The links below are to articles reporting on Amazon’s Kindle ebooks table of contents review that is currently occurring.
For more visit:
– http://www.teleread.com/amazon-pulls-e-books-table-contents-placement/
– http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/why-is-amazon-removing-thousands-of-kindle-ebooks
The link below is to an article that looks at how to celebrate Spring Break (or any holiday for that matter) with a book nerd.
For more visit:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/34-ways-to-celebrate-spring-break-like-a-book-nerd/
Richard Ovenden, University of Oxford
Information is constantly under attack. The current debate around the longstanding use of vellum (a parchment made using calf skin) for printing key legislative documents highlights the continued concern over this. Some are advocating a switch from vellum to archive paper, which costs much less and can last up to 500 years.
Recorded information is certainly vulnerable: paper and parchment, and the inks and pigments that are written, drawn or painted on their surfaces, can decay and disappear if not stored in controlled environmental conditions.
And digital information is even more susceptible to degradation than that recorded on vellum. Operating systems and information environments change and develop rapidly, and as a result information created and stored on older systems easily can become unusable. It’s by no means certain that the digital information created by our parliament today will still be secure and reliably accessible in 200 years.
Books and manuscripts have been the targets of thieves for millennia. Whole libraries have been destroyed by invading armies and fanatical idealists. Even nature occasionally has played its part – the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD caused the contents of the Roman library at Herculaneum to become illegible. Libraries and archives have been dealing with these threats for centuries.
But the growth of digital networks as a means of storing and sharing information has created new hazards. Cybersecurity is increasingly a critical concern for modern organisations. All face the potential of hostile attacks on their digital information from cyber-criminals. And as age-old protectors of information, it’s up to libraries and archives to safeguard this knowledge from such assaults.
Paul Cowan/Shutterstock.com
Libraries and archives have tackled the threats to knowledge with great ingenuity for thousands of years. The archives of Merton College, Oxford, for example, were stored from the 14th century in a building purposefully made of stone, with flooring made from tiles rather than wood to eliminate the threat of fire. And the founders of Oxford’s Bodleian Library in 1602 required all readers to swear an oath that they would not bring the library into harm, for example by pledging not to “kindle therein any fire nor flame”.
Libraries and archives have also been at the forefront of preserving digital information. Groups such as the Digital Preservation Coalition work together to develop the skills and techniques we need as a society to help manage and preserve the vast amounts of information created in digital formats. They have developed disaster recovery routines, back-up strategies, policies and a host of other collaborative arrangements.
Scholarly information is being protected through physical networks of connected computers, such as LOCKSS – an agency built on the proposition that “lots of copies keeps stuff safe”. And non-profit organisations funded by the library and archive communities, such as Portico, have developed large-scale capabilities for preserving books and journals in digital form, with backups in multiple locations.
AstroStar/Shutterstock.com
Personal information is also of great importance to society. Drafts of poems and novels, and the correspondence of politicians and scientists can help shine light on critical areas of history and science. Libraries and archives have always kept files of the letters of philosophers, such as Isaiah Berlin, or the drafts of speeches of Winston Churchill. But the intellectuals and political big-hitters of today are working in digital form, drafting their speeches using word-processing software, and exchanging emails and text messages with each other.
The preservation of this kind of information is much harder than the analogue equivalents. Librarians and archivists have therefore deployed techniques borrowed from fields such as digital forensics to ensure that these records are safeguarded for future generations to learn from.
But in the challenging fiscal environments of the early 21st century – a period hailed by many as the era of information – society runs the risk of endangering its future by neglecting the role of libraries, archives and museums). The global network of libraries and archives has been, and will remain, fundamental to the preservation and propagation of knowledge.
Society ignores the role of libraries and archives at its peril. Last year saw the 800th anniversary of that “great charter of liberties”, Magna Carta. It survives not in one copy but in multiple originals, distributed around the kingdom, as well as numerous later affirmations. Its survival as a potent set of legal and political concepts was in no small measure thanks to the role of libraries and archives in preserving the original documents.
William Blackstone, one of the most important legal theorists ever, was able to look at original engrossments of Magna Carta while writing his influential legal treatises, for example. His books went on to be read by Thomas Jefferson and the other founders of the American constitution.
Mikhail Evstafiev, CC BY-SA
In more recent times, we need only look at the actions of the army of Republika Srpska in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They deliberately destroyed the national library in Sarajevo as a means of erasing the uncomfortable truths of history – a perverse validation of the democratic significance of libraries.
The costs of maintaining such a system of libraries and archives are trivial compared to the costs of other state initiatives or the revenues of the giant tech companies. But across the globe, the funding of many of these institutions is under severe pressure. In an age of “information overload”, we are in real danger of failing to ensure that succeeding societies have access to the wisdom, and error, of their predecessors.
Richard Ovenden, Director of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The link below is to an article that argues for PDF as a better format than ePub. What do you think?
For more visit:
http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/03/11/five-reasons-pdfs-are-better-than-epub/
Linda Dryden, Edinburgh Napier University
Ask most people about the heavyweights of late Victorian fiction and they will probably mention the likes of Thomas Hardy, George Eliot or Oscar Wilde. Raise Robert Louis Stevenson, however, and you’ll struggle to attract more than dusty affection: his work is usually seen as the stuff of old illustrated copies of boys’ adventures such as Treasure Island and Kidnapped, left in the forgotten corners of people’s attics.
It was very different in Stevenson’s lifetime. The Scottish writer was renowned as an essayist and belle-lettrist like Henry James, who himself regarded Stevenson as an equal in intellect and talent. Stevenson’s subsequent journey to the lightweight fringe was no accident either. You can trace it through a series of decisions and events that demonstrate an unsettling truth: once you are no longer here, there is little you can do to protect your literary reputation.
When Stevenson died aged just 44 on Samoa in December 1894, reportedly of a brain tumour, the Victorian literary world was reeling. James wrote of the “ghastly extinction of the beloved RLS”. In Samoa, Stevenson had been known as “Tusitala”, the teller-of-tales, and his obituary in the Illustrated London News lamented his passing as such:
He is gone, our Prince of storytellers – such a Prince, indeed, as his own Florizel of Bohemia, with the insatiable taste for weird adventure, for diablerie, for a strange mixture of metaphysics and romance.
The high praise was not to last. After Stevenson’s death his family, notably his wife Fanny, and literary friends such as Sidney Colvin, began to manage and manipulate his legacy. When Colvin published Stevenson’s letters, he had redacted material they thought unsavoury, including the writer’s disputes with his family and his salacious youthful activities.
Probably motivated by a desire to protect the lucrative revenues from those boys’ adventures, this sanitised his image. It made him more palatable for a moralistic Victorian readership, securing his reputation as a non-controversial writer of children’s fiction. In 1901 Stevenson’s great friend, the poet and critic WE Henley, decried how he had been turned into a “seraph in chocolate” and a “barley-sugar effigy”.
Stevenson quickly became a target for other leading writers. Joseph Conrad denounced him, declaring to his agent, JB Pinker: “I am no sort of airy RL Stevenson, who considered his art a prostitute and the artist no better than one”. The American writer Stephen Crane was particularly disparaging, claiming: “That man put back the clock of English fiction fifty years”. Even HG Wells wrote that Stevenson’s interest in the romance tradition was a “pitiful instance of the way in which wrong-headed flattery, a feminine book market, and a man’s own talent may triumph over his genius”.
Whether they were inspired by Stevenson’s image-makers is unclear, but these writers were certainly in the vanguard of a new generation who felt the need to distance themselves from their Victorian forebears. Stevenson was also phenomenally successful, so professional jealously may also have been a factor. It set the tone for a long period in which he was frequently seen in the same kind of way.
David Masters, CC BY-SA
Stevenson’s work is actually far more complex and wide-ranging than these reductive assessments allow. For Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde alone, he should be regarded among the great British writers. A book of massive influence and endurance, Vladimir Nabokov believed that it “belongs to the same order of art as […] Madame Bovary or Dead Souls”.
byronv2, CC BY-SA
Treasure Island itself is more than meets the eye. It is actually a deeply subversive story of betrayal and divided loyalties, which deserves close reading. And beyond these household names, Stevenson also produced groundbreaking work that the likes of Wells and also 20th-century literary scholars unaccountably overlooked. Published in the year that he died, The Ebb-Tide is a dark tale of tyranny and imperial mismanagement, which anticipates Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and signals how Stevenson was beginning to question the morality of European interference in the Pacific. Together with the similarly themed The Beach of Falesá, it shows that had Stevenson lived, he could have gone on to rival even Conrad as an imperial sceptic.
Stevenson incidentally had a strong influence on his literary critics. Conrad and Ford Madox Ford used the opening page of Treasure Island as the model for the first sequence of their collaborative 1903 novel, Romance, actively seeking his fame and fortune whilst diminishing his art.
As for Wells, The Ebb-Tide is a considerable inspiration for The Island of Doctor Moreau, while The Invisible Man owes a great debt to Jekyll and Hyde. Put these arguments together and you begin to see why he was never denigrated in the same way overseas. Particularly in America, France and Italy, he has always been seen as a great writer.
Some more recent writers were kinder about Stevenson. Ernest Hemingway was a fan, for instance. Jorge Luis Borges considered him “among the greatest literary joys I have experienced”. In the 1990s he began to be welcomed back into the fold in literary academic circles. This was led by the likes of Alan Sandison and the rise of cultural studies, which argues that “high” and “low” culture are completely interdependent and don’t fit into separate boxes.
More than a century after his death, it finally feels like we have reached the point where Stevenson is fully gaining the reputation he so richly deserves. We at Edinburgh Napier University are playing our part with the Mehew Robert Louis Stevenson Collection of his books and papers, which officially opens to the public on March 17. For one of Scotland’s greatest writers, his homecoming is long overdue.
Linda Dryden, Professor of English Literature, Edinburgh Napier University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Catherine Butler, Cardiff University
The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public – The Intentional Fallacy, 1954.
With these stirring words the American critics, W. K. Wimsatt Jr and Monroe C. Beardsley, established a principle still maintained by many: namely that once a book is published its author relinquishes authority over it and becomes, in effect, a reader like any other, with no special power to determine meanings or control interpretations. Any intentions not realised in the book itself cannot be shoehorned in by post-facto pronouncements, even by the author.
It was always more complicated than that, but the relationship of JK Rowling to the world of the Harry Potter series shows the serious limitations of this view.
The series was published over a ten-year period, during which it was the subject of vast amounts of comment and criticism, as well as forming the basis of innumerable online fan fictions.
Millions of readers had firm ideas about the way that the series ought to progress. For example, when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005) revealed that Hermione Granger was romantically destined for Ron Weasley rather than Harry himself, so-called Harmonians who had “shipped” Harry and Hermione felt hugely aggrieved.
Of course, there have always been readers who felt satisfied or disappointed by fictional developments of this kind, but Rowling was one of the first authors whose readers were keen to discuss the books in real time on social media. Her readers increasingly viewed their fandom as a collective activity, from the queues outside book shops on publication day to the immediate internet discussions afterwards.
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As the critic Ebony Elizabeth Thomas pointed out on Rutgers’ Child Lit discussion list, this reflected a profound shift in the self-conception of readers: “It’s not enough for me to read a novel anymore. I have to run straight to the ‘net to find out what people are saying about it.”
That’s changed since my childhood. I also have to post my opinion on the book on Facebook. But as a child who treasured my books more than anything else in the world, I learned to let it sit in my head like a great secret between me, the page, and the misty author ‘somewhere out there.’ It was like I had this private world that was a protective force field against the woes and mundanity of everyday life … a place just for me.
While the Harry Potter series was still being published, Rowling remained relatively aloof from her readers’ passionate engagement – or replied largely indirectly, through the medium of the books themselves.
Once the series was complete, however, the question arose of how to (and whether she should) control the ways they were read.
pictures.reuters.com
An early and famous intervention was her suggestion that Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts, was gay. Predictably, many welcomed the intervention while others were horrified, and some complained that it would have been more liberating had Rowling not kept Dumbledore closeted until after publication was complete.
The revelation also had a more subtle effect on the numerous fan fictions that had explored Dumbledore’s sexuality prior to Rowling’s statement. Much of that fiction had aimed to “queer” what had seemed a notably mainstream heterosexual set of texts; Rowling’s post-facto attempt to establish the headmaster’s gay sexuality as canonical simultaneously endorsed that attempt and undermined its position as a resistant reading of her books.
Since then, Rowling has made extensive use of the internet in the form of her Pottermore website and Twitter. On Twitter, she has developed an impressive following – 6.86m – who regard her as an authoritative and influential figure on all matters – not just magical. She was one of the loudest voices during the Scottish independence referendum, for example, and has shown support more recently for junior doctors.
Pottermore, on the other hand, allows users to “enrol” at Hogwarts, and rewards those who work through its various challenges with insights into the Potterverse and its history not present in the published texts.
Like much fan fiction, these additions to the lore of Harry Potter work by elaborating back-stories and filling gaps in our knowledge – but because their ultimate origin is Rowling herself they carry an authority that other fan speculations lack.
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Arguably, that authority derives from their date as much as from their source. Just as Rowling insists that she had always known Dumbledore to be gay, we are told that Pottermore’s revelations are based on her original notes rather than being post-2007 invention.
By contrast, her 2014 admission to Emma Watson, that not linking Harry and Hermione romantically was a poor artistic decision, dramatically – if belatedly – endorsed the Harmonians’s viewpoint. But because it postdated the books it remains a speculative, indeed spectral, vision, despite coming from Rowling herself. In the end, even Rowling’s powers to reshape and expand her universe are limited.
If she had access to a Time-Turner, now, it might be a different story.
Catherine Butler, Senior lecturer, Cardiff University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Nathan Hollier, Monash University
How healthy is the bookselling and publishing industry in Australia? And what are the key reasons for this state of wellbeing (or illness)?
These questions have been pondered by many people over the past decade. But they’re worth asking again, given that Amazon, the “everything store” that began as a bookstore, will soon be warehousing stock here and fulfilling orders from Australia, via a partnership between its subsidiary Book Depository and Australian logistics company DAI Post.
We’re also in the midst of a new round in the highly emotional argument over whether Australia should keep its parallel import restrictions on books.
As debate continues over the impact of digital technology and e-books on the industry, genuinely disinterested voices are hard to find and conclusive data harder still to locate.
Meanwhile, the federal government has decided to no longer count peer-reviewed publications in determining funding for universities. Funding for research will primarily reflect, instead, an academic’s capacity to attract business or other investment in her project.
The decision is expected to disadvantage humanities scholars and their publishers.
It also illuminates our government’s general attitude to its role in the setting of cultural and intellectual policy frameworks – which should be of more than passing interest to publishers, booksellers and readers.
Kim Kyung Hoon
Amazon.com (as it was then known) entered the bookselling retail marketplace in the mid-1990s. Since then, Australian booksellers and publishers have been shielded to an extent from the competitive (and some would say anticompetitive) pressures it has imposed on the industry by one key factor: delivery of a book from the US took time and cost money.
Geographic isolation provided some comparative advantage to our book industry, even allowing for Amazon’s premium delivery rates and its sales being free from the GST. In 2011, however, Amazon bought the UK-based company Book Depository.
At the time, Book Depository was its biggest online bookstore competitor. Buying it meant Amazon could take advantage of what now seem arcane international postal union agreements between Australia and the UK, offering zero postage costs for Australian consumers.
Any comparative advantage for Australian booksellers will now go. Amazon setting up here is likely to mean a further drop in retail book prices, (which have been falling for the past five years), as it goes in search of a greater Australian market share.
In one sense, of course, that is good for consumers. And by providing new sales platforms and channels, the firm may also help some Australian retailers and publishers stay in business.
But others may find the new degree of competition pushes them to the wall. Over the last decade, many bookshops have gone under.
And readers who like visiting bookstores may be less impressed by Amazon’s arrival and its owner Jeff Bezos’s commitment to the “everyday low prices” example of Walmart and Costco.
Jo Yong hak
Parallel import restrictions prohibit retailers here from bringing in overseas versions of a title if an Australian publisher has released a version of it within 30 days of its initial publication and are able to supply the retailer with copies within 90 days of an order being placed.
In April 2015, the Harper Competition Policy Review recommended that the import restrictions be removed. If the federal government does so, what impact will this have?
Some retailers would prefer to have the option of importing a cheaper overseas edition of a book rather than risk losing sales to overseas firms selling books online.
Most publishers here, however – and not only home-grown ones but the Australian offices of multinational corporations – have stridently declared that the removal of the restrictions will seriously damage their business.
The Australian Society of Authors points to recent research revealing that authors are struggling financially to an unprecedented degree.
It positions the debate squarely as one between supporting Australian authors (and the import restrictions) or abandoning them (with the restrictions).
Perhaps the stridency of the general response by the publishers, authors, and to a lesser extent the retailers, is more a reflection of the difficult overall industry conditions than of the likely catastrophic effects of the restrictions’ removal.
The Australian Productivity Commission, which has also examined the restrictions, has almost always tended to the view that the interests of the consumer should take precedence over those of the producer. It reasons that there are more consumers than producers.
Still, it’s interesting to note that while lower prices seem to trump all other concerns in the case of the book industry, when it comes to the Australian banking sector it is apparently essential for us to have a “strong”, or wildly profitable, handful of banks.
Heidi Elliott, CC BY
Are ebooks replacing print? Is the book itself (in whatever form) in the last throes of life? What do consumers really want? And should we let them have it?!
With the possible exception of this last question, which may be heretical within our parameters of public debate, all of these questions have been asked in depth in recent years.
Indeed in 2010, a Book Industry Strategy Group, was set up by the then Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr. Later, Greg Combet, in a slightly rejigged ministerial portfolio (Industry Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education), set up the Book Industry Collaborative Council from 2012–13.
Sales of e-books and e-readers, which grew strongly for many years, may have plateaued over the last year or so.
But as there is no body with the capacity or authority to collate e-book sales (in the way that Nielsen BookScan does for print books in Australia) and most information we do have comes from industry participants, authoritative pronouncements on whether e-books are displacing print are not possible.
For most publishers, their profit margin is less on an e-book than it is on a print book – thanks chiefly to Jeff Bezos. In 2007, he wanted to sell e-books for his new Kindle at $9.99. He had the market power to enforce this price as a standard across the global market.
(E-book pricing in the higher education market, it should be noted, is completely different from the retail sector being referred to here.)
In general, e-books are only slightly cheaper to produce than print books. So, with Amazon tightening its percentage screws on publishers for the use of its Kindle channel, most publishers report that print sales remain much more important for them financially then e-book sales.
Print book sales fell in Australia across 2010–14, before bouncing back in 2015, partly with the help of the colouring-books-for-adults phenomenon.
Samuel Wong, CC BY-NC
But what does this mean? That no-one wants to read books anymore? That no-one has time to read books? That book readers are dying off and young people don’t like books? That books can’t compete with other forms of entertainment and instruction? Or only that print books have had a temporary period of … negative growth?
The Australian retail sector as a whole experienced very flat growth across 2010–14, before picking up, as bookstores did, in 2015. Owners of physical bookstores have had to contend with burgeoning online sales.
Meanwhile, Australians are working harder and longer. And government policy decisions seem to be made with increasingly little reference to intellectual, let alone cultural, considerations.
Joel Becker, CEO of the Australian Booksellers Association, told me in February that there has been a “small but noticeable growth in the presence of bookshops, coming either from existing stores expanding or from new stores opening up”, in the five years since Borders and Angus & Robertson closed.
He notes that sales in the US independent book retail sector were “buoyant … up over eight percent in December 2015 on the previous December, which was also not bad.”
The federal government making it harder for humanities scholars to demonstrate their value financially within their universities can hardly be viewed as a major index of the health of Australian publishing and bookselling.
The clear message it sends, however, is that the government does not regard cultural matters – questions of historic, literary, philosophic, artistic or social value – as of public significance.
The ancient Greeks saw attending theatrical performances as an important part of their responsibilities as citizens: a way of trying to ensure that political decisions were the result of shared understandings and values.
For our leaders, however, it seems such fundamental questions must be removed from life and made wholly subject to economic considerations.
For the Productivity Commission, tellingly, consumers’ interests are defined almost solely in terms of price. That which cannot be easily measured is simply ignored.
Orangeaurochs, CC BY
There is no evident government interest in encouraging a public conversation about shared or differing values. This is bad for book publishers and sellers because books are a – if not the – major vehicle for such a conversation.
This lack of interest raises a bigger, rarely asked question: just what we want our bookselling and publishing industry to do or achieve for our society?
From the discussions I had with participants in the previous book strategy group and collaborative council, it was relatively clear what people in the industry generally wanted – an efficient, self-reliant (rather than government-reliant) sector, not disadvantaged by regulations that effectively provided assistance to overseas competitors.
In other words, they wanted a fair go and an industry policy framework reflecting that. (In this context, it is worth remembering that Amazon’s sources of profit include the Internet, developed primarily by the US government, tax avoidance, low wages and determined opposition to the unionisation of its workforce.)
But for Australians in general, is our bookselling and publishing industry any more worth preserving than, say, the car industry?
If what “we” want, most fundamentally, from publishers and booksellers, is the opportunity for Australians to write important books for a local readership that can help us build, ultimately, a better overall quality of life and a more robust democracy, perhaps the most important policy decisions pertaining to the industry are not those most immediately affecting it.
Reduced book prices from the arrival of Amazon, for instance, are unlikely to lead to a boom in reading, because there are other more important factors influencing whether people read or not and what and how they read, if they do.
It’s not a coincidence that some of the most enlightened nations in the world, with the highest literacy rates; the best outcomes on a range of social measures – from equality to social cohesion to education and health – and populations who work relatively shorter hours for relatively more money, also have the strongest book publishing and selling businesses.
It’s not a coincidence either, I would suggest, that these northern European nations have produced some of the most successful writers on the world stage in recent decades (Stieg Larrson, Henning Mankell, Karl Knausgaard, Jo Nesbø …)
The best societies create the preconditions for the best minds to shine; instead of the preconditions for the best minds to give up or take up banking.
Thanks to John Byron, Malcolm Neil and Sean Scalmer for reading and commenting on drafts of this article.
Nathan Hollier, Director, Monash University Publishing, Monash University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The links below are to articles and reviews of new content posted at Pottermore (J. K. Rowling) concerning Harry Potter like content and material, which she will be adding to over the course of this week – entitled ‘History of Magic in North America.’
For more visit:
– http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/08/history-of-magic-in-north-america-jk-rowling-review-mark-lawson-harry-potter
– http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/08/new-jk-rowling-story-history-of-magic-in-north-america-depicts-native-american-wizards
– http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/08/jk-rowling-casts-fresh-spells-in-new-stories-for-pottermore
– http://www.adweek.com/galleycat/j-k-rowling-reveals-new-information-on-skin-walkers/117292
– http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/j-k-rowling-writes-about-the-salem-witch-trials
The link below is to an article that looks at the benefits of reading before bed.
For more visit:
http://www.lifehack.org/371544/these-6-amazing-things-will-happen-you-read-before-bed-2
The link below is to an article that looks at ‘the best places to read.’ What are your best places to read? Pass on your thoughts in the comments.
For more visit:
http://www.readitforward.com/the-best-places-to-read/
At the BookShelf 
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