Fifty Shades of Grey banned from Florida libraries

EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey ‘is not a classic’, according to Florida library services. Photograph: Philippa Cotton

Bestselling erotic novel removed from shelves in Brevard County as other US libraries make the most of title’s popularity

By Alison Flood

It’s the fastest selling book of the year in the UK but British author EL James’s erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey is just too pornographic for residents of Brevard County, Florida, according to local librarians.

The book, which traces the increasingly sadomasochistic relationship between a young student and a rich businessman with a fondness for bondage, has been removed from shelves in libraries in the Florida district. “It’s quite simple – it doesn’t meet our selection criteria,” Cathy Schweinsberg, library services director, told Florida Today. “Nobody asked us to take it off the shelves. But we bought some copies before we realised what it was. We looked at it, because it’s been called ‘mommy porn’ and ‘soft porn.’ We don’t collect porn.”

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The 25 Most Beautiful Public Libraries in the World

Vennesla Library and Culture House, designed by Helen & Hard, Vennesla, Norway

By Emily Temple

We’re suckers for beautiful libraries here at Flavorpill, as you might have noticed from our lists of beautiful college libraries and beautiful private libraries from all over the world. But public libraries are probably even more important to the culture at large than either of these — they’re places where anyone can enter and partake of knowledge they offer, where anyone can engage with history, literature and culture. And while we know it’s the books that are important, everyone likes to read in a beautiful space, so we decided to take a look at the most beautiful public libraries in the world. We excluded some very beautiful libraries that may be open to the public as museums or tourist attractions but with limited function as actual libraries, like the Vatican library (which to use, you must prove your qualifications and research needs) and the library of Dutch Parliament, but we think there are enough public libraries proper to make up for their loss.

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Occupy Wall Street Library Confiscated in Union Square

These are the remaining books left in the Occupy Wall Street Library following a police action last night.

By Jason Boog

At 7 p.m. yesterday, the Occupy Wall Street librarians posted a picture of the newly rebuilt Occupy Wall Street Library in New York City’s Union Square Park. By 10 p.m., police had cleared out most of the library–leaving behind the books in the picture (embedded above).

Below, we’ve created a chronological collection of tweets from activists showing what happened to the library. The librarians tweeted a new chant today: “People got sold out, Books got thrown out!”

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We will measure our loss

By Peter Brantley

Last week was a hard one for readers, with Penguin pulling out of the library market by curtailing its agreement with Overdrive, possibly for allowing Amazon to directly lend files to patrons. It’s left a lot of us feeling markedly less charitable about large publishers.

I had a feeling it wouldn’t be an easy week. It started with a hard and passionate discussion on a mailing list for public library directors on the amount of support given the homeless that frequent urban libraries. Many homeless must maintain their belongings in large parcels or boxes that could block public access and potentially pose a security risk. If a library prohibits containers beyond certain dimensions, are they discriminating against the homeless because there’s no secure storage outside the library? Can they make a special allowance for baby strollers and childcare gear? Yet every librarian wanted to avoid making the homeless feel unwelcome, because they have a right to be in the library just like anyone else. Balancing competing expectations across people from very different backgrounds is part of what librarians do every day.

And more disturbing things as well. In the middle of the week, I had lunch with a friend who is director of a small urban library near San Francisco in what many people would describe as a pleasant community, with a mix of wealthy and working people from different backgrounds. She discussed having to deal with a growing number of methamphetamine addicts, including one recent individual who, screaming loudly, was threatening the library’s patrons and staff with the pair of scissors he was wildly waving about. The library director courageously enticed him outside, engaging him in a conversation about what exactly he wanted to do with the scissors, while her staff frantically called the police. Having to cope with crazed meth-heads in the library is disturbingly common, even as librarians struggle to shield it from their patrons.

These same librarians, who one moment are fending off someone badly damaged, minutes later might receive a visit from an old woman wanting to donate $50 every month from her retirement pay so her granddaughter will have good books to read after her elementary school is out. It’s enough to make you want to cry. Every goddamn day.

And so hearing that Penguin, one of the six largest publishers in the United States, was willing to make libraries collateral damage in a skirmish they hadn’t chosen somehow seemed a fitting end to the week, even though we had only reached Thursday. I know that Penguin has many very hard working and dedicated professionals who care deeply about publishing, and that they must make decisions that strike them as difficult about what they can publish, and the bold risks that their authors take. But all I could think about on Friday was wanting to ask the CEO of Penguin, “Have you ever been so afraid for your staff, so concerned about their safety, that you’ve tried to get them certified on Tasers?” Because I know librarians who have.

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A Valentine for Librarians

By Barbara Vey

I was the oldest of nine children, so we didn’t buy books except school books.  They were treasures to me.  The idea of actually owning a book of your very own seemed like something just rich people did.  For the rest of us there was the library.

I can still remember my first trip to the library. I felt like I was entering holy ground.  It appeared so huge to my young eyes.  Rows upon rows of every subject you could ever imagine.  And the quiet was so very quiet.  You could hear the turning of pages, the scrap of chair across the floor and the occasional shush from the librarian.  If there was any talking it was in extremely muted tones.

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Crime gives library loan beating to other genres

Photograph by Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

With a conspicuous absence of non-fiction, this year’s PLR figures show crime fiction dominating lending, with children’s books not far behind.

By John Dugdale

As with Sherlock Holmes’s dog that failed to bark in the night-time, the most telling thing in the league table of library borrowings for 2010/11 is what’s absent. Why is there no non-fiction at all in the top 100, although cookbooks, memoirs and Guinness World Records are invariably among the leading titles in annual charts of books bought?

And where is David Nicholls’s One Day, Britain’s No 1 bestseller in 2011 after making the top five in 2010? Like Dawn French’s debut novel A Tiny Bit Marvellous, also a hit in both years, it’s nowhere to be found. One inference would be that people are more likely to buy books they expect to read or refer to more than once. Fans of Nicholls’s love story, or Jamie Oliver’s recipes, by and large coughed up cash to own or to give them; so if a book is either useful or treasurable, it’s unlikely to appear prominently and may not figure at all.

That also would explain other aspects of the table – compiled by Public Lending Right (PLR) and covering mid-2010 to mid-2011 – such as the relatively feeble showing of literary novels: only Joanna Trollope (38), Hilary Mantel (41, 94), Kathryn Stockett (42), Sebastian Faulks (44), Sarah Waters (80) and Nick Hornby (81) fly the flag for non-genre fiction.

Whodunnits and thrillers, by contrast, are rarely reread for obvious reasons: once you’ve finished them you know the solution or outcome. This disposability seems to account for the overwhelming dominance of crime authors in PLR’s rankings, and also James Patterson’s emergence as supreme among them. The American overseer of a production line churning out a slew of titles each year, Patterson regularly scores several top 100 bestsellers. Few make it higher than mid-table, however, and it’s in library loans that he’s pre-eminent, Britain’s most-borrowed author for the fifth consecutive year.

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That’s Why the Lady is Revamped

The entrance foyee to the re-vamped Johannesburg City Library with escalators.. Picture: Chris Collingridge INLSA

By UFRIEDA HO

YOU notice the escalator first, and then where the escalator leads to.

It’s a swish, modern, sensor-activated escalator that dominates the Joburg City Library. There’s more: three new floors. They rise from the centre of the library foyer that has been under wraps to the general public while it has been renovated.

Gone are the flat-top glass display cabinets that dotted the quiet, airy space.

The same entrance space where, at exam times, a human snake of students grew in coils as people waited for a seat to become free in the reference section.

Now a mezzanine floor – the first stop on the escalator – juts out on to the reference section. It’s the new digital hub of the library.

There will be 212 public access computers and the library will become a wi-fi zone. Overall seating in the library – the first to be opened to all races in 1974 – has been increased from 255 to 566.

The imposing double-storey windows are opaque, shutting out the world to the seriousness of non-fiction and grown-up research material.

An old catalogue card cabinet stands among the rows of wooden bookshelves.

It’s not practically functional any more, just a reminder of a time before Google, apps and Android – a time when alphabetising was all the order the world seemed to need and a request slip for a book out on loan for two weeks was not too long to wait.

The revamp of the grand old lady of the city has come at a cost of nearly R93.5 million. It’s from the city’s coffers and a R26m grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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Living in the Jungle: Amazon and Penguin

  By Peter Brantley

I’ve been thinking about Amazon’s entry into the ebook lending market, initially via Overdrive and now through the Prime subscription program, and considering its ramifications. I am hardly alone; publishers are obviously evaluating this move as well. Penguin’s abdication from the library market has been widely perceived to be a response to Amazon’s entry into ebook lending. As Eric Hellman notes on his blog, “The Penguin move should be seen not as corporate verdict on libraries, but as a reaction to Amazon’s entry into the library market. … The recently announced Kindle Owner’s Lending Library demonstrates that Amazon, blessed with its trove of marketing data, understands the power of libraries to promote sales. But it also demonstrates that Amazon is not content to leave libraries to libraries.”

The unique characteristic of Amazon’s lending programs is that the books are sourced directly from Amazon regardless of whether the reader finds the work through Overdrive or directly on Amazon, for Prime subscribers. This makes absolute sense for Amazon, and it is an opportunity enabled by their use of a proprietary ebook format. Amazon gains user intentionality data, and visits to their site are likely to drive up sales of books and other media, as well as shavers, GPS units, cell phones, and kids’ toys (and Kindle readers). From the perspective of a cloud-based platform player, a library-style lending program is an attractive offering, and will be the nexus of investment in additional content and services; among its other affordances, it is a “Look Inside” on steroids.

From a reader’s perspective, Amazon’s lending support is highly attractive, even as it erodes any competitive advantage libraries possess in ebook acquisition, i.e., borrowing. I am in the midst of my third transition in ebook providers, and for me, Amazon’s lending support is a considerable inducement, even as I am aware of the downside of further strengthening their market position, and I have no desire to support a proprietary ebook format (Kindle Format 8, in its latest iteration). However, as any economist can tell you, what seems most rational at the personal level is not necessarily the most advantageous social or market position once individual decisions are aggregated.

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Libraries are active partners with the publishing industry

By Greg Hill

Samuel Pepys, the great English diarist who chronicled London life in the 1660s, was a sucker for an interesting book. In Pepys’ day, book buyers purchased the loose pages of manuscripts and had them bound themselves. For example, on July 8, 1664, Pepys wrote that he’d gone “to the binder’s and directed the doing of my Chaucer … and thence to the clasp-maker’s to have it clasped and bossed.”

Librarians love bookstores, of course, and that affection’s largely returned by booksellers, who’ve long known that thriving libraries inspire readers to buy books.

Last month Publisher’s Weekly had an article about a Library Journal survey showing more than “50 percent of all library users report purchasing books by an author they were introduced to in the library. This debunks the myth that when a library buys a book the publisher loses future sales. Instead, it confirms the public library not only incubates and supports literacy, as is well understood in our culture, but it is an active partner with the publishing industry in building the book market, not to mention the burgeoning e-book market.”

Librarians certainly buy a lot of books for themselves. I spend a little extra to buy new books locally and support our local booksellers. When used books are hard to locate, I turn to BookFinder.com. For example, my friend Leon showed me how engaging his 1938 copy of Judge James Wickersham’s “Old Yukon: Tales, Trails, and Trials” was recently, and I craved my own copy. BookFinder.com revealed a bookstore in Massachusetts would part with theirs for $6.99, after I threw in another $3.99 for shipping. Now, it’s mine.

The Judge’s book has the entire May 1903 issue of the Fairbanks Miner, with an exclusive with Felix Pedro and a tall “Tanana Tale,” about a miner who claims to survive falling in the Tanana River at 70 below, getting lost, and staving off starvation by eating the tail of his lead dog.

“I gave Doughnuts the bone out of his tail,” he explained, “and after gnawing it a while he came on into the Fortymile with me.”

Few events are so pleasing as books in the mail. The pleasure’s heightened when they arrive wrapped in tissue paper. My new “Old Yukon” measured up, and was further wrapped in pages from a New York Times several weeks old. Several eye-catching articles popped out, including one by Jess Bidgood about the Occupy Wall Street Library, also known as the “People’s Library.”

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A Corner of American Outreach Has Few Visitors, and Plenty of Dust

Andrea Bruce for The New York Times

Kamal Yunis, a research librarian at Baghdad University, oversees the quiet American Corner.

By TIM ARANGO

 In a nook of the library at Baghdad University, sturdy histories of the American Revolution and the Vietnam War line up next to Alexis de Tocqueville and John Updike. Paperbacks from Tom Clancy and Michael Connelly, even Judy Blume, dangle guilty pleasures. And, as if to close the loop on Americana, baseball makes a token appearance with a copy of “Farm Team,” a novel about a boy who builds a ball field in a cow pasture.

Yet, the readers never come.

On a recent morning, this section was empty, as it is most days. As far as Kamal Yunis, a research librarian who oversees what is formally called the American Corner, can tell, no student has ever opened one of the books. The collection was assembled by the American Embassy here and is an example, writ small, of the sort of cultural programs — “soft power,” in the diplomatic nomenclature — that the State Department will emphasize after the last troops leave. Even in this arena of cultural and educational links, United States diplomats say they hope to gain leverage over Iran — whose political influence here is vast and likely to grow after the departure of the American military — by steering more students and academics toward American ideas and, hopefully, more opportunities to study in the United States.

Like nearly every American pursuit here, a battle of ideas will be difficult to win given deep suspicions toward the United States and the shattered civil society that is only slowly re-emerging. Iraq’s losses from war, tyranny and sanctions can be tabulated in physical terms, in lives and property, and in soulful shades, in identity and peace of mind. Less momentously, on the same ledger, sit the cultural losses of reading and academic striving.

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