March 18th, 2010 Brian Herzog
A couple years ago, Encyclopedia Britannica was on an anti-Wikipedia kick, fearing, I think, that this would be the fate of print encyclopedias:
I’m happy (and not surprised) to report this didn’t happen. I believe the same will prove true with the notion of ebooks making print books obsolete. This is a big world, and things have a way of finding their own niche. Radio lives on despite television (and movies and computers), pencils live on despite pens, candles live on despite electricity, bicycles live on despite cars, etc.
Many of the books I own are older than I am, and I’m sure they’ll still be around (and in use) after I’m gone.
via
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March 11th, 2010 Brian Herzog
Here’s another one of those coincidences with the same topic popping up in different contexts throughout the day.
On my way in to work one day last week, I heard a story on the radio (via the BBC) talking about how children are becoming more sexualized. I wouldn’t have thought this was possible, but the report described how, for decades, society has told little girls that they need to be thin and pretty. But recently, society has ramped up this message, telling them they need to be thin and pretty and sexually-attractive to boys. It seemed to say that now it’s not just about looks, but that sex appeal is also required.
Later at work, our Teen Librarian asked me if I’d heard of a “princess bible.” I hadn’t, so I looked it up, and sure enough they are for sale. Our reactions were the same, and echoed the point of the radio show earlier: isn’t this an odd mixture of religion and sassy sexy self-image?
Not necessarily, of course, because I know my niece likes Disney princesses, and that is totally innocent. Perhaps I’m just being over-sensitive on the little girl sex angle. Maybe it’s just the marketing gimmicky feel of it I don’t like - it seems akin to using a cartoon camel to peddle cigarette to children. I guess I just question what this princess message is trying to appeal to in young girls - and whether that should be necessary to sell Bibles. It seems a bit at odds with the pious modesty of Christianity.
Interestingly, this book appears in WorldCat.
And just for a counter-point, BoingBoing reports that Campus atheists offer free porn in exchange for Bibles. I guess there’s more than one way to connect religion and sex.
Tags: bible, bibles, child, children, faith, libraries, Library, princess, princess bible, public, religion, sex, sexuality See Also
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March 2nd, 2010 Brian Herzog
I’m sure libraries across the country are asking this same question.
My library purchased Last Train from Hiroshima, but haven’t put it out yet because we’re divided over how to handle it. Based on revelations in the New York Times and Washington Post, I’m opposed to just shelving this book in non-fiction. There are a lot of requests for it, so I do want to make it available for people to read, but I would like to include a note of some kind stating there are significant known inaccuracies in the book.
One argument is that it’s not a library’s place to censor books, and if people want to read it we should provide access. However, we do censor resources and information simply by the act of selection, and by choosing which websites to link to based on their factual accuracy and reliability.
Mainly I want to protect school kids and other unknowing people from taking portions of this book as fact - which is what the library is confirming by shelving it in non-fiction. But so far, neither the Charles Pellegrino (author) nor the Henry Holt (publisher) has issued an easy-to-print statement to include in the book. As of today, the book is still being promoted on the publisher’s homepage, but the author has addressed the issue in a forum posting linked to from his website.
So, what are libraries doing with this book? Shelving it as usual? Not shelving it at all? Including a note inside or on the cover? Putting it in fiction? We still have Million Little Pieces in non-fiction, but I think there’s a difference between a memoir and a book about World War II.
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January 16th, 2010 Brian Herzog
A patron walked up to the desk one morning and said:
My book group met last night to talk about Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian. A question came up that we couldn’t agree on, so I hope you can answer it for us. On the cover of the book there is a woman in an orange dress - who is she?
The patron went off to look for her book group’s new selection, and I started searching. I haven’t read this book and didn’t know what the cover looked like, but I was hoping she was asking which character the cover represented, and not who the actual model was.
After a searching for various combinations of the title, author, “cover,” “woman,” and “orange dress,” I found something rather surprising on the She Reads and Reads blog:
Have you seen these women?
The first lot of similar covers I’m featuring this week are Lives of the Saints by Nino Ricci, Blaming by Elizabeth Taylor and Verbena by Nanci Kincaid:
Working in a library, I’ve seen a lot of similar book covers, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the exact same stock photo reused before. This makes me sad, because it reinforces that it’s probably the publisher making decisions like this, rather than the author.
With that in mind, I next looked for Chris Bohjalian’s website to ask him who he felt the woman in the orange dress represented. Delightfully, he provided an answer a few days later.
I let the patron know the next time I saw her, and she was very happy - thrilled, actually, to have an answer right from the author. So yay for Web 2.0 and direct dialog.
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November 17th, 2009 Brian Herzog
A couple weeks ago I posted about new options for printing books, in which I mentioned Google’s Expresso book-on-demand printer. I found out that the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge has one, so I went to check it out.
I still really like this as a source for out-of-print books to fill out a library’s collection, so my “test book” was The History of Chelmsford, written by Wilson Waters in 1917. My library has lots of copies of this, but I chose it because:
- I knew it was in Google Books
- It is huge (almost 1000 pages) and I wanted to see how well the book-on-demand printer handled it
- It has text, maps, illustrations and photographs, and I was curious to see how they reproduced
The people at the Harvard Book Store were incredibly nice and informative. I told them who I was and what I was doing, and the owner Jeff and shop assistant Amanda explained each step of the process to me, as well as told me about their experience so far with the service.
Typically, the process (photos) is completely automated and books take less than ten minutes to print start to finish (including download time), and cost $8 (which is the price announced by Google in a press conference, so the store is honoring it). However, since the book I wanted was so long, everything was expanded: downloading alone took five minutes, and it had to be printed in two volumes, because the printer can only handle about 500 pages at a time. Since it had to be divided, Amanda had to find the best place to split the book, and then do some quick calculations to figure out how thick each textblock would be to make sure the covers fit properly. And due to the extra labor involved, my two books cost $10 each, with the whole process taking about 40 minutes.
A few other interesting points:
- There were no ghost hands, but some of the pages were not cropped correctly - this caused them to be shrunk when printed, and in some cases the page numbers got trimmed off
- It seems like the quality of the printing was excellent - the only real variable is the quality of the scan
- The paper they use is acid-free and feels slightly glossy. I asked how long they expect the paperback covers and binding to last, but it’s so new they’re not sure
- Color is only available for the covers - book pages are b&w only
- I asked if they consider themselves “the publisher” for these books, and the answer was no - they are “the printer” because being a publisher involves more legal responsibility for the content of the books
- Jeff said they’ve had the printer for about a month and a half, and it is used
three or four 15-40 times a day (which was more often than I expected, but then again, the store is right across the street from Harvard. Nerds.)
- Their catalog interface doesn’t just search Google Books, but allows the printing of any book in the public domain, as well as self-published books
- I don’t want this to sound like a commercial for the store, but Jeff said he’d be interested in working with libraries - contact him for details
I tried to photograph the interesting parts, so check out my Books-on-Demand Printer flickr set or watch the slideshow below:
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