Bluestalking

Photo of the Day

 

 

 

 

Last Wednesday was my birthday. In honor of that I'm posting a photo of one of the lilies in the bouquet I received.

The other part of my present was a gift card to Barnes & Noble, which I surprisingly have not yet spent. Every year my husband gives me a gift card in the amount of my age. This is the only reason I'd ever want to live to be 100. Not that that stops me from spending that amount on books already. So, perhaps this is a moot point entirely.

But hey. A gift card is a gift card...

The Library, Once More Into the Breech

We had a staff meeting this morning re: the new direction libraries are headed and what that will mean for our own library within the next 10-15 years. I expressed my trepidation regarding the ongoing fight between publishers and libraries in a previous post and the more I think about it the more I'm even more angry what I see as a knee-jerk reaction to a period of new technologies.

Department by department, we visited other area libraries to see what they've been planning and have already implemented. Universal changes included: elimination of reference books (including the Brittanica and OED), new and better displays for DVDs, CDs and magazines (organized by theme, consolidating shelving units, etc.) and adding more digital, online databases.

 

 

Cool Magazine Display

Others involve eliminating circulation staff - or, at best, severely cutting down positions - because now there are conveyor belts that take incoming books and sort them into big bins for re-shelving. Here's an example of a really large, sophisticated version, unlike any I've seen in real life:

 

 

It looks pretty cool, yes? Wonder what that costs, and how long it will take to pay for itself with the money saved by firing all those circulation clerks.

Then there are the vending machines - like the Red Box model - where patrons can check out popular books and DVDs without the necessity of involving an actual person. Books ordered from outside the library can be tucked in there, as well, for pickup by patrons who put the books on hold. Slide in your library card and POOF! There's your book.

 

Library Media Box Vending Machine

 

Coffee and snack vending areas are another popular patron request, as are more quiet places to read and study. And I'm all for that, assuming users aren't spilling coffee all over the books and computers. Especially the books...

Most of these ideas seem pretty cool to me, aside from letting go of the OED and Brittanica, on general principle. But then again, the Brittanica is ceasing print publication anyway. The set we have will be the last we can purchase. It's seldom used anyway (it's all available online) but the OED? Ouch.

What I find most disturbing is the new mentality involving book buying, which we in the library refer to as "collection development." Because the reading public clamors mostly for genre novels, and less and less for more literary books, justification for purchasing more dense, complex, heavy-hitting books is less of a priority.

Want to know the most popular library books checked out last year? Here are some 2011 figures from The Guardian (UK). This is a British list, granted, but the U.S. lists are quite similar. If libraries devote large chunks of their fiction budgets buying, say, James Patterson's books where does that leave readers of literary fiction?

And it isn't just readers. It's already nearly impossible making money as a writer, save from that slim majority who hit it big. It could be argued authors aren't in the business for money - sure, because that pays the bills - but spending a huge amount of time producing a well-written book should surely be compensated. Or am I entirely off the mark? Is there something I'm forgetting?

Ours is a disposable society. Will books follow that example? If libraries bring reading materials down to the lowest common denominator, pandering only to mass market "airport" or "supermarket books," will the rest of us need to be content reading quality books published before the decline of literature?

Maybe I'm an alarmist. I certainly hope so but I'm also on the front lines, a librarian who's hearing all this first-hand. Worst of all, the official library stance from the Powers That Be is "go along with all the changes or perish." All the fight appears to have gone out of the profession, at least from what I've seen.

Or, if it hasn't gone out, it's most definitely gone quiet.

 

While trawling through the web one day...

Welcome to Tuesday, the week before my kids have Spring Break from school. And I don't. For what it's worth, my birthday (March 28) has always fallen the week of their break. When they were little I told them that's the purpose of their week off, to celebrate my birthday. For a while there I'm pretty sure they believed me.

Kids. It's so fun messing with their minds.

Here's some stuff I found on the interwebs. Hope you enjoy it.

 

This one may make you CRY. It did me, forcing me to face the fact I can't read all these gems:

http://www.worldhum.com/features/lists/the-100-most-celebrated-travel-books-list-20100427/

Have you read any you feel I simply cannot die without having read? Loads of them already on my wish list...

 

Amazingly wonderful and thoroughly considered blog post re: the current eBook battle between libraries and publishers:

http://librarianbyday.net/2012/03/07/should-libraries-get-out-of-the-ebook-business/

 

Essay on finding artistic inspiration:

http://www.themillions.com/2012/03/finding-inspiration-a-homework-assignment.html

 

A favorite quote:

"Like many novelists, I tend to experience an existential crisis every time I finish a book. Why bother? Why engage in such an intangible and self-involved vocation when I could be doing something more tangibly and socially useful? (i.e., stopping a pipeline, regrouting the bathroom.) Why write longform narrative in a world that prefers to live swiftly and episodically?"

- Kyo Maclear, from "The Beautiful Afterlife of Dead Books"

 

 

 

Lizzie Skurnick on 50 Shades of Grey: The new self-published eBook erotic thriller that's (inexplicably) shot to the top of the bestseller list.

Review and thoughts on the book from Smart Bitches Trashy Books

 

Book review lust:

 

http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2012/03/howard_frank_moshers_the_great.html

 

Four First Novels Reviewed:

The Telegraph

 

 

 

 

And, finally, this Youtube Video: Super Mario Saves the Princess (á la The Family Guy):

 

 

 

 

Books vs. eBooks, Libraries vs. Publishers

Weirdly enough, I don't often post here as a librarian. Or, I should say, about being a librarian, specifically. But lately there's a continually rising trend so disturbing I can't keep mum about it any longer.  Namely, libraries are - or are planning to start - getting rid of physical books in favor of digital/eBooks. Re-design plans for library space have either been set in motion or are under discussion. "New" library floorplans strip book collections down to the bestsellers, the books most checked out. Older, less obviously popular books will be escorted to the door, their mylar covers ripped off and security tags removed.

You may say, "Big deal. These books aren't getting checked out often anyway, plus the space could be better used housing tech labs, private rooms for meetings or study or teleconferencing - things people actually use."

If you're bloodless, unappreciative of things like serendipitous discovery of new books and authors, topics and the free exchange of ideas, good for you. Your ignorance precedes you and isn't likely to go away, thanks to your closed-minded logic. But if, for the rest of us, the very thought of the "libri" root of the word library still evokes actual books you can hold in your hands, flip through and enjoy the heft of actual papers glued between two covers, this is positively chilling.

Ironically, now libraries willing and in the process of chucking print books are running into a bit of a hitch. Namely, it's finally dawning on publishers they're becoming the only game in town, the one source of the very digital books libraries need. And, sure, they were the suppliers for paper and glue books, too. But those cost a lot more money to produce, store and ship than their digital counterparts. Digital books, they're realizing, are a true cash cow. And who needs eBooks in order to provide books to their patrons? Why, the same libraries heaving print books out the door. The same who need to provide newly electronically-enlightened patrons with copies of digital books they assume will, or have, supplanted the old fashioned book book.

So publishers are raising their prices for eBooks, tightening up their licenses in order to continue making money - not such an odd thing for a business. Prices are raising not 10 or 20%, or even 50%. Try numbers like 300 % over the prices they were just a couple weeks ago - at least in the case of mega-giant Random House.

Publishers like Penguin are refusing to sell eBooks to libraries at all, figuring they're missing out on a hefty profit when these books are checked out over and over, never wearing out, never needing to be replaced. Because, for the foreseeable future, digital is forever. Some are in negotiations with libraries to charge per however many checkouts they deem normal for an equivalent paper book, estimating how long book books last before needing to be replaced. And libraries are horrified, justifiably or not.

There's a lot that's up in the air but who'll be suffering most? Ah, that's right. The readers. The public, the students, the whomever is queueing up to make use of these books. And their patience won't last long. The first time they go to check out a new book and hear, "Umm... We don't have that in electronic form because the publisher is charging too much money for it and we won't buy from them" I don't think they'll find it in their hearts to feel too badly for the library itself. Rather, I think they'll scream their heads off, holding onto their Nooks, Amazon Kindles, Sony eReaders and whatever else is coming down the pike.

Library patrons are keeping libraries in business. They're paying property taxes which pay for books, maintenance, little things like librarian's salaries. And, in exchange, they expect service, an institution that meets their needs. When libraries are at war with publishers patrons don't care. They expect one or both to suck it up, get over it and provide the services and materials they need.

When books are swallowed up by digital books, libraries have become computer labs instead of storehouses of information and the world has rolled over in response to the pressure of staying on the cutting edge of technology, where will humans be? At what other time in history has so much change been forced upon people in such a short time? And, where will the non-technical people be? Left in the dust, I guess.

Luddite I am not, proof positive being my presence here, my possession of an iPhone and a Kindle Fire. But I'm also a bibliophile. My house is bulging at the seams with books numbered in the thousands: the old-fashioned sort made of paper. What I am is concerned and one of the things bothering me most is the possibility the world outside the library profession doesn't realize all that's going on right now, all the turmoil, certainly, but the threat to paper books as well. Or, the threat to paper books especially.

I hope you'll take what I'm saying here and turn it into library activism, on whatever scale you can. Maybe things where you are haven't - and even won't, for a long time or forever - changed but for those of us in major metropolitan areas things are changed already. Libraries are jumping on the bandwagon to be ahead of the curve. Some have renovated already, taking out the books, modelling themselves after the now-defunct Borders, putting coffee bars where books used to be.

All well and good but there's more at stake. The battle between publishers and libraries is joined and getting more bloody by the minute. Being a librarian, I'm trying to straddle the line, eager to provide eBooks to those who want them but also stubbornly against sacrificing books to do so. I'm one of those who walks in the library stacks, one finger on book spines like a child running a stick along a picket fence. When a title, or an image strikes my fancy I love pulling it off the shelf, reading the dustjacket blurb and considering if it would suit me or not. If those books are no longer there I'll never stumble on them. I'll never experience the excitement of finding a new-to-me author not recommended by Amazon, because someone else who bought a certain book also bought this one. And while I can page through lists of eBooks, neatly organized in alphabetical order, that grows tedious awfully quickly.

While understanding the upsurge in providing eBooks, I also think all this is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Libraries are turning from books (who'd ever believe that would happen?) so as not to seem old-fashioned, and now publishers and libraries are at each other's throats. Those without e-readers are being shoved out into the cold and books more than a few years old are either going to used book sales or being pulped. It's a mess, quite frankly. One I'm expected to stay on top of, to keep abreast of what's new and generally support the library and its new mission.

Between you and me, I wish I'd been born much earlier, even long enough ago I'd be turned to dust by now. Because I'd rather not have lived to see all that's happening. Words can't describe how much I hate what's being lost. Call me old fashioned, or backward, or whatever you'd like. Honestly, I don't care. What I dread is the day I have a grandchild who grows up without need of a bookcase, because all s/he needs is a pouch to hold an e-reader.

The scary thing is, this may not be far off the mark. And I still don't want to be here to see it.

 

For more:

http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2012/03/ebooks/librarians-feel-sticker-shock-as-price-for-random-house-ebooks-rise-as-much-as-300-percent/

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/business/for-libraries-and-publishers-an-e-book-tug-of-war.html

http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Books-Present-Future/dp/158648902X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331241317&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Life-Story-Technology/dp/0801893119/ref=pd_sim_b_2

 

For Librarians:

http://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=3638&zbrandid=4634&zidType=CH&zid=10559990&zsubscriberId=1026617009&zbdom=http://ala-publishing.informz.net

http://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=3525

 

Amazing new invention: the BOOK!