles we’ve discovered recently which have sold in their thousands.” He singled out The Collini Case, a legal thriller by Ferdinand von Schirach, one of Germany’s top authors, which has sold 29,385 copies – “more than the last John Grisham” – eclipsing some homegrown novels that barely sell a few hundred. “The perception of translations isn’t what it was perhaps 10 years ago,” he said. “They are just treated as great books.”

Here in Canada, the perception that books in translation are “just treated as great books” by English-language readers may hold true for genre stalwarts such as Larsson, Nesbø, and Henning Mankell, though it continues to be an uphill battle for homegrown fiction from Quebec, despite a series of government-funded translation fairs over the past several years. Numerous houses – including Coach House Books, House of Anansi Press, Cormorant Books, Talonbooks, and Biblioasis – have published works by noted Quebecois authors, though none has reached bestseller proportions among readers in English Canada.

Earlier this year, Coach House published an English translation of Guyana by Élise Turcotte, one of the most interesting authors currently working in Quebec, to little fanfare. Last year’s Anansi translation of Louis Hamelin’s FLQ-era thriller October 1970 was longlisted for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize, but failed to catch on with anglophone readers. Even winning the 2010 iteration of Canada Reads didn’t push the English translation of Nicolas Dickner’s novel Nikolski into bestseller territory.

Perhaps the vogue for translated fiction currently washing over the U.K. will be replicated here. This fall, Arsenal Pulp Press will bring out the English edition of Skandalon, French author Julie Maroh’s graphic-novel follow-up to Blue Is the Warmest Color; the new volume is translated by Canada’s own David Homel. One of this country’s best French-to-English translators, Homel recently collaborated with Jacob Homel on a translation of the late Quebec author Nelly Arcand’s novel Hysteric, published earlier this year by Anvil Press. Kim Thúy’s new novel in English translation, Mãn, is out this month from Random House Canada. (Mãn is the follow-up to 2012’s Ru, which did achieve modest success in English after being shortlisted for the Giller and the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.) Thúy’s book is translated by Sheila Fischman, who is also responsible for the English translation of Crossing the City, the latest from the prolific Michel Tremblay, coming in October from Talonbooks.

Canada clearly does not have a paucity of fiction in translation; finding an audience for it is another matter.

from: Quill and Quire

Google Wants to Save Our Schools—And Hook a New Generation of Users

by: Issie Lapowsky

The old “dog ate my homework excuse” is about to become a thing of the past. And kids will have Google to thank.

The search giant has just released Classroom, a free tool that allows teachers to do everything from assigning projects to collecting and grading assignments, all online. Classroom uses Google’s own products such as Docs and Drive to manage and organize the often chaotic classroom workflow.

Google launched a pilot of Classroom in May, but on Tuesday, the search giant announced it was offering Classroom to anyone with a Google Apps for Education account. The goal, says Classroom creator and Google product manager Zach Yeskel, is to make already overburdened teachers more productive by reducing the time spent pushing paper around a classroom.

“We did user research, and what came to the forefront was the fact that teachers were spending a lot of time doing things other than teaching,” Yeskel, a former high school math teacher, says. “The goal of Classroom is to make the things that should be simple, simple.”

The Business of Education

Of course, Classroom isn’t simply a show of altruism. There’s a business case for the product. For starters, Google Chromebooks have been a runaway hit in schools. In the second quarter of this year alone, Google sold 1 million Chromebooks to schools. The tiny laptops now account for a fifth of all the mobile computer purchases made by schools today, according to The Wall Street Journal.

This somewhat unexpected trend has made Google more focused on offering even more products to teachers already using Chromebooks, Yeskel says: “They were an organic hit in schools, so now our sales team and marketing team and product teams are all thinking about those users more.”

What’s more, those users just happen to be extremely valuable. The whole world may use Google products today, but kids will dictate tomorrow’s market. Tech companies from Facebook to Google are all too aware of the importance of hooking younger users early. “They’re the future,” Yeskel says. “They’ll be going into business someday.”

Just a Start

So it stands to reason that Google would make an aggressive push into the education space. The question is, of all the problems teachers face, why focus on this one? After all, the American school system is fraught with issues, and in Silicon Valley, there’s no shortage of well-meaning companies attempting to use tech to solve those problems. Some provide sophisticated testing tools to assess kids’ skills in real time. Others offer up coding classes as the cure to the education system’s ills. All of it makes Google’s decision to focus on what is essentially a productivity tool for teachers seem somewhat mundane.

But Yeskel says Google’s education team spent a year working with teachers around the world to assess the crowded ed-tech space. They found one gap that remains was classroom management. “It was clear they had a lot of technology that helped with other problems, but there was still an opportunity for us to solve a real problem in classroom organization,” he says.

The whole world may use Google products today, but kids will dictate tomorrow’s market.

Today, Classroom allows teachers to set up a virtual classroom, invite students in, distribute worksheets, assign work, grade and return work, and collaborate with students on a document in real time. Classroom keeps track of what work has been turned in and automatically sorts it into Google Drive folders. Still, Yeskel admits this is just a start. Classroom is merely laying the foundation, spreading Google’s existing services to classrooms around the world in order to layer additional tools on top of it in the future.

“We think there are some foundational pieces that needed to be put in place before we can tackle those problems,” says Yeskel, adding that the company is currently in talks with some third party developers. “Classroom is just the beginning of what we hope to do.”

from: Wired

Denver Public Library launches local music service Volume

by: Matt Miller

Like books, CDs have gone the way of vinyl and cassette.

This generation's musicians are emerging in a digital landscape. Albums are sold as MP3s, branding is done through social media, and many times the instruments themselves are nothing more than laptops and hard drives. Music, along with technology, moves quickly, and it's up to traditionalists to catch up. In the year of its 125th birthday, the Denver Public Library is hitting play on a digital means to disseminate local music to the community.

Sept. 11 marks the official launch of Volume Denver, the library's online collection of local music that's available for free streaming and download for anyone with a library card. Currently, the site has 38 albums available, including local favorites Esmé Patterson and Ian Cookeand genres ranging from Americana to hip-hop.

"We thought this could be an amazing opportunity to connect with our local community," said Volume project manager Zeth Lietzau. The Denver Public Library will celebrate the launch of Volume, along with the library's 125th birthday, with "Overdue: Beer, Books and Bands" at the McNichols Building on Sept. 11. The event features samples from local breweries, food trucks and performances from Ian Cooke, Plat Maravich and Switchyard Social Club.

Taking the idea from a handful of experimental libraries across the country, DPL started building Volume last winter and soft-launched the site on Aug. 5. Since the soft launch, Volume has had 200 albums downloaded, 2,000 tracks downloaded and 6,000 tracks played.

Volume is directed toward two primary audiences, Lietzau said. The first is younger people who don't realize the type of services the library can offer.

"We tend to lose a lot of people in their 20s and early 30s," Lietzau said.

The second targeted audience is the people already using the library who might not know the local music scene.

But with many — if not all — local artists familiar with or already using traditional channels of sharing music like Bandcamp, Soundcloud or Spotify, what would pull users away from established services to the Denver Public Library's Volume?

"I think the one thing that we have is the specifically local piece," Lietzau said. "What we're trying to find is a place that creates a really Denver-centric community. That's a niche that people are interested in."

The service is local to its core — any band that's not based in Colorado isn't allowed to be included in Volume. To compile these local artists, DPL started by putting out a call for submissions.

For this first batch of local musicians, Volume received 91 submissions and selected 50 of those using a committee consisting of library staff and local music enthusiasts who have worked in record stores or reviewed music.

"Hopefully, the fact that they make it through is a source of pride," Lietzau said. "But the biggest thing for them is that local exposure."

While getting some major players in the Colorado music scene — like OneRepublic, The Fray and others — would provide great visibility for Volume, Lietzau said that record label restrictions would deter bigger bands from participating.

But, for smaller bands not yet signed to a record deal, this isn't an issue. In fact, unlike many major online streaming services, Volume will pay artists for their music. Volume gives musicians $100 to host a full album for two years.

As of now, the Volume budget will support 100 albums a year. This budget, and the number of albums available, will grow if Volume proves to be successful.


"We would gauge success on how often things are downloaded," Lietzau said.

from: Denver Post

“War and Peace” tortured me: Facebook, email and the neuroscience of always being distracted

I used to be able to read for hours without digital interruption. Now? That's just funny. I want my focus back!

by: Michael Harris

This essay is adapted from "The End of Absence"

I’m enough of a distraction addict that a low-level ambient guilt about not getting my real work done hovers around me for most of the day. And this distractible quality in me pervades every part of my life. The distractions—What am I making for dinner?, Who was that woman in “Fargo”?, or, quite commonly, What else should I be reading?—are invariably things that can wait. What, I wonder, would I be capable of doing if I weren’t constantly worrying about what I ought to be doing?

And who is this frumpy thirty-something man who has tried to read “War and Peace” five times, never making it past the garden gate? I took the tome down from the shelf this morning and frowned again at those sad little dog-ears near the fifty-page mark.

* * *

Are the luxuries of time on which deep reading is reliant available to us anymore? Even the attention we deign to give to our distractions, those frissons, is narrowing.

It’s important to note this slippage. As a child, I would read for hours in bed without the possibility of a single digital interruption. Even the phone (which was anchored by wires to the kitchen wall downstairs) was generally mute after dinner. Our two hours of permitted television would come to an end, and I would seek out the solitary refuge of a novel. And deep reading (as opposed to reading a Tumblr feed) was a true refuge. What I liked best about that absorbing act was the fact books became a world unto themselves, one that I (an otherwise powerless kid) had some control over. There was a childish pleasure in holding the mysterious object in my hands; in preparing for the story’s finale by monitoring what Austen called a “tell-tale compression of the pages”; in proceeding through some perfect sequence of plot points that bested by far the awkward happenstance of real life.

The physical book, held, knowable, became a small mental apartment I could have dominion over, something that was alive because of my attention and then lived in me.

But now . . . that thankful retreat, where my child-self could become so lost, seems unavailable to me. Today there is no room in my house, no block in my city, where I am unreachable.

Eventually, if we start giving them a chance, moments of absence reappear, and we can pick them up if we like. One appeared this morning, when my partner flew to Paris. He’ll be gone for two weeks. I’ll miss him, but this is also my big break.

I’ve taken “War and Peace” back down off the shelf. It’s sitting beside my computer as I write these lines—accusatory as some attention-starved pet.

You and me, old friend. You, me, and two weeks. I open the book, I shut the book, and I open the book again. The ink swirls up at me. This is hard. Why is this so hard?

* * *

Dr. Douglas Gentile, a friendly professor at Iowa State University, recently commiserated with me about my pathetic attention span. “It’s me, too, of course,” he said. “When I try to write a paper, I can’t keep from checking my e-mail every five minutes. Even though I know it’s actually making me less productive.” This failing is especially worrying for Gentile because he happens to be one of the world’s leading authorities on the effects of media on the brains of the young. “I know, I know! I know all the research on multitasking. I can tell you absolutely that everyone who thinks they’re good at multitasking is wrong. We know that in fact it’s those who think they’re good at multitasking who are the least productive when they multitask.”

The brain itself is not, whatever we may like to believe, a multitasking device. And that is where our problem begins. Your brain does a certain amount of parallel processing in order to synthesize auditory and visual information into a single understanding of the world around you, but the brain’s attention is itself only a spotlight, capable of shining on one thing at a time. So the very word multitask is a misnomer. There is rapid-shifting minitasking, there is lame-spasms-of-effort-tasking, but there is, alas, no such thing as multitasking. “When we think we’re multitasking,” says Gentile, “we’re actually multiswitching.”

We can hardly blame ourselves for being enraptured by the promise of multitasking, though. Computers—like televisions before them—tap into a very basic brain function called an “orienting response.” Orienting responses served us well in the wilderness of our species’ early years. When the light changes in your peripheral vision, you must look at it because that could be the shadow of something that’s about to eat you. If a twig snaps behind you, ditto. Having evolved in an environment rife with danger and uncertainty, we are hardwired to always default to fast-paced shifts in focus. Orienting responses are the brain’s ever-armed alarm system and cannot be ignored.

Gentile believes it’s time for a renaissance in our understanding of mental health. To begin with, just as we can’t accept our body’s cravings for chocolate cake at face value, neither can we any longer afford to indulge the automatic desires our brains harbor for distraction.

 * * *

It’s not merely difficult at first. It’s torture. I slump into the book, reread sentences, entire paragraphs. I get through two pages and then stop to check my e-mail—and down the rabbit hole I go. After all, one does not read “War and Peace” so much as suffer through it. It doesn’t help that the world at large, being so divorced from such pursuits, is often aggressive toward those who drop away into single-subject attention wells. People don’t like it when you read “War and Peace.” It’s too long, too boring, not worth the effort. And you’re elitist for trying.

In order to finish the thing in the two weeks I have allotted myself, I must read one hundred pages each day without fail. If something distracts me from my day’s reading—a friend in the hospital, a magazine assignment, sunshine—I must read two hundred pages on the following day. I’ve read at this pace before, in my university days, but that was years ago and I’ve been steadily down-training my brain ever since.

* * *

Another week has passed—my “War and Peace” struggle continues. I’ve realized now that the subject of my distraction is far more likely to be something I need to look at than something I need to do. There have always been activities—dishes, gardening, sex, shopping—that derail whatever purpose we’ve assigned to ourselves on a given day. What’s different now is the addition of so much content that we passively consume.

Only this morning I watched a boy break down crying on “X Factor,” then regain his courage and belt out a half-decent rendition of  Beyoncé’s “Listen”; next I looked up the original Beyoncé video and played it twice while reading the first few paragraphs of a story about the humanity of child soldiers; then I switched to a Nina Simone playlist prepared for me by Songza, which played while I flipped through a slide show of American soldiers seeing their dogs for the first time in years; and so on, ad nauseam. Until I shook I out of this funk and tried to remember what I’d sat down to work on in the first place.

* * *

If I’m to break from our culture of distraction, I’m going to need practical advice, not just depressing statistics. To that end, I switch gears and decide to stop talking to scientists for a while; I need to talk to someone who deals with attention and productivity in the so-called real world. Someone with a big smile and tailored suits such as organizational guru Peter Bregman. He runs a global consulting firm that gets CEOs to unleash the potential of their workers, and he’s also the author of the acclaimed business book 18 Minutes, which counsels readers to take a minute out of every work hour (plus five minutes at the start and end of the day) to do nothing but set an intention.

Bregman told me he sets his watch to beep every hour as a reminder that it’s time to right his course again. Aside from the intention setting, Bregman counsels no more than three e-mail check-ins a day. This notion of batch processing was anathema to someone like me, used to checking my in-box so constantly, particularly when my work feels stuck. “It’s incredibly inefficient to switch back and forth,” said Bregman, echoing every scientist I’d spoken to on multitasking. “Besides, e-mail is, actually, just about the least efficient mode of conversation you can have. And what we know about multitasking is that, frankly, you can’t. You just derail.”

“I just always feel I’m missing something important,” I said. “And that’s precisely why we lose hours every day, that fear.” Bregman argues that it’s people who can get ahead of that fear who end up excelling in the business world that he spends his own days in. “I think everyone is more distractible today than we used to be. It’s a very hard thing to fix. And as people become more distracted, we know they’re actually doing less, getting less done. Your efforts just leak out. And those who aren’t—aren’t leaking—are going to be the most successful.”

I hate that I leak. But there’s a religious certainty required in order to devote yourself to one thing while cutting off the rest of the world. We don’t know that the inbox is emergency-free, we don’t know that the work we’re doing is the work we ought to be doing. But we can’t move forward in a sane way without having some faith in the moment we’ve committed to. “You need to decide that things don’t matter as much as you might think they matter,” Bregman suggested as I told him about my flitting ways. And that made me think there might be a connection between the responsibility-free days of my youth and that earlier self’s ability to concentrate. My young self had nowhere else to be, no permanent anxiety nagging at his conscience. Could I return to that sense of ease? Could I simply be where I was and not seek out a shifting plurality to fill up my time?

* * *

It happened softly and without my really noticing.

As I wore a deeper groove into the cushions of my sofa, so the book I was holding wore a groove into my (equally soft) mind. Moments of total absence began to take hold more often; I remembered what it was like to be lost entirely in a well-spun narrative. There was the scene where Anna Mikhailovna begs so pitifully for a little money, hoping to send her son to war properly dressed. And there were, increasingly, more like it. More moments where the world around me dropped away and I was properly absorbed. A “causeless springtime feeling of joy” overtakes Prince Andrei; a tearful Pierre sees in a comet his last shimmering hope; Emperor Napoleon takes his troops into the heart of Russia, oblivious to the coming winter that will destroy them all…

It takes a week or so for withdrawal symptoms to work through a heroin addict’s body. While I wouldn’t pretend to compare severity here, doubtless we need patience, too, when we deprive ourselves of the manic digital distractions we’ve grown addicted to.

That’s how it was with my Tolstoy and me. The periods without distraction grew longer, I settled into the sofa and couldn’t hear the phone, couldn’t hear the ghost-buzz of something else to do. I’m teaching myself to slip away from the world again.

* * *

Yesterday I fell asleep on the sofa with a few dozen pages of “War and Peace” to go. I could hear my cell phone buzzing from its perch on top of the piano. I saw the glowing green eye of my Cyclops modem as it broadcast potential distraction all around. But on I went past the turgid military campaigns and past the fretting of Russian princesses, until sleep finally claimed me and my head, exhausted, dreamed of nothing at all. This morning I finished the thing at last. The clean edges of its thirteen hundred pages have been ruffled down into a paper cabbage, the cover is pilled from the time I dropped it in the bath. Holding the thing aloft, trophy style, I notice the book is slightly larger than it was before I read it.

It’s only after the book is laid down, and I’ve quietly showered and shaved, that I realize I haven’t checked my e-mail today. The thought of that duty comes down on me like an anvil.

Instead, I lie back on the sofa and think some more about my favorite reader Milton – about his own anxieties around reading. By the mid-1650s, he had suffered that larger removal from the crowds, he had lost his vision entirely and could not read at all—at least not with his own eyes. From within this new solitude, he worried that he could no longer meet his potential. One sonnet, written shortly after the loss of his vision, begins:

When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, and that one Talent

which is death to hide Lodged with me useless . . .

Yet from that position, in the greatest of caves, he began producing his greatest work. The epic “Paradise Lost,” a totemic feat of concentration, was dictated to aides, including his three daughters.

Milton already knew, after all, the great value in removing himself from the rush of the world, so perhaps those anxieties around his blindness never had a hope of dominating his mind. I, on the other hand, and all my peers, must make a constant study of concentration itself. I slot my ragged “War and Peace” back on the shelf. It left its marks on me the same way I left my marks on it (I feel awake as a man dragged across barnacles on the bottom of some ocean). I think: This is where I was most alive, most happy. How did I go from loving that absence to being tortured by it? How can I learn to love that absence again?

This essay is adapted from “The End of Absence” by Michael Harris, published by Current / Penguin Random House.

from: Salon