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Licence Culture Wars – Librarians Set to Battle HarperCollins

February 28, 2011 //

From LISNews: Librarian News:

Library users, librarians, and libraries have begun to boycott publisher HarperCollins over changes to the terms of service that would limit the ability of library users to borrow ebooks from libraries. A new website, BoycottHarperCollins.com, is helping to organize their efforts to get HarperCollins to return to the previous terms of service.

On February 24, Steve Potash, the Chief Executive Officer of OverDrive, sent an email to the company’s customers — primarily US libraries — announcing that some of the ebooks they get from OverDrive would be disabled after they had circulated 26 times. Soon after, librarians learned that it was HarperCollins, a subsidiary of News Corporation (NWSA), that intended to impose these limits.
Immediately, library users, librarians, and libraries began voicing their opposition to the plan by HarperCollins, with several library users and librarians urging a boycott.[full article]

26 times? I think the days of touting the freedom and ease of access of eBooks via libraries are coming to a middle. The recent excitement over rising eBook usage glosses over the implications of events like Kindle’s Orwellian muck-up a year or so ago.

A face-off with a vendor has been brewing for a while, and more are sure to follow.

EBook providers are going to switch to increasingly intransigent and limiting terms because they sense threats to their profits from other directions, such as piracy. Frustratingly, HarperCollins’ policy and others like it will slowly throttle a library’s ability to supply eBooks conveniently (for the user and the library) and affordably (for the library).

If eReaders continue to boom, and they likely will, people could choose to absorb the cost of eBooks themselves for the sake of quick access. This is unfortunately probable, since people who can afford an eReader of any sort can likely afford the cost of compatible books (related demographic info).

The outcome could be rough. Libraries will eventually loose any iniative  they’ve gained on this front and could be pushed out as an eBook access point. And, as new technology eventually surpasses print, public libraries could end up standing on a fairly bleak precipice.

Enough, doom saying. The collective weight of librarians, library users, and other supporters could roll this trend back. Visit www.boycottharpercollins.com and get involved.

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Categories Book News, Library News, Public Libraries, Technology, User experience

In Accodance with Concordances: Number Crunching Bibliographics and Our Minds

February 17, 2011 //

Sad Cypress

What happens when statistics and literature collide?

One outcome is NPR’s Radio Lab‘s mini-doc “Vanishing Words”. It’s a thought provoking look into what can be gleaned from the statistical analysis of a person’s collected writing. From Radio Lab’s site:

Agatha Christie’s clever detective novels may reveal more about the inner workings of the human mind than she intended. In this podcast, a look at what scientists uncover when they treat words like data.

According to Dr. Ian Lancashire at the University of Toronto, the Queen of Crime left behind hidden clues to the real-life mysteries of human aging in her writing. Meanwhile, Dr. Kelvin Lim and Dr. Serguei Pakhomov from the University of Minnesota add to the intrigue with the story of an unexpected find in a convent archive that could someday help pinpoint very early warning signs for Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Sister Alberta Sheridan, a 94-year-old Nun Study participant, reads an essay she wrote more than 70 years ago.

Listen here.

Radio Lab has a great knack for finding the compelling human side of just about any science topic. It’s well produced, humourous and straight forward. I’d call it worth checking out. Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories Book News

Essex County

February 5, 2011 //

The CBC’s Canada Reads starts broadcasting next week.

For those who don’t know:

Started in 2001, Canada Reads is CBC’s annual battle of the books, where five Canadian personalities select the book they think Canadians should read. Each personality selects a book to defend and the books are eliminated one by one until a winner is declared. The debates air on CBC Radio One. Jian Ghomeshi has hosted Canada Reads since 2008.

In 2011, the contenders are:

I’d love to see Essex County win. Not simply because I’m a fan of graphic novels getting love on the literary stage, but also because books so forthright and well crafted are rare in any format. It’s a frank, haunting, causality of lives. Complicated and unresolved – the characters are rendered in the rough and sketchy style, where detail seems as once scarce and almost overwhelming.

Essex County Sample

I used to live in Windsor, Ontario, which abuts the actual Essex County. Lemire captures the sense of a wide-open farmland that can feel so isolating and confining at times. It’s not the Essex County everyone experienced, but Lemire’s is palpable and recognizable.

Anyways, that’s my vote.

The Canada Reads debates will air on CBC Radio One on February 7, 8 and 9 at 11 a.m. and again at 8 p.m. (2:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. in Newfoundland).

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Categories Book News

Amazing News! Holden Caulfield Could Have Died Fighting Nazis

January 27, 2011 //

Catcher in the Rye

NPR, the other day, had an interview with Kenneth Slawenski author of J.D. Salinger: A Life.

From NPR.org:

One revelation that is elaborated on throughout Slawenski’s erratic biography [Stirling says: Ouch.] is just how crucial Salinger’s World War II experiences were to his later Zen Buddhism, as well as to his writing. Salinger served in an Army Counter Intelligence Corps. On D-Day, he landed on Utah Beach, then went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge; toward the end of the war, he helped liberate a sub-camp of Dachau. According to Slawenski, manuscript pages of The Catcher in the Rye were on Salinger’s person throughout the fighting.[full article with audio!]

Crazy. One stray bullet and no Holden Caulfield! Generations of angst-ridden teens would’ve lost out. After all, there’s no Edward the Sulking Vampire without dear Mr. Caulfield.

Salinger fans would do well to check out Slawenski site: Dead Caulfields.

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Categories Amazing News!, Book News, Library Bric-a-brac

All Thousand Words… On Judging Kids’ Lit.

January 26, 2011 //
Scaredy Squirrel

From the 2007 winner! Scaredy Squirrel

Tonight, I’m whittling down my top ten pics for the Amelia France Howard-Gibbon Illustrator’s Award for children’s literature. This list will be added to all the other shortlists made-up by my co-committee people and distilled down to yet another shortlist.

This is a pretty exciting committee. I’ve received a steady stream of free books over the last few months. I had a pile many feet hight and read them all. Phew.

There’s no way to summarize the kinds of books people are making. Cute. Creepy. Weird. Occasionally serious. Sometimes heartrendingly beautiful. Often didactic (more often than not). It doesn’t matter. The caliber and creativity of the Canadian artists I’ve read is just astounding

I’ve also fallen smack into a literary world that I haven’t dabbled in for years and years. Relearning how to encounter these books has been both a trip down memory lane and a quest to figure out what the 21st century reading experience is for young readers.

Not an easy question to answer. It’s easy to let your personal nostalgia for books like when you were little overpower what young people today might be looking for.

This is a challenge, and it’s one that children and youth services librarians grapple with all the time. Lucky them, right? I’m a little envious.

I look forward to the announcement of the winner, so I can review some of the books I’ve discovered!

Also, looking forward to starting over next year.

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Categories Book News, Library Bric-a-brac

Judging by the Cover – We All Do It

January 16, 2011 //

Book Cover ArchiveI will not say the old adage is moot, but cover design has become pretty central to the book experience. This is especially the case when it comes to browsing shelves for your next read.

The Book Cover Archive shows off how book makers try to catch readers attention. The site is a huge, searchable database that celebrates the best and brightest of cover design industry right now.

As a design-freak, I love sites like this. It makes my eyes greedy and my soul a little jealous (Wouldn’t it be fun to make art like that all the time?).

book cover archive screen shot In a perfect world, libraries would be able to constantly update book covers to keep up with design trends. Realistically, it’d be impossible.

Online, though, it’s different. Online catalogue records could reflect newer designs for covers of older books. This can help breathe new life into editions passed over by browsers as dated. It’s an easy way to capitalize on marketing trends and cash in on the cues readers expect from book covers.

In the graphic designer part of my life, I’ve had some practical experience in the book cover field.Pretty nice, right? The poetry inside is good, too.

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Categories Book News, Library Bric-a-brac, Public Libraries, User experience

Future of the Book

January 12, 2011 //

legos gutenburg

One of my favourite CBC Radio shows, Ideas, has posted a podcast on the future of the book. It’s a round table discussion with perspectives from publishers, editors, and writers with, of course, a decidedly Canadian outlook.

Ideas host Paul Kennedy moderates a panel from the 2010Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal.  Two publishers (Yvonne Hunter from Penguin Canada and Kim McArthur from McArthur Books) and an academic/author/blogger (Andrew Piper from McGill) discuss the uncertain future of an endangered species. [Listen here.]

This episode is a really good cross-section of the issues around the evolving world of eBooks, print books, and the push and pull between them.

A few things have got me to thinking.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories Book News, Technology, Uncategorized

On the Merits of Accurate Bibliographic Description

January 8, 2011 //

burning templars burn burn

My love of edu-TV melodrama meant I had to watch Museums Secrets the other night.

The show was on the Vatican Museum (cool in its own right and on my top list museums and libraries I need to see). I knew a lot of the stuff they talked about, except for their closing vignette about a recently rediscovered document apparently acquitting the Knights Templar from heresy charges.

From Reuters:

The parchment, also known as the Chinon Chart, was “misplaced” in the Vatican archives until 2001, when Frale stumbled across it.

“The parchment was catalogued incorrectly at some point in history. At first I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was incredulous,” she said.

A CBC report places the shady entry in 1628, 320 years after the original trial.

Conspiracy? Maybe…

Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories Amazing News!, Book News, Cataloguing, Library Bric-a-brac

A Word’s Worth

January 6, 2011 //

Just a Huck Finn Moment

I’m always surprised when the debate over the  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn returns.  I’m not sure why that is. I shouldn’t be. According to the ALA it is among the top five most challenged books in the United States. The controversy, as we all should know, stems largely from the representations of Jim and the vocabulary attached to him.  But don’t worry, someone has come up with a way to solve  the problem.

From the New York Times:

Throughout the book — 219 times in all — the word “nigger” is replaced by “slave,” a substitution that was made by NewSouth Books, a publisher based in Alabama, which plans to release the edition in February.

Alan Gribben, a professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery, approached the publisher with the idea in July. Mr. Gribben said Tuesday that he had been teaching Mark Twainfor decades and always hesitated before reading aloud the common racial epithet, which is used liberally in the book, a reflection of social attitudes in the mid-19th century…

“I’m by no means sanitizing Mark Twain,” Mr. Gribben said. “The sharp social critiques are in there. The humor is intact. I just had the idea to get us away from obsessing about this one word, and just let the stories stand alone.” (The book also substitutes “Indian” for “injun.”) [full article here]

Except that of course he is sanitizing it. Gibben’s scheme to end the book’s contentiousness is an end run around the book itself, a way to make it easier to swallow Twain’s social criticisms. A nice spoonful of sugar.

But, carbo-loading your literature isn’t the best idea. Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories Book News, Censorship

E-gads! eBooks!

January 5, 2011 //


Digital Library Blog has reported that:

Despite some issues caused by a surge in activity, traffic, checkouts, and new user registration records were smashed over the Christmas holiday–all thanks to eBooks.

For the first time ever, eBooks out-circulated audiobooks at libraries’ ‘Virtual Branch’ websites. Audiobooks are still very popular and increasing in circulation, but this momentum for eBook downloads shows that the format has gone mainstream at libraries.[full article here]

The holiday spike in library checkouts of eBooks is cool, but not unsurprising considering that high-tech gadgetry like eReaders are popular gifts. For sure, people will always want to play with their new toys/tools right away. Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories Book News, Technology
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