E-Books and Democracy

By ANTHONY W. MARX

WRESTLING with my newspaper on the subway recently, I noticed the woman next to me reading a book on her smartphone. “That has to hurt your eyes,” I commented.  Not missing a beat, she replied, in true New York style, “My font is bigger than yours.” She was right.

The information revolution raises profound questions about the future of books, reading and libraries. While publishers have been nimble about marketing e-books to consumers, until very recently they’ve been mostly unwilling to sell e-books to libraries to lend, fearful that doing so would hurt their business, which is under considerable pressure.

Negotiations between the nation’s libraries and the Big Six publishers — Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, Random House and Simon & Schuster, which publish roughly two-thirds of the books in America — have gone in fits and starts. Today Hachette, which had been a holdout, is joining the others in announcing that it will make e-books available to public libraries. This is a big step, as it represents, for the first time, a consensus among the Big Six, at least in principle, that their e-books should be made available to library users.

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94% of Parents Think Libraries Are Important for Their Children

By Jason Boog

Think that libraries are obsolete in the 21st Century? A whopping 94 percent of American parents agree that “libraries are important for their children.”

Last year, Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project surveyed 2,252 Americans aged 16 or older to find out more about library attitudes in America. Here is more information from the inspiring report:

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Library in a Shipping Container

By Michael Lieberman

Welcome to The Amin Library in Batu, Indonesia, a new eight-room public library and clinic designed by dpavilion architects and made entirely out of recycled shipping containers!

 Eight containers in all were used with each color corresponding to a different function.

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Nazi-Looted Books Spell Decades of Labor for Libraries

An almanac that once belonged to Arthur Goldschmidt, a Jewish businessman persecuted by the Nazis and a book collector who amassed 40,000 volumes. His grandson recently reached a settlement with the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, which will keep the books.

By Catherine Hickley

Arthur Goldschmidt, a Leipzig dealer in animal feed and an exporter to South America, was more passionate about books than business. His private collection numbered 40,000 carefully indexed volumes and he engaged a librarian to take care of it.

After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Goldschmidt was persecuted as a Jew; his assets were liquidated and his company confiscated. For survival, he sold his treasured collection of 2,000 almanacs — spanning three centuries — for a pittance to the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar. He fled in 1938.

His grandson Tomas Goldschmidt, who was a toddler when Arthur died in poverty in Bolivia in 1951, had no idea the collection had survived until he was contacted by the London- based Commission for Looted Art in Europe — 70 years after his grandfather’s escape. The commission traced him at the request of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar.

The library has since reached a restitution settlement with Goldschmidt and, just as importantly for him, helped to illuminate an era of family history. He described his first visit to see the almanacs in 2007.

“I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t touch those books, I couldn’t swallow,” he said over coffee in a Berlin cafe. “I felt so proud. It put my family in a new light. I never knew they were so wealthy and so educated. In South America my grandfather had nothing to live on — they were poor.”

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Rem Koolhass Goes Back to the Library

By by Michael Lieberman

He’s back! Hoping to build on the tremendous success of the Seattle Central Library, Rem Koolhaas and the OMA team are back. This time they’re in Qatar to build the National Library.

As ArchDaily said in they’re look at the Seattle Central library project:

The Seattle Central Library redefines the library as an institution no longer exclusively dedicated to the book, but as an information store where all potent forms of media—new and old—are presented equally and legibly. In an age where information can be accessed anywhere, it is the simultaneity of all media and, more importantly, the curatorship of their content that will make the library vital.

The building itself is reaching the level of the Space Needle and the Pike Place Market in the Emerald City’s iconography but more importantly usage of the library is twice as much as was first projected!

Qatar is hoping for a similar success. The Qatar National Library will be a place “where all Qataris can meet friends, enjoy moments with their families and spend leisure and creative time in their personal journey in search of knowledge and cultural experiences.” says Project Director Dr. Claudia Lux,

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Promoting Literacy and Opening Libraries in Africa

By Matia Burnett

The African Library Project – a nonprofit organization that coordinates book drives to build libraries in African nations – celebrated a significant milestone in January by sending its millionth children’s picture book to Africa. ALP relies on the efforts of volunteers in schools, clubs, community groups, and other organizations in the U.S. and Canada. Each book drive is matched with a specific community that has requested a library and has established a space to house the books, often through collaboration with Peace Corps workers and other partnering organizations.

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Four Amazing Mini Libraries That Will Inspire You to Read

Libraries are among the most important of human institutions, warehousing knowledge accumulated over centuries, nay, eons. Libraries are also very alluring places, often built with ornate and cavernous reading rooms, vertiginous shelving for book storage, and winding secret passages. Originally built to protect books from ruin, libraries are generally gigantic bunker-like buildings. Inwardly focused, they restrict access to their treasure troves to those who whisper and can thrive without sunlight.

With the advent of the internet, however, all of the world’s knowledge is available instantly to anyone who desires it. Books are no longer precious for the information within them, but rather for their physicality: you can’t hold the internet or turn a webpage (discounting the swipes of an iPad). This frees libraries to pursue another of their functions: to foster dialogue and investigation. To accomplish this task, libraries themselves have had to get smaller, and more mobile. More accessible to a larger population than a classic library, the Pop-Up Library preserves the intimacy and experience of the book. Below are some great examples of this new species of institution.

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The most borrowed library books of 2012

With figures compiled too late for EL James to make an impression, borrowers favoured homicide over hanky-panky.

By John Dugdale

Has EL James done it again?” is what you inevitably wonder, when approaching the latest annual chart for UK library loans. “Did she dominate sales rankings as she did last year? Did library users show just as much appetite for porn as bookshop customers?”

A quick glance at the chart will show that the emphatic answers are no, no and no: not only is the Fifty Shades trilogy not at the top, it’s nowhere – as are last year’s other erotica hits. As a result, the borrowings table looks more blokeish and less sexy than the all-2012 sales chart, where the top 10 was female-dominated: overall, 65 of the authors of the 100 most-borrowed books are men.

Perhaps some librarians were reluctant to stock porn. The difference between buying (where titles can be acquired impersonally online) and borrowing (where users typically hand titles to librarians for checking out) might also offer a partial explanation.

The main factor, however, is presumably not primness or diffidence but the chart’s timeframe. The table, compiled by PLR – which distributed a total of £6.4m to 23,190 authors for 2011/12, at a rate of 6.20 pence per loan – covers borrowings up to the end of June last year, leaving little time for James’s books to make an impression after their publication in April.

So, instead of switching to sex and spanking in America, borrowers stuck with 50 shades of US murder.

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The medicinal power of literature: Books on prescription to be introduced

‘Mood boosting’ poetry and novels to be recommended by GPs

By Nick Clark

People consulting their local GP over mental health issues may find they are written a surprising prescription, one redeemed at the local library rather than a pharmacy.

The “big guns” of the library and medical worlds have joined for an initiative to help treat those with mild to moderate mental health problems.

Patients could be recommended anything from one of 30 medical volumes dealing with specific conditions to “mood boosting books” – novels and poetry – from writers including Jo Brand, Bill Bryson and Terry Jones.

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Bring back shushing librarians

Library users plead for quiet places to read, write and study — but is anybody listening?

By Laura Miller

Librarians hate to be depicted as bun- and glasses-wearing shushers, hellbent on silencing any and all noisy activities within their sacred domain. Fair enough: Librarians are highly skilled, well-educated and socially aware as a rule, and should not be reduced to a cultural stereotype ranking only a notch or two above a church lady on the hipness scale.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot to be said for that shushing. I’ve long believed that one of the most precious resources libraries offer their patrons is simple quiet. Alas, for too long I’ve been forced to confine this sentiment to bar-stool rants because for all I knew I was being hopelessly retrograde. Libraries are constantly talking up the new — and often clamorous — services and activities they have added or plan to add in order to “better serve a diverse community” (and by extension, justify their continued funding in the eyes of public officials who like to appear forward-thinking). But take heart, seekers of serenity, for now we have data!

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