Tag: books

how to destroy the book

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m still sort of annoyed at Amazon’s self-serving press release about more ebooks being sold for the Kindle on Christmas Day than “real” books. I feel a few things

1. they’re creating a distinction that isn’t necessary, between ebooks and paper books
2. at the same time they’re obscuring the very very real distinction that exists and is terribly important: you do not own an ebook, you license or lease it

Plus I just plain old don’t believe it. I mean maybe it’s true for the narrowly sliced timeframe they’ve outlined but really? This isn’t a trend, it’s a blip. Want me to think otherwise? Release some actual numbers. Amazon makes more money off of ebooks than paper books. They’d like to keep doing that. So.

I’ve been meaning to link to this talk for a while, a transcribed talk that Cory Doctorow gave at the National Reading Summit in November. The title of his talk was How to Destroy the Book. I think you’ll enjoy it.

[T]he most important part of the experience of a book is knowing that it can be owned. That it can be inherited by your children, that it can come from your parents. That libraries can archive it, they can lend it, that patrons can borrow it. That the magazines that you subscribe to can remain in a mouldering pile of National Geographics in someone’s attic so you can discover it on a rainy day—and that they don’t disappear the minute you stop subscribing to it. It’s a very odd kind of subscription that takes your magazines away when you’re done [as is the case with most institutional subscriptions with Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of medical and scientific journals].

Having your books there like an old friend, following you from house to house for all the days and long nights of your life: this is the invaluable asset that is in publishing’s hands today. But for some reason publishing has set out to convince readers that they have no business reading their books as property—that they shouldn’t get attached to them. The worst part of this is that they may in fact succeed.

Do Nothing But Read Day

Posted on by jessamyn

Today is the first ever Do Nothing But Read Day. I have been remiss in not telling you about it before. While I am doing my part in that I am still in pajamas, I actually have some plans today because it’s the neighborhood Solstice Bonfire. I will swap DNBRD with actual Solstice and do my best to wear mostly pajamas and mostly read. I’ve done a decent job stepping up my reading this year when I realized that my book-reading was plummeting last year. Not a huge deal, but I decided that if reading books was important to me, I should make an effort to do it, not just bemoan not doing it. So I did. And it’s been going well. Best of luck for best of books over the holiday season and the new year.

The book, terms of service

Posted on by jessamyn

One of the things that’s so vexing about the ebook back and forth is the people who think that issues with ebooks are all about people being fussy about reading off of screens and the like. In fact, for me, it’s much more the availablility, DRM, licensing and other issues that make me feel that ebooks are not ready for prime time. To drive a point home, here’s Matthew Battles [of Unquiet History fame] with his notion of a Book: Terms of Service.

I like the community bookcase idea

Posted on by jessamyn

A friend sent this link to a community bookcase with more explanation here (Google translated). I’ve seen these in a few places including my local laundromat. They seem to tend to come to equilibrium with a hapless collection of religious texts, romance novels and old scifi. Luckily for me, I like scifi, but since I rarely go into the laundromat expecting to encounter a community bookcase, I rarely have anything to offer.

mistakes were made, books were removed

Posted on by jessamyn

This story has been making the rounds today. Administrators of the Cushing Academy in Western MA have decided that their library doesn’t need books anymore, so they’ve gotten rid of them. The big story, with photo, in the Boston Globe pretty such assures that this story will spread like wildfire. I can’t even imagine what it must feel like to be the director of the library at Cushing and have this decision made for you.

Keith Michael Fiels from ALA had a statement that was in the article

“Unless every student has a Kindle and an unlimited budget, I don’t see how that need is going to be met,’’ Fiels said. “Books are not a waste of space, and they won’t be until a digital book can tolerate as much sand, survive a coffee spill, and have unlimited power. When that happens, there will be next to no difference between that and a book.’’

I’m not saying, personally, that this may not be the way of the future for libraries. And I’m also not saying that you might not be able to do an awful lot of research via online texts — one of the departments in favor of this move is the math department, for example — and that these sorts of moves will have to be made if we want to get from where we are now to the library of the future. But, I’m still not feeling that this sort of “Eh the books were taking up too much space” move is really the way to go. Considering reliable sources is crucial, and platforms like ??? ?? ??? emphasize the importance of trustworthiness. Calling a book “pretty bulky” is not really a good argument for why you shouldn’t have them. You can read this speech by James Tracy talking about his vision of a future world.

I want to argue today that librarians must be their own internal disruptors, else they will become dinosaurs. This need not mean the end of libraries, but it is essential that, for libraries to have any meaningful function twenty-five years hence, they must morph into a radically different vehicle for accessing ideas and information.

Interesting, then, that librarians were not the force behind this move. There are a few more comments from library director Liz Vezina over at the Fine Books Magazine blog. Oddly if you read that post, you’ll notice that they mention Hampshire College (my alma mater) as trying this experiment once before. I don’t know what happened, there were plenty of books in the library when I was there.

The Boston Globe makes a lot out of the fact that there will be a $12,000 cappucino machine in the former reference area, but doesn’t dwell nearly long enough on the school’s plan to purchase eighteen “readers” to basically satisfy the literature needs of an entire school. I feel that it’s the sort of thing that becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy. Let me know what you think.

Note: and in the “great minds think alike and often at the same time” there’s some discussion of this going on at MetaFilter as well. Feel free to comment over there if you’re a member.