One Way to Encourage Checking-Out at the Library

Jeremiah Lee and Susan Gray, speed dating at the San Francisco Public Library.

by: Malia Wollan

OUTSIDE of college campuses and romantic comedies, the library is not usually a place to pick up a date. But that didn’t stop several dozen singles, mostly in their 20s and 30s, from showing up on a recent Tuesday night at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library for its first speed-dating session.
Among them was Jeremiah Lee, a 33-year-old software engineer who said he had not stepped foot in a public library in years. “The kind of person the library can attract is different than the kind you get at a bar,” said Mr. Lee, who wore a dark purple fleece and blue jeans for the occasion. Participants were asked to bring a favorite book, so he clutched a copy of “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell and “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy.
In a basement meeting room a boombox played love songs while daters were assigned numbers and had four minutes to chat, flirt or wrinkle their noses at one another’s literary tastes. Then the men rotated, book in tow, to the next woman. Later, librarians would tally scorecards and connect any two people who indicated mutual interest.

Can “Atlas Shrugged” find love with the “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”? Is attraction possible between a Jonathan Franzen reader and a die-hard Elizabeth Gilbert fan?

Those are the types of questions librarians are starting to field. In a kind of hearts-and-flowers literacy drive, public libraries across the country are sponsoring speed-date nights to draw more young professionals into reading rooms.

In Fort Collins, Colo., librarians strung white lights and scattered rose petals for two date nights last fall. The main library in Sacramento recently hosted its second event. Libraries in Chattanooga, Tenn., Piscataway, N.J., and Omaha all held soirees for Valentine’s Day last month.

“The library wants to be a gathering place that is relevant to younger people,” said Donya Drummond, the reference librarian who promoted the San Francisco event, mostly through Facebook. “We had more people than we knew what to do with.”

Literary speed dating seems to have its roots in Europe. Danny Theuwis, a librarian from Leuven, Belgium, believes he and his colleagues introduced the concept in 2005 with the goal to enliven somber libraries, and make them “more alive, more direct, more emotional,” he said in an e-mail. He trained hundreds of librarians across Europe to host literary speed dating, or “bibdating” in Flemish.

Among the first of similar events in the United States took place at the Omaha Public Library Benson Branch, where Amy Mather, a librarian, and her colleague at the time, Manya Shorr, organized a “Hardbound to Heartbound” night in 2009, on Valentine’s Day. Some 65 people showed up.

Library Journal, a trade publication, named the two women “Library Leaders Creating the 2.0 Library of the Future” for their efforts to attract “a generation that came of age in the Age of the Internet.”

“The age range from 20 to 40 is a population that we do tend to lose unless they have young kids to bring them into the library,” said Audra Caplan, president of the Public Library Association. “They’re paying taxes and voting. We need to be viable to them and provide them with experiences and resources that are useful.”

Last spring the Collaborative Summer Library Program, a national consortium of public libraries, included literary speed dating on its list of suggested adult library programming. Since then, libraries across the country have been dimming the lights and playing matchmaker.

“It’s a safe space,” said Diane Moore, a librarian at the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library. “There is no alcohol, so you don’t have to worry about people saying ‘Oh, baby’ one night, and then the next morning waking up and going, ‘Yikes!’ ”

One logistical snag is the preponderance of women. Libraries reported difficulties attracting men in sufficient numbers. In downtown Fort Collins, an event had to be canceled when no men signed up. At the San Francisco event, the sign-up ratio was about one man to every five women. (The one exception seemed to be the same-sex night, when more than twice as many gay men turned up as lesbians.)

“We can’t figure out how to get enough men,” Ms. Moore said. Chattanooga’s downtown branch is planning to host date nights quarterly, and is soliciting ideas for how to draw more men. Some have suggested putting photographs of attractive young women on their leaflets. Others proposed playing down fiction, since men seemed to bring in more nonfiction books.

That was not the case at the San Francisco Public Library, where women and men showed an eclectic range. Not surprisingly, the book you brought advertised something about your compatibility.

One man brought a science fiction book he wrote himself. Another participant, Tiffany Bukowski, a 24-year-old marketer, brought a collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski, the infamous womanizer, with whom she shares a surname.

“One guy brought in Kafka,” said Ms. Bukowski, who wore a quick smile and low-cut sleeveless dress. “I’m like, ‘What are you trying to say about yourself with that?’ ”

Still, she seemed to hit it off with the Kafka guy. The witty exchange prompted her to include the man on her list of those she would like to see again. It wasn’t clear if he felt the same.

As for Mr. Lee, the software engineer, he went to dinner and karaoke with a woman he met at the library, though things fizzled after one date. He was undeterred and said he would come again.

“The books were almost irrelevant,” Mr. Lee said. “But if your four minutes is feeling like a long time, you have your book to fall back on. It’s a great prop.”

from: NY Times

Publishers Look Beyond Bookstores

by: Stephanie Clifford and Julie Bosman

Kitson, a group of boutiques based in Los Angeles, is the kind of store that appears regularly in the tabloids for both its stylish clothes and its celebrity clientele like Sean Combs and Joe Jonas.


But in a town that is all about flash, Kitson is finding a surprising source of revenue that is not from its fashionable shoes or accessories. It is from books.


The company’s owner, Fraser Ross, estimates that Kitson sold 100,000 books in 2010, double what it had the previous year.

Publishers turned aggressive about selling to Kitson, Mr. Ross said, as traditional bookstores switched focus or closed. That “has been good for us,” he said. “If there’s a good book, we’ll go deep into it.” And publishers, he said, “realize what a specialty store can do for their business, with the window and the table.”

Publishers have stocked books in nonbook retailers for decades — a coffee-table book in the home department, a novelty book in Urban Outfitters. In the last year, though, some publishers have increased their efforts as the two largest bookstore chains have changed course.

Barnes & Noble has been devoting more floor space for displays of e-readers, games and educational toys. Borders, after filing for bankruptcy protection in February, has begun liquidating some 200 of its superstores.

“The national bookstore chain has peaked as a sales channel, and the growth is not going to come from there,” said David Steinberger, chief executive of the Perseus Books Group. “But it doesn’t mean that all brick-and-mortar retailers are cutting back.”

A wide range of stores better known for their apparel, food and fishing reels have been adding books. The fashion designer Marc Jacobs opened Bookmarc in Manhattan in the fall. Anthropologie has increased the number of titles it carries to 125, up from 25 in 2003. Coldwater Creek, Lowe’s, Bass Pro Shops and even Cracker Barrel are adding new books. Some mass retailers, too, are diversifying — Target, for instance, is moving away from male-centered best sellers and adding more women’s and children’s titles this year.

Having a physical outlet for books is extraordinarily important, publishers say. While online and e-book sales are huge channels, lesser-known books can get lost in that world if they do not have a physical presence to spur interest. The ability to catch a shopper’s eye in a store is almost impossible to mimic online.

So publishers are approaching just about anyone with a shelf. For Perseus, sales at nontraditional retailers in 2010 outpaced its sales at Borders, which were around 7 percent, for the first time.

For Abrams, which publishes illustrated and art books, nontraditional retailers are seen as one way to offset the business lost by Borders, which has slowed especially in the last year, the Abrams president and chief executive, Michael Jacobs, said.

“We’ve definitely cranked it up,” Mr. Jacobs said. Last year, executives realized that “so much of our backlist wasn’t being carried by bookstores. If we’re still doing these books, where are we going to sell them?”

The nontraditional category has been growing for Abrams, making up more than 15 percent of its total business in 2010. Mr. Jacobs said he expected that it would grow to 25 percent in the next two to three years. Big publishers, too, like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Random House, say they have been seeking out specialty retailers.

The attention from publishers comes as a welcome surprise to the stores.

“The response has been dramatic. There are piles of book samples and catalogs dropped off in the shop every day,” Jennifer Baker, a book buyer for Marc Jacobs, said in an e-mail. “The assortment of rare and out-of-print books have been a challenge to keep in stock.”

Placement in different stores can widen the audience for books, appealing to someone who would not spend time at a Barnes & Noble. “A customer who might not often buy books but adores the brand can ease in to the Bookmarc selection,” Ms. Baker said.

Beyond attracting new readers, book sales tend to be a good deal for both sides.

Though sales to nonbook retailers can be more complicated and labor-intensive for publishers, books are generally sold on a nonreturnable basis. Bookstores, on the other hand, can return unsold books to publishers.

“We know it’s a nice clean sale,” said John Duff, publisher of Perigee Books, an imprint of Penguin Group USA.

The books tend to be profitable for the retailers, since they select them carefully and do not usually mark them down. More important, they can drive other purchases and help with branding.

At Lowe’s, books on subjects like cooking and home projects are stacked at the front of the store, “inspiring and informing customers to purchase goods that will allow them to successfully complete home improvement projects,” Patti Price, the company’s senior vice president for merchandising, said in an e-mail.

At Sam’s Club, which has long carried stacks of best sellers, more children’s books and cookbooks have been added lately. “Those are areas that don’t fit as well into the e-book story, like the best seller or mass-market or even romance books do,” said Phil Shellhammer, a Sam’s Club executive who oversaw the books category there until recently. Sam’s Club has been using its bricks-and-mortar advantage in other ways, too, like adding books from local writers, and bringing in authors for signings.

If Anthropologie is selling ikat prints, it might feature books with ikat covers, or it will carry books about inspiration and poetry to get the customer in an escapist mood.

“As we try to get them excited about different ideas as they walk in the door, books can be a tremendous way to narrate those stories,” said Aaron Hoey, head merchant for home and accessories at Anthropologie. “We do a very good job of selecting unique books, books you’re not going to find in a typical bookstore, and certainly not in a mass-market bookstore like Borders or Barnes & Noble. And to stumble across it at Amazon, you have to really know what you’re looking for.”

The specialty stores can be a boon for publishers selling quirky titles unlikely to get on Amazon’s home page. “Awkward Family Photos” is a hot item at Urban Outfitters, “Hello, Cupcake,” about cupcake design, has been selling strongly at the craft store Michaels, and Price Stern Sloan, another Penguin imprint, sold 42,000 copies of “Mad Libs” in January alone — at Cracker Barrel. At Bookmarc, where fashion titles sold predictably well, executives were surprised when “Erotic Poems” by E. E. Cummings started flying off shelves.

At Kitson, too, the top sellers hardly mimic the best-seller list, including books like “How to Raise a Jewish Dog” and “The Official Dictionary of Sarcasm.”

“We try to be different,” Mr. Ross said.
from: NY Times

How to Spot a First Edition

by: Maria Bustillos

One of the most touching things about Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids is the way the author slips into book-scouting lingo when she describes the knack she had for that enjoyable (and revenue-enhancing) pastime in the late '60s and early '70s:
            
            Not long after, I found a twenty-six-volume set of the
            complete Henry James for next to nothing. It was in
            perfect condition. I knew a customer at Scribner's who
            would want it. The tissue guards were intact, the
            gravures fresh-looking, and there was no foxing on the
            pages. I cleared over one hundred dollars. Slipping five
            twenty-dollar bills in a sock, I tied a ribbon around it and
            gave it to Robert.

Smith describes a number of such finds. The mere idea that you could run into a signed Faulkner just wandering around a used bookstore in New Jersey!

It's worthwhile to know a little bit about rare books—because it's fun and also because you shouldn't be letting valuable things slip off into perdition, if you can help it. There are many characteristics that tend to make a book more valuable, but nearly all the valuable ones are first editions. So what is a first edition, exactly?

A reasonably simple question, but it turns out to be one of those deceptively difficult ones, like "What is knowledge?" or "Can cats secretly talk?": one that even a lifetime of study can never fully answer.

Let's get on a sound footing by first considering the whole idea of collecting books.

Bibliophilia, taken as a separate pursuit from the mere love of reading (which it may accompany) is concerned with all aspects of books, not only their contents. Bibliophiles like to study their materials and construction, or the whole history of a publishing house, a genre, an author. There's no detail they won't pore over. The history of publishing is chockablock with romantic stories: the charm and brilliance of designers like Eric Gill, say, or the literary sensitivity of Max Perkins (soon to be played by Sean Penn in a movie, apparently). Whole collections are built around such things as these. And collectible books can become tokens rich with personal associations, of course. Patti Smith found one of the rare Ace paperbacks of William S. Burroughs's debut as "William Lee" at a bookstall near Forty-Second Street one night with Robert Mapplethorpe. She never sold it, she says.

The study of a particular copy will somehow set the collector's heart beating a little faster: how close is it to that rare state, "pristine," still looking absolutely new despite its great age, in a fresh, glossy, clean wrapper free of even the slightest little tear, and inscribed by the author to his favorite mistress, who happens to be the model for the heroine of the story? That would be ideal. Or maybe it's an agreeably raggedy old thing, published by the book club a century later: "spine ends bumped, with chipped corners, cocked, hinges cracked and some foxing."

For those of us who have always collected books in order to read them, the two might scarcely be worth telling apart, so long as they contain the same words in the same order. To a collector, however, who sees each copy of a book as a specific, significant instance of that book's history on this earth, the difference may be as vast as that between the Hope Diamond and some wretched thing the cat dragged in. So, on to business.

Here is a quite nice-looking book, in a decent dustjacket (or in Knifecrime Islandese, "dustwrapper") in a protective mylar cover. (The Highsmith company of Wisconsin is a great library supplier where you can buy these at a good price and in small quantities. Yay Wisconsin.)


Much of the information you'll need for identifying a first edition is contained on the copyright page, which can be found on the reverse side ("verso" they sometimes say) of the title page.

The number series (also "number line" or "printer's key") found on the copyright page of many modern books is a valuable clue. Unfortunately, the subject volume lacks this feature. When the number "1" is present, that is an excellent sign and really almost always means a first printing. Irritatingly, some publishers such as Random House (in certain years) omit the "1" and begin with "2," even on the first printing.

If you're lucky, you will see the generally credible words, "First Printing." A first printing in collector's terms means the first printing of the first edition, so that when you see those words your research may well be over. The words "first edition" and "first printing" are often used more or less interchangeably in the book world, though really they shouldn't be. A printing is a single print run. An edition refers to the whole set of what were once printing plates. When any corrections or amendments are made to the original plates, then you have a second edition. If a dozen separate printings are made off the first set of plates, though, only those copies from the very first printing are of significant value; this is true, generally speaking, even of highly collectible books. You may have the twelfth printing of the first edition, but that doesn't mean you have a "true first." Almost always, it's only the very first printing that has collectible value. (With older books, this whole business gets quite a bit trickier, since number lines didn't come into general use until well into the twentieth century. It sometimes takes quite a bit of research to get hold of all the pertinent details.)

The agreeable term "First Printing" can also be found occasionally in a modern book club edition, in which case the book club will have just ordered some immense number of copies right off the first print run.

This very book contains a message indicating that it was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. That may mean that this is a book club edition, printed in the zillions and therefore utterly without value; or it may mean that the author Mr. Jones was fortunate enough to have secured an agreement with the BOMC in advance of the original trade publication of his novel. In these cases, you must check out the dustjacket, if present. Book club editions, most commonly, do not have a price on the inner flap of the dustjacket. But this copy has the price… a good sign.

Also, you'll find that book-club editions are commonly marked with a blind stamp—that's a small embossed dot or square or other recessed mark on the lower right corner of the back cover. There are probably exceptions to this (there always seem to be!), but blind stamps seem to be found only on book club editions. No blind stamp here … excellent.

(Personally, I find book club editions make great reading copies, and you don't have to feel so guilty when you take them into the bathtub.)


It's a good bet that this is, in fact, a genuine first edition. Worth, according to comparisons from the various search services such as Abebooks, maybe thirty or forty bucks in this condition.

The real trouble is that even today, there are no standards by which all publishers routinely identify their own first editions, and there are immense numbers of publishers. Not to mention which, publishing houses tend to change their methods over the years, and exceptions and errors are made constantly. Even experts are continually fooled as to the authenticity of various books purported to be "firsts." All the little details that go into identifying the first edition of a particular title are called "points," or "points of issue"; if you ever get into collecting a particular set of titles, you'll very soon be up on all the relevant ones. Here's a good one, just to be getting on with: the true first of Infinite Jest has got William Vollmann's name misspelled on the dustjacket blurb (with just one "n").

Keep in mind too that most books, even most first editions, are without collectible value. Only the stuff that turns out to have lasting interest appreciates over time. Really the best way to learn how to identify valuable first editions is to handle a lot of books with a view to learning how to do so. There are several excellent basic books on collecting commonly used by experts, notably Collected Books: The Guide to Values by Allen Ahearn and Patricia Ahearn, and The Pocket Guide to the Identification of First Editions by Bill McBride is a good portable reference. Also recommended: the murder mysteries by John Dunning, Booked to Die and The Bookman's Wake. These feature the detective Cliff Janeway, a bibliophile and book dealer whose descriptions of book collecting are fun to read and full of useful details. Plus, there are murders!

Please be aware that a substantial percentage of the books for sale online are wrongly described. (That is a knife that cuts both ways, of course, because quite often less knowledgeable sellers may not quite know what it is they've got.) Careful study will reveal that many, many dealers, in some cases more than half those offering a given title, have not bothered to figure out what the earliest printing was, but instead merely pop the magic words "first edition" into their listings, either out of unwarranted optimism or mere laziness, or outright chicanery. If book lovers do the necessary homework, it will no longer pay those lazy bums to be so sloppy.

A Visual Dictionary of Commonly Used Terms

Cocked (spine slanted)

 Foxing

A blind stamp

Lower spine end bumped

from: The AWL

National Archives hunts for missing treasures with recovery team

by: Lisa Rein

FRANKLIN, TENN. - Among the Civil War buffs wandering through the tables of muskets and faded daguerreotypes of Union soldiers for sale here are four federal agents.


One raids houses and carries a gun. But right now he's handing out innocuous-looking brochures to the relic hunters walking by, as the sweet smell of glazed nuts wafts from a concession stand. "Does that document belong in the National Archives?" the brochure asks.

The agents have flown to a fairground outside Nashville to the country's biggest Civil War show to hunt for stolen treasure - robbed right from the nation's attic.

Whether they know it or not, the dealers may be trafficking in stolen government property. The heist may have taken place in 1865. Or last week. Or a document may not have been looted at all, but made its way into private hands instead of the Archives.

With the Civil War 150th anniversary drawing new interest, the trail could be warm.

"We're friendly," says Paul Brachfeld, inspector general of the Archives, who has gotten out of the office this December weekend to see his team in action. For the dealers, "it's an authenticity thing," he says. "If you traffic in stolen documents, it taints everything."

The tactic illustrates the new, more aggressive approach the Archives is taking in an effort to recover treasures that have disappeared from its holdings. Porous security and open access have allowed countless items to slip out of the Archives' 44 centers and presidential libraries, from the Washington headquarters to the Reagan Library in California.

The missing items include telegrams written by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War; the Wright brothers' patent for a flying machine; Eli Whitney's patent for the cotton gin; Lyndon Johnson's class ring from the Coast Guard; an official portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt; and target maps for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

'We were defenseless'

Government auditors have long warned that lax security at the Archives has allowed trusted researchers and employees to sneak past security cameras with priceless treasures, or find ways to destroy or alter government records. The problem was underscored last month when the agency accused a longtime researcher of changing the date on a pardon signed by Lincoln to make it appear more valuable. There were no security cameras at the time.

"For a long time we were defenseless, and senior managers just accepted that," said Brachfeld, who has assigned eight of his 24 agents to the Archival Recovery Team, a unit devoted to retrieving stolen loot.


"We have people alone with images and artifacts all the time," Brachfeld said. "The thieves all say how easy it was." Until not long ago, some researchers were given open access to stack areas with no supervision, officials and researchers said.

Around the time they disclosed that the Lincoln pardon was altered with a fountain pen in full view in the main research room in Washington, Archives officials instituted new security procedures they said would include random body searches as visitors leave the downtown headquarters and the massive records center in College Park.

Many heists have been carried out by insiders. In October, the team discovered one of the biggest caches of documents taken from the repository, a valuable audiovisual collection stored in the Rockville basement of the former department chief in charge of the records.


Led by a tipster, the inspector general's office raided Leslie Waffen's house and filled two trucks with boxes. Waffen, a nationally known expert, had run the Archives' audio and film department for 37 years until his retirement last June.

Waffen has been banned from the Archives. He has not been charged in the matter, although the inspector general's office is building a case against him that will include evidence that he sold sound and film recordings on eBay. His attorney, Michael Fayad, declined to comment.

Public approach

The challenge of monitoring the collection is enormous. Nationally, the collection includes 10 billion letters, maps and charts, reports, photographs, moving images and sound recordings. The holdings take up 31 million cubic feet, plus hundreds of thousand of artifacts and 6.7 billion electronic records. Right now there is no money for security enhancements beyond the Washington area.

An item-by-item inventory has never been taken. "It would be counting grains of sand, there's so much," Brachfeld said.

The Archives allow access to anyone over age 14 who shows proper identification.

"There's a fine balance between providing access and security and protection for the documents," said Richard Judson, the Archives' director of space and security management.

Government auditors described "significant weaknesses" in the Archives' security last fall, highlighting loose computer access, physical security and clearance requirements for the agency's 3,000 employees.

On an unannounced visit to a regional research room 11 months ago, the inspector general's office concluded that the holdings were "at constant risk of theft." Another investigation last summer revealed that employees were failing to refile records provided to researchers. Too many employees had access to the stacks. There was no way to ensure the records were properly accounted for.

Archives officials say they are devoting more full-time staff to patrol research areas instead of interns and requiring better training of employees who handle original documents.

But it is still possible, officials say, to walk out of a research room with a letter or photograph stashed in a sock or bra and go undetected.


"It would be very onerous to go through a detailed search of everyone's bag," Judson said.

That's where the treasure hunters, as the Archival Recovery Team is known, come in.


Brachfeld, who came out of internal affairs at the Secret Service, assembled his team of criminal investigators five years ago. He pushes an aggressive approach, appealing to the public for help as agents did at the Civil War show.

Hits and misses

Many such efforts turn up nothing; the agents dispatched to Franklin flew home to Maryland with no new leads, but a handful of new contacts.

The outreach builds trust - and generates tips. Tips and leads from document dealers have helped the agents recover about 7,000 missing items that were stolen from the Archives or never made it into the agency's possession in the first place.

"We see things from our holdings we don't know if they were stolen last week or if great-grandpa took them," said Thomas Bennett, the team's computer crimes expert.

Stolen records often show up for sale on the open market. The "only known copy" of the Potsdam Declaration signed by Harry Truman demanding the surrender of Japan in 1945 is for sale on the Web site of the online auction house Alexander Autographs. The listed price is $100,000 to $150,000. The team did not try to get it back, though. They can't pursue everything.

Among the office's highest-profile cases was a theft by former Clinton national security adviser Samuel "Sandy" Berger, who was fined $50,000 after pleading guilty in 2005 to stuffing his coat pockets and walking out of the Archives with classified counterterrorism documents.

Other recoveries include a map of Cuba with John F. Kennedy's notes in the margin. It was found after a dealer from Catonsville, Md., put it on eBay.

Ronald Reagan's high school yearbook, stolen from his presidential library in California, was returned by an employee who was exposed by a friend.

A letter Lincoln wrote on behalf of a fired U.S. Mint director five days before the Gettysburg address turned up in a private collection in Arizona before the owner agreed to donate it to where it belonged.

A year after Berger confessed, Jim Thomas was hunting for a birthday present for his brother, Dean, a Civil War buff from Gettysburg, Pa., and found for sale online a series of original letters to the Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia, which supplied munitions to the Union Army. Dean recognized the letters from his research at the Archives for his books on Civil War munitions. He called the Archives. The seller turned out to be an intern at the Philadelphia branch. He confessed to smuggling more than 160 documents in the pages of a yellow legal pad. All but three were recovered.

Eighty-one boxes of records with national security value are still missing from the Archives' storage facility in Suitland, where federal agents discovered them missing last year. Between 2005 and 2007, original records from the Bureau of Indian Affairs were discovered dumped in the trash at the Washington headquarters.


Whether the crime was intentional or an accident is not known.

The FDR portrait is still missing, too. Brachfeld says he thinks he knows who did it, but doesn't have enough evidence to pursue a case.

from: Washington Post

A Limit on Lending E-Books

by: Julie Bosman


Heather Stephenson, a librarian at the main Siouxland Library, in Sioux Falls, S.D., demonstrates how to download an e-book.

A print book can be checked out of a library countless times, at least until it falls apart and needs to be replaced.


What about an e-book?

HarperCollins, the publisher of Michael Crichton, Sarah Palin and Dennis Lehane, said on Friday that it had revised its restrictions for libraries that offer its e-books to patrons.

Until now, libraries that have paid for the privilege of making a publisher’s e-books available for borrowing have typically been granted the right to lend an e-book — say, the latest John Grisham thriller — an unlimited number of times. Like print books, e-books in libraries are lent to one person at a time, often for two weeks. Then the book automatically expires from the borrower’s account.

HarperCollins said on Friday that it had changed its mind. Beginning March 7, its books may be checked out only 26 times before the license expires.

“We believe this change balances the value libraries get from our titles with the need to protect our authors and ensure a presence in public libraries and the communities they serve for years to come,” it said in a statement. The policy does not affect books already licensed by libraries.

Steve Potash, the chief executive of OverDrive, a provider of e-books to public libraries, said HarperCollins was the first publisher to limit how many times an e-book may be checked out.

The announcement was a reminder of the publishers’ squeamishness over having their e-books available in libraries. More people are using libraries for e-reading, a practice that does not require visiting a library in person, and is possible on many electronic devices, including the Nook and the iPad.

While hundreds of publishers make their e-books available to libraries, at least two major publishers, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan, do not.

Librarians fumed about the limit, complaining that it would require them to pay more for HarperCollins’s books when budgets are being cut.

“All libraries are going to think twice about what e-books they’re going to purchase in the future,” Leah L. White, a librarian at the Morton Grove Public Library in suburban Chicago, said Friday. Mr. Potash said the change would force some libraries, especially those that stock a lot of best sellers, to be more careful about the publishers from which they buy. “Libraries will have to consider whether they want to invest in titles that, after a year or 18 months or so, they’ll have to replenish or buy additional units,” he said. “There will be some who may have to be more selective about how they can use their digital book budgets.”

On Sunday, he said that OverDrive would take HarperCollins titles out of its general e-book catalog, which would keep them available but make them less easily accessible.

from: NY Times

Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins

by: Dirk Johnson

CHICAGO — Locked in a climate-controlled vault at the Newberry Library here, a volume titled “The Pen and the Book” can be studied only under the watch of security cameras.


The book, about making a profit in publishing, scarcely qualifies as a literary masterpiece. It is highly valuable, instead, because a reader has scribbled in the margins of its pages.


The scribbler was Mark Twain, who had penciled, among other observations, a one-way argument with the author, Walter Besant, that “nothing could be stupider” than using advertising to sell books as if they were “essential goods” like “salt” or “tobacco.” On another page, Twain made some snide remarks about the big sums being paid to another author of his era, Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.

Like many readers, Twain was engaging in marginalia, writing comments alongside passages and sometimes giving an author a piece of his mind. It is a rich literary pastime, sometimes regarded as a tool of literary archaeology, but it has an uncertain fate in a digitalized world.

“People will always find a way to annotate electronically,” said G. Thomas Tanselle, a former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. “But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved. And that is a problem now facing collections libraries.”

These are the sorts of matters pondered by the Caxton Club, a literary group founded in 1895 by 15 Chicago bibliophiles. With the Newberry, it is sponsoring a symposium in March titled “Other People’s Books: Association Copies and the Stories They Tell.”

The symposium will feature a new volume of 52 essays about association copies — books once owned or annotated by the authors — and ruminations about how they enhance the reading experience. The essays touch on works that connect President Lincoln and Alexander Pope; Jane Austen and William Cooper; Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau.

Marginalia was more common in the 1800s. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a prolific margin writer, as were William Blake and Charles Darwin. In the 20th century it mostly came to be regarded like graffiti: something polite and respectful people did not do.

Paul F. Gehl, a curator at the Newberry, blamed generations of librarians and teachers for “inflicting us with the idea” that writing in books makes them “spoiled or damaged.”

But marginalia never vanished. When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in South Africa in 1977, a copy of Shakespeare was circulated among the inmates. Mandela wrote his name next to the passage from “Julius Caesar” that reads, “Cowards die many times before their deaths.”

Studs Terkel, the oral historian, was known to admonish friends who would read his books but leave them free of markings. He told them that reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.

Books with markings are increasingly seen these days as more valuable, not just for a celebrity connection but also for what they reveal about the community of people associated with a work, according to Heather Jackson, a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

Professor Jackson, who will speak at the symposium, said examining marginalia reveals a pattern of emotional reactions among everyday readers that might otherwise be missed, even by literary professionals.

“It might be a shepherd writing in the margins about what a book means to him as he’s out tending his flock,” Professor Jackson said. “It might be a schoolgirl telling us how she feels. Or maybe it’s lovers who are exchanging their thoughts about what a book means to them.”

Just about anyone who has paged through a used college textbook has seen marginalia, and often added comments of their own.

Not everyone values marginalia, said Paul Ruxin, a member of the Caxton Club. “If you think about the traditional view that the book is only about the text,” he said, “then this is kind of foolish, I suppose.”

David Spadafora, president of the Newberry, said marginalia enriched a book, as readers infer other meanings, and lends it historical context. “The digital revolution is a good thing for the physical object,” he said. As more people see historical artifacts in electronic form, “the more they’re going to want to encounter the real object.”

The collection at the Newberry includes a bound copy of “The Federalist” once owned by Thomas Jefferson. Besides penciling his initials in the book, Jefferson wrote those of the founding fathers alongside their essays, which had originally been published anonymously.

“It’s pretty interesting to hold a book that Jefferson held,” Mr. Spadafora said. “Besides that, if we know what books were in his library in the years leading to the writing of the Declaration of Independence, it tells us something about what might have inspired his intellect.”

In her markings, Rose Caylor gave us a sense of her husband, the playwright Ben Hecht. In her copy of “A Child of the Century,” which Mr. Hecht wrote, she had drawn an arrow pointing to burns on a page. “Strikes matches on books,” she noted about her husband, who was a smoker.

Some lovers of literature even conjure dreamy notions about those who have left marginalia for them to find. In his poem “Marginalia,” Billy Collins, the former American poet laureate, wrote about how a previous reader had stirred the passions of a boy just beginning high school and reading “The Catcher in the Rye.”

As the poem describes it, he noticed “a few greasy smears in the margin” and a message that was written “in soft pencil — by a beautiful girl, I could tell.” It read, “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”
from: NYTimes

Kindle e-book piracy accelerates

by: David Carnoy

Several months ago I set up a Google alert for my book, "Knife Music," to keep abreast of anything anybody was saying--good or bad--about the thing. Over the months I've received news of the occasional blog post and tweets, but more recently I popped open an alert to learn that my book was being pirated--both as a separate file and part of two larger Torrents called 2,500 Retail Quality Ebooks (iPod, iPad, Nook, Sony Reader) and 2,500 Retail Quality Ebooks for Kindle (MOBI).

I had the strange reaction of being both dismayed and weirdly honored that someone had selected my book to strip free of its copy-protection (DRM) and include as part of a collection of "quality" e-books, many of which were from very good authors.

OK, so the use of the term "quality" was a reference to the formatting of the e-books and not the quality of the actual work, but for a moment I wasn't too bothered. After all, if someone downloads 2500 books, what are the odds he or she is going to even bother looking at yours? I was probably only losing a few bucks, especially considering my e-book is currently priced at $3.99, which only leaves me with about 50 cents a book after the publisher, e-book seller, and agent, take their cuts. Even if I missed out on selling 200 e-books, that's a mere $100. No big deal, right?

Well, obviously, for big authors, this whole pirating thing presents a bigger problem--and a bigger loss. But that isn't what dismayed me so much (sorry, but when you're a little guy, you don't care so much about how much the big guys are losing). Rather, what's shocking, and what the publishers should be most concerned about, is the fact that a library of 2,500 books can be downloaded in a matter of hours. E-books are small files and 2,500 of them can be packed into a single download (Torrent) that's only about 3.4GB. If you set the average price per book at a measly $2, the worth of said download would be $5,000. Bring it up to $4 a book and you're at $10,000. (In fact, publishers charges much more for some of these books).

By comparison, a single DVD movie is usually larger than that, as well as many retail PC games, which tend to run in the 4GB to 7.5GB range. A "major" PSP title is about 1GB, sometimes a bit larger (yes, the PSP has been severely impacted by piracy).

I probably don't need to point this out but I will. I have about 600 books in my paper book collection, which took me years to gather and prune during various moves. Digitally, that same collection could be downloaded in around 30 minutes and stored on a cheap 1GB thumb drive, which could then be copied in a matter of seconds and passed on to someone else.

A lot of people think moving away from paper is a good thing. Maybe it is. But what should also be alarming to publishers is that the number of people pirating books is growing along with the number of titles that are available for download. As I've written in the past, the rise of the iPad has spurred some of the pirating, but now the huge success of the Kindle is also leading to increased pirating. Yes some companies, such as Attributor, have done some studies about the issue, and seen increases. But for my evidence one only need glance at Pirate Bay and see what people are downloading and how many of them are doing it.

The most popular e-book download on Pirate Bay is the Kindle Books Collection, which has something like 650 e-books in it (it's just less than 1GB), and is ahead of a 224-page PDF e-book called "Advanced Sex: Explicit Positions for Explosive Lovemaking." At the time of this writing, 668 people were "seeding" the Kindle collection while 153 people were downloading it. A few month ago, the numbers of people downloading e-book collections like this at given moment were in the 50 to 60 range with fewer seeders.

Now some of you in the comments section are going to inevitably say, who needs 2,500 books? And most people don't read all that much anyway. But the point here is that there may very well be a dark side to the success of e-books, which some are speculating will make up 50 percent of the market in as little as 5 years.

You can argue whether it was Napster or the rise of the iPod--or most probably both--that led to the huge amount of music piracy, but the book business will also take its share of big losses as it moves further into the digital realm. True, it's much harder to get someone to invest the time to read a book than to listen to an album, watch a movie, or play a game, so chances are piracy won't hurt the book business as much as those industries. But on the flip side, as I said before, it's also much quicker to download a huge collection of books or a number of New York Times bestsellers with a single click of a button.

How much will price play into all this? Well, you already have plenty of folks out there who think it's outrageous for publishers to price an e-book at $12.99 or $14.99 when the hardcover is first released. And some of those folks may feel justified in downloading pirated versions of books in protest--or just because they say they don't like getting ripped off. And while some pricing decisions by publishers are clearly bad, pricing may be a smaller part of the piracy equation than you might think. What a surprising number of people have told me is that they pirate stuff for the same reason that a lot of people like the Kindle: it's all about instant gratification.

As one friend put it, "You want something, you click a button, you get it." He has a Netflix account and knows he can get a particular movie within 36 hours delivered to his door, yet he he says sometimes uses Bit Torrent to get the movie so he can watch it faster.

This is something publishers will have to contend with going forward. They know it, and Scott Turow, the President of the Author's Guild and a practicing lawyer, is acutely aware of how much of a problem it is and could become.

"It [piracy] has killed large parts of the music industry," he said in an interview. "Musicians make up for the copies of their songs that get pirated by performing live. I don't think there will be as many people showing up to hear me read as to hear Beyonce sing. We need to make sure piracy is dealt with effectively."

Alas, so far it hasn't been dealt with effectively and I doubt it ever will be. It won't cost me much now--and it may even help me find a few readers who might not have read my book--but in the long run, it could really hurt. And unlike the New York Time's David Pogue, I've got no live act. Perhaps I need to get one, though I think I'd have a hard time matching his rendition of "Apps, I did it again."

Comments?

from: CNET