The links below are to articles reporting on the latest news concerning the Google Book’s scanning project.
For more visit:
– http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/16/us-google-books-idUSKCN0SA1S020151016
– http://www.detroitnews.com/story/tech/2015/10/16/google-book-battle/74044360/
Catherine Bond, UNSW Australia
Few of us wish to disclose our age. But, for the purposes of this article, I am willing to do so: in 2012, I turned 30.
According to data generated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a woman in Australia aged 30 in 2012 will likely live for another 54.90 years. If this figure is correct in my case, then copyright will protect this article for nearly 125 years. It will officially enter the public domain on 1 January, 2141.
Is what I say in this article so significant that I, and many generations of Bonds to come, should enjoy a right to control who copies this piece for the course of the next century and beyond?
Probably not. However, that is how copyright applies in Australia. So why do we protect copyright for the life of the creator plus 70 years?
The length of copyright protection has been in the news recently following the leaking of the Intellectual Property Chapter of the forthcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Under the TPP, Australia won’t be required to make any changes to our term of copyright for works (such as this article). We already introduced the TPP-mandated period of protection for published works – life of the author plus 70 years – when we signed the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement in 2004.
Before this, Australia’s term of protection was life of the author plus 50 years, which is the minimum standard required by the Berne Convention, our main international copyright agreement. However, other countries in the TPP, such as Canada and New Zealand, will need to extend copyright in works to life plus 70 years if the TPP proceeds.
For as long as there has been statutory copyright protection, there has been a stated term of protection for published works. That duration is seen as part of what is described as the “copyright balance”.
When the High Court of Australia considered in 2009 whether copyright should protect a TV guide created by Channel Nine in IceTV v Nine Network Australia, the judges stated that:
[…] the purpose of a copyright law respecting original works is to balance the public interest in promoting the encouragement of “literary”, “dramatic”, “musical” and “artistic works”, as defined, by providing a just reward for the creator, with the public interest in maintaining a robust public domain in which further works are produced.
Copyright provides authors with an incentive to create works and release these to the public, by rewarding that author with a number of rights for a limited period of time.
These rights include control over who can copy it or make it available online. In turn, during the term of copyright, the public can use the work as allowed under law, but after copyright expires, any person may copy the work in part or in whole in a variety of ways.
Over the years, that period of protection has been extended a number of times to take account of factors, including the impact of war, although today copyright protects works for far longer than a patent might protect an invention (20 years) or a design (two terms of five years).
Jane Austen’s books, for example, have been in the public domain for more than 150 years. As a result, anyone can publish and sell their own edition of Emma or Sense and Sensibility, or use Austen’s characters in another story, as happened in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its forthcoming film adaptation.
Robert Burdock/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
When Austen died in 1817, copyright in her works passed to family members, as was intended under copyright law. A posthumous term of copyright was to ensure that heirs of the copyright owner could benefit from what his or her family member created, and to continue to enjoy some financial benefit after the death of the original author.
However, this does not always happen. Austen’s relatives sold the copyright in her works to an English book publisher in the 1830s, and it often happens that a publisher or another third party will own copyright.
When Men at Work were famously sued for copying the children’s song Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, the owner of the copyright was not Marian Sinclair, the writer of the song, or her direct heirs. Instead, it was a music publishing company, Larrikin, which purchased copyright in the song from the Public Trustee.
Today, we have empirical evidence that a strong public domain provides significant economic benefits.
Often these benefits are overlooked when we are negotiating trade agreements like the TPP, which may have broader strengths and consequences beyond those that affect IP. However, when the duration of copyright in an online article starts to sound like science fiction, it may be time to limit the time of copyright.
Catherine Bond, Senior Lecturer in Law, UNSW Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Manneke Budiman, University of Indonesia
Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country and among the most culturally diverse. Yet not many people are familiar with literary works by Indonesian writers. Why is that? Well …
Indonesian literature plunged into obscurity following an anti-communist massacre in 1965-1966 that brought Suharto’s repressive New Order regime to power.
As we enter the 50th year of the communist purge, this is about to change. Indonesia is the Guest of Honour in this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, taking place from October 14 to 16.
That means, for the first time, Indonesian literature is in the global spotlight at the world’s largest book festival.
Below, Manneke Budiman, of the University of Indonesia’s literature department, gives an introduction to Indonesian literature and explains how colonial legacy plays a part in determining “Third World” authors’ place on the international literary stage.
Indonesian literature is not widely known compared to works from other countries. Writings of Indonesian authors do not get translated as much as works by other authors of “Third World” countries. Colonial legacy plays a part in this.
Penguin
Authors from the former colonies of France and England have the attention of French or British publishers that own a large international market share. Big publishing houses such as Heinemann and Penguin have translated and published authors from India, Kenya, Senegal, Egypt, and Morocco.
In contrast, Dutch publishers rarely publish literary works from their former colonies, which includes Indonesia. Except for academic publishers, there are only few, if any, Dutch publishers with international access to global market.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet, published by Penguin, are the rare works that got translated into foreign languages during Suharto’s rule. His tetralogy eventually caught the attention of the Noble Prize Committee, which nominated him several times for the Noble Prize in Literature.
The Nobel Prize nominations show that Indonesian literature is not inferior to the literature of other countries. But there are questions as to whether it was his works or his status as political prisoner that made the Nobel Committee nominated Pramoedya. Some wondered whether the Committee nominated Pramoedya to pressure the Indonesian government to release him from prison.
Equinox Publishing Indonesia
Literary production remained consistently high even during the repressive era of Suharto.
In the 1970s and 1980s, works by women authors – such as Mira W., Marga T., La Rose, Ike Supomo, Titi Said, Nh. Dini, and Marianne Katoppo – dominated the scene. But many male critics tended to brush them aside as “women’s fiction”, which carries a negative connotation of having low literary quality.
After Suharto’s regime collapsed, the atmosphere changed dramatically. More women began to write. Very soon there was an “explosion” of titles by a new generation of female authors such as Ayu Utami, Linda Christanty, Nukila Amal, Fira Basuki, and Dewi Lestari. Ayu Utami’s Saman, for instance, has been translated into several Asian and European languages.
The styles and characteristics of Indonesian literature change from time to time. They sometimes follow the political dynamics of the country and the region.
In the colonial era, local authors were heavily inspired by Western novels and poetry. Many writers produced adaptations of Western fiction in their local setting or even “plagiarised” works produced by their Western counterparts. Popular works such as Robinson Crusoe, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Sherlock Holmes were translated and adapted in Malay, Sundanese and Javanese languages in the late 19th century in the Netherlands Indies by Dutch, Chinese and indigenous translators.
In the 1920s and 1930s authors were preoccupied in finding the “right” language. Writers such as Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana and Sanusi Pane debated whether Indonesia had to abandon its traditional values and fully embraced Western modernity or vice versa.
Dalang Publishing
In the 1940s, as the nation struggled to free itself from colonial rule, authors became more straightforward and blunt. As the Japanese invaded and defeated the Dutch, a spirit of nationalism and militancy grew among authors. They also experimented with forms that were “borrowed” from the West – such as English war poems and works of fiction by European writers. Chairil Anwar and Idrus are examples par excellence of this instance.
Chairil’s poem, Antara Kerawang dan Bekasi (Between Kerawang and Bekasi) is suspected to be an adaptation of Sir Archibald Clark Kerr’s poem, whereas Idrus’ short-stories show striking similarities with works written by European writers in terms of the modernist ideas in his works, as discussed by Indonesian studies expert Keith Foulcher.
The Golden Age of Indonesian literature, according to many scholars, was the period between the 1950s and 1960s. Authors were working out how to connect traditions and local flavors with modern trends in literature.
In that period, the Cold War was raging. Many authors were fiercely involved in ideological tug of wars among themselves. Authors also began to seriously search for a distinct Indonesian identity through their works that could become part of the world culture. Unfortunately, that vibrancy had to abruptly end with the take over of power from Sukarno to Suharto.
After Suharto stepped down in 1998, there was a brief moment of euphoria among authors as freedom of speech and democratisation began to flourish. But the 32-year authoritarian rule seemed to have taught them not to be too optimistic. This is clearly reflected in the works of the post-Suharto writers, which are strongly marked by doubt and ambiguity about the future.
In those works, readers may sense a yearning for freedom from the haunting legacy of Suharto’s rule.
Realism remains to be the dominant style, although sometimes it also blends with some kind of romanticism – a nostalgia for the lost past – and a sense of disillusionment that replaces it.
Dalang Publishing
There is also a trend of looking outward to what happens in other parts of the globe. Contemporary Indonesian writers are curious and adventurous in embracing cosmopolitanism and transcending national boundaries.
That’s particularly visible in the works of many current women authors. At the same time, their works also rebel against customary laws and traditions that marginalise women.
Young authors are not oblivious to the conditions of their country. They show genuine concern about what has happened in outer islands outside the primary island of Java.
Amid the relatively meagre attention from big international publishers to Indonesian authors, a foundation and a small publishing house in the US are working to bring more English translations of Indonesian literature to international readers.
Lontar Foundation, founded by American John McGlynn, has done extraordinary work translating and publishing Indonesian literature in English. Lontar regularly publishes the Menageries Series containing translated works by Indonesian authors. It also published a collection of poems written by Indonesians about their American experience (On Foreign Shore) and a series of Indonesian classics.
Lontar
California-based Dalang Publisher, owned by Lian Gouw, a Chinese-American who spent her childhood in Indonesia before her family migrated to the US, has published several works of contemporary Indonesian writers in high-quality translation.
Some of the works that have been published by Dalang in translation are Remy Silado’s My Name Is Mata Hari (Namaku Mata Hari), Lan Fang’s novel Potions and Paper Cranes (Perempuan Kembang Jepun), Erni Aladjai’s Kei, Anindita S. Thayf’s Daughters of Papua (Tanah Tabu), Ahmad Tohari’s The Red Bekisar (Bekisar Merah), and Hana Rambe’s Cloves for Kolosia (Aimuna dan Sobori).
That list is by no means exhaustive, and it keeps on growing. Gouw seems to have a sharp sense of knowing which works may appeal to non-Indonesian audience. Her choices include works that are concerned with pluralism, ethnic and religious conflicts, colonialism, and injustice.
McGlynn, meanwhile, prefers choosing works of established or well-known authors, such as the poet Sapardi Djoko Damono, short-story writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma, and novelist Oka Rusmini.
There are other small-scale publishers that have published Indonesian works in German, Dutch, and French. But in general those publishers do not have the requisite international stature to draw a significant attention.
Lontar
Pramoedya’s tetralogy – The Earth of Mankind, The Child of All Nations, Glass House, and Footsteps – remain the most important books for foreign readership. Mangunwijaya’s The Weaverbirds is another classic that has become a must-read. These two senior authors are the best introduction to the dynamics and complexities of Indonesian society.
Oka Rusmini (Earth Dance), Seno Gumira Ajidarma (Jazz, Perfume & the Incident), Nukila Amal (Cala Ibi), Ayu Utami (Saman), belong to the generation that follows; and then young writers such as Erni Aladjai (Kei), Lan Fang (Potions and Paper Cranes), Anindita Thayf (Daughters of Papua), and Okky Madasari (Maryam).
The works of the new generation of writers works contain rich panorama of Indonesian social, cultural, and political dynamics viewed from different generational lenses.
The Frankfurt Book Fair runs until October 16. Details here.
Manneke Budiman, Lecturer at the Literature Department, University of Indonesia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The link below is to an article that takes a look at book deals.
For more visit:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-p-david/whats-the-deal-with-book-_b_8263394.html
The link below is to an article that takes a look at some creepy book trivia.
For more visit:
http://bookriot.com/2015/10/12/13-creepy-bits-bookish-trivia/
Peter Boxall, University of Sussex
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2015 has been awarded to the Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich. Her writing, until now not well known in the Anglophone world, is difficult to categorise. In works such as Voices from Chernobyl and War’s Unwomanly Face, Alexievich develops a distinctive kind of documentary writing, drawn from large numbers of interviews, which gives an intimate picture of what it is like to be the victim of war, of state negligence, brutality or totalitarianism.
Neither fiction nor non-fiction, the work develops what the secretary to the Swedish Academy Sara Danius calls a “new literary genre”, which gives us “a history of human beings about whom we didn’t know that much”.
This is surely a welcome and brave award, for at least two reasons. The statement from the academy announces that the prize was awarded “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”.
The stress on the “polyphony” of her writing is significant; if it is the case that Alexievich is little known in the English-speaking world, this is partly because the financial pressures on contemporary publishers make it very difficult to publish work that does not conform to a very narrow set of generic and formal norms.
Alexievich’s work is difficult to categorise, and hence difficult to sell, and so nearly invisible. The prize will change this, and will at the same time do much to alert us to the growing importance of documentary writing elsewhere in Europe.
Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters
Equally significant is the assertion that Alexievich’s work represents a monument to a kind of experience – a kind of suffering – that ordinarily goes undocumented. In awarding Alexievich the prize, the academy has helped to ensure that the voices she records are heard on a much bigger stage.
With the award of this prize, the Academy is likely to bring an important body of writing to new audiences – something that is much harder to achieve with the better known contenders for the prize, such as Haruki Murakami or the perennial outsider Philip Roth.
So this is a progressive and exciting choice. But it is also one that is mired in the contradictions that surround the prize – contradictions that are perhaps inherent in the concept of literary prizes in general, but which are sharpened by the terms of Alfred Nobel’s original bequest.
Nobel specified in his will that all five prizes were to be awarded to those who, in a given year, “have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind”. The prize for literature, he goes on, is to be awarded to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”.
The history of the prize has been the history of attempts to interpret this stipulation. How are we to quantify or to characterise the benefit that art confers on mankind, and what does it mean for literature to take an “ideal direction”? There has been a long tradition of awarding the prize to writers, such as Alexievich, whose work “benefits” us by drawing attention to the injustices which are perpetrated against the weak, the powerless or the dispossessed.
We might think that the award of the prize to Samuel Beckett in 1969 and to J M Coetzee in 2003 belongs to that tradition. These writers, like Alexievich, might be seen to erect a “monument to suffering”.
But in awarding the prize to writers who give us such naked and powerful accounts of the privations of human beings, the academy might appear to be in breach of that second stipulation: that recipients should travel in an “ideal direction”. In awarding the prize to Coetzee, the academy wrote that the value of his work lay in part in his principled refusal of ideals, his absolute commitment to depicting suffering as it is, rather than as we would like it to be.
“His intellectual honesty”, the academy wrote, “erodes the basis of all consolation, and distances itself from the tawdry drama of remorse and confession”. This is work that resists the consolations or ornament of lyricism; but in recognising the power of this kind of vision, the academy is led to betray its spirit, to transform a difficult, bleak vision, into a redemptive one, one which leads in an “ideal direction”.
In honouring Alexievich, the academy has done a great service to literature, giving new audiences to a writer who has dedicated her life to speaking for those who have few means of articulating their own experiences. But it has done so in a way that exposes, again, the contradictions in Nobel’s bequest – contradictions that are absolutely central to the idea that we should think of art as conferring a benefit to mankind.
The Nobel Prize seeks to weaponise art, to deploy it in a battle against social injustice. This is a noble aim, but it leads us again and again to make something consoling out of a picture of suffering, or to imagine that art is a kind of alchemy that can make of the terrors it witnesses something restorative, or palliative.
The impossible demand that art makes of us is perhaps to recognise that its benefits are not measurable by existing instruments, and are not “conferred” upon mankind by any reliable mechanism. But in the absence of any readily available means of meeting that demand, the Nobel’s recognition of Alexievich’s courageous work is welcome indeed.
Peter Boxall, Professor of English, University of Sussex
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Rukmini Pande, University of Western Australia
Consider yourself a stranger to fanfiction? It’s unlikely.
If you’ve read E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey (2011) then you already have at least one title under your belt. If you caught Robert Downey Jr’s turn as Sherlock Holmes (2009), that’s another.
So what is it? At its most basic, fanfiction is a genre of amateur fiction writing that takes as its basis a “canon” of “original” material.
This original material is most often popular books, television shows and movies – but can expand to almost anything, from the lives of celebrities to the travels of inanimate objects like the Mars rover.
Fanworks, including fanfiction and fanart, are created by fans who are invested in the source material. They seek to expand the narrative universe and share their personal creations with other fans for free.
Mary Blair/flickr, CC BY
The main impulse behind fanfiction has always been a playful desire to engage with original works. Yet authors are still subject to modern copyright laws. In Australia, the US and the EU, copyright exists for the lifetime of the author plus seventy years.
Many early Disney film adaptations were derivative works based on out-of-copyright novels – think Alice in Wonderland (1951) and The Jungle Book (1967). In a way this could be considered a form of fanfiction.
Today, existing restrictions mean those interested in “remixing” copyrighted material create online communities to discuss and distribute their work freely. One of the aims of the fan-led Organisation of Transformative Works is to fight for the validity of fair use laws.
Still, the amateur status copyright law forces on fanworks is one of the reasons fanfiction as a whole is regarded with some derision.
This is one reason why the Twilight fanfiction origins of 50 Shades of Grey were obscured. Due to residual textual and thematic similarities, the question of copyright infringement remains open.
Andy Rain/AAP
Still, canonical works have remained a source of creative inspiration.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (1887-1927) series has spawned a veritable industry of derivative works, both sanctioned and unsanctioned. Many successful novelists, including Colleen McCullough with The Independence of Miss Mary Bennett (2009), publish literary reimaginings of Jane Austen’s novels.
The “fanfiction” classification usually results from the context of creation and circulation rather than anything inherent to the subject matter or quality of writing.
Popular culture academics in the US and the UK trace the beginnings of an identifiable fan culture and community from the 1970s. These tendencies were first identified by Henry Jenkins in Textual Poachers (1992).
There is early evidence of fans coming together around science fiction television shows like The Man From U.N.C.LE. (1964-1968) and the original Star Trek (1966-1969).
MiMiKa Z/flickr, CC BY
Comparable communities formed around anime and manga in Japan during the 1980s. The influential all-female manga artist group Clamp first came to prominence through Doujinshi (amateur, self-published works) based on Captain Tsubasa (1983-1986) and Saint Seiya (1986-1989).
Today, thanks to the internet, connecting to other fans has never been easier. This level of accessibility has lead to a remarkable proliferation of what was once considered an obscure subculture.
In the digital realm, just one popular archival site – www.wattpad.com – currently hosts a staggering 40 million users a month.
It would be difficult to find a pop culture phenomenon today – from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Game of Thrones (2011-present) to K-dramas (Korean dramas) like Coffee Prince (2012-present) and Bollywood movies – that does not have fanfiction written about it.
Fanfiction enables readers, writers, and sometimes even literary professors to play in an imaginative sandbox, interpreting and reinterpreting events, relationships and characters to flesh out different scenarios.
MiMiKa Z/flickr, CC BY
The power of fanfiction stems from the fact that it actively invites writers to break down boundaries considered “natural” in a broader cultural context – primarily around sex, sexuality, and gender.
Fanfiction communities often critically engage with stories not written specifically for them. With doubts swirling over whether Marvel will ever make a Black Widow movie, is it any wonder female fans feel the need to create their own stories?
These reinterpretations interact with canonical events – actual events from the original text – in different ways, “filling in” unexplored aspects of a scene, or “fixing” things that were dissatisfying or problematic.
Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse’s study, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), found that fanfiction is primarily written by women, of all ages and sexual identities, and tends to explore – or “ship” – intimate and romantic relationships between characters.
Fans themselves have attempted to quantify the demographic diversity of readers and writers, with over 10,000 participants taking part in one particular survey.
MiMiKa Z/flickr, CC BY
Situated within such a demographic, fanfiction becomes a unique space within which a much more fluid approach to ideas of what is “possible” or “realistic” is encouraged.
As a result, fanfiction faces the same criticism as many genres where women predominate, from romance novels to young adult literature. Sarah Rees Brennan, a fanfiction writer who went “pro”, writes about her experiences in this context.
Those fans not engaged in fanfiction sometimes mock fanfiction writers for being “delusional”, questioning the “realism” of the relationships featured in fanworks. Additionally, since a lot of fanfiction is explicitly erotic, it becomes the target of parody.
The sheer volume and variable quality of fanfiction makes it an even easier target. Instead, I’d argue that the uneven quality of fanfiction reflects the low barrier of entry to the community rather than an inherent lack of value in the genre.
This is not to say that the potential for subversion is always expressed unproblematically.
While transgressive in some ways, fanfiction writers and readers remain enmeshed within social power hierarchies. These communities do engage in self-critique, but issues of sexism and racism still persist.
Liz Mogollon/flickr, CC BY
Most English language fanfiction, whether it involves straight or queer relationships, remains concerned with white characters.
This is partly a reflection of the racial biases that still plague the production of the (mostly US) popular films and television shows that form the basis of these communities.
However, it is a worrying trend that even when non-white characters have significant roles in a canonical work, fanfiction very often fails to register this – or worse, undercuts it.
In Marvel Cinematic Universe fanfiction, characters of colour receive significantly less attention than their white counterparts. Clearly, interracial pairings (red) receive far less attention.
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It is not surprising that Steve Rogers (Captain America) and Bucky Barnes’ (Winter Soldier) close canon relationship has prompted a great deal of fanfiction, but the difference concerning the number of stories about Sam Wilson’s (Falcon) pivotal relationship with Rogers is startling. The fact that there is more fanfiction for Rogers and Darcy Lewis, characters who have never met in canon, is further proof of this imbalance.
Although Clint Barton (Hawkeye) and Phillip Coulson barely interact in the films, they have prompted a very significant output of fanworks. Tony Stark’s (Iron Man) close friend James Rhodes (War Machine) is paired with him rarely whereas there are many stories featuring Stark alongside Rogers, Pepper Potts and Bruce Banner (The Hulk).
Similarly, while fanfiction based around non-US media like Bollywood films, anime or K-pop doesn’t have the same problems regarding race and ethnicity, it still must negotiate its own cultural prejudices.
As Alexis Lothian, Kristina Busse and Robin Anne Reid conclude, fanfiction provides a fluid space for (mainly) queer women writers and readers to engage with the various pop cultural narratives that influence their lives.
These negotiations, while messy and problematic, retain the potential to (re)fashion the “canon” to be inclusive of a broader range of human experiences.
Jade Lilly/flickr, CC BY
Rukmini Pande, PhD researcher in the fields of Popular Culture and Postcolonialism, University of Western Australia
La version originale de cet article a été publiée sur The Conversation.
The link below is to an article that looks at some facts about Barnes & Noble.
For more visit:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/69259/14-page-turning-facts-about-barnes-noble
Clay Calvert, University of Florida
A dozen years ago, in his New York Times review of the best-selling British novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Jay McInerney (of Bright Lights, Big City fame) called it “stark, funny and original.” Told from the perspective of a 15-year-old autistic savant, the book is now a Tony Award-winning play.
But what’s hot on Broadway is sometimes too hot for Florida Panhandle high schools.
This past summer, the novel was pulled from the assigned summer reading list at Lincoln High School in Tallahassee, Florida. As reported by the Tallahassee Democrat, “the move was made to accommodate offended parents,” who apparently took offense to the dozens of instances of profanity in the text.
Whether it’s challenging Harry Potter books for promoting Satanism and the occult or wiping Fifty Shades of Grey from the shelves for depicting “mommy porn,”, it’s become all too common for books to be challenged – and sometimes banished – from local libraries and schools.
The American Library Association’s annual Banned Books Week, currently in its 23rd year, officially celebrates and promotes “the freedom to read” by raising awareness of books that are most frequently challenged across the nation.
Perhaps more significantly, however, Banned Books Week also provides both a rudimentary barometer of contemporary cultural concerns – the flashpoint topics, ideas and words that push our censorial buttons – and a test of our core commitment to the First Amendment.
The challenged books let us take the pulse of American squeamishness and, more bluntly, intolerance. They reveal the concerns of the day that rub some people the wrong way, so much so that they take the time and effort to file complaints rather just averting their eyes or cautioning their own children.
Not surprisingly, sex and sexuality, along with religion, are hot-button topics. Number three, for instance, on OIF’s list of most challenged books for 2014 is And Tango Makes Three. The children’s book, which was inspired by actual events in New York’s Central Park Zoo, tells the story of two male penguins who hatch and raise a female penguin named Tango. Publishers Weekly called it a “heartwarming tale.”
jessica wilson/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
Those challenging it, however, find it anything but heartwarming. Instead, it is “anti-family” and “promotes the homosexual agenda.” Then again, at least the book was not the most challenged this past year, as it was in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2010 (the 2014 honor goes to Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian).
Culturally, the wrath heaped upon And Tango Makes Three suggests that one recent Supreme Court ruling aside, we are still conflicted when it comes to same-sex marriage (apparently for both humans and penguins).
Cultural questions, of course, sometimes spill into courtrooms. While the First Amendment explicitly protects freedom of speech, it also implicitly safeguards our right to receive speech.
As Justice William O Douglas wrote for the US Supreme Court fifty years ago in Griswold v Connecticut, “the right of freedom of speech and press includes not only the right to utter or to print, but the right to distribute, the right to receive, the right to read and freedom of inquiry.”
Griswold’s logic leads to convoluted case law surrounding public schools’ ability to regulate and ban books in their libraries.
In a 1982 case called Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v Pico, a New York school district sought to remove a number of books from library shelves, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and a Langston Hughes-edited collection called Best Short Stories of Negro Writers.
According to the school board, the titles removed were “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-[Semitic], and just plain filthy.”
A fractured Supreme Court wrote that “the discretion of the States and local school boards in matters of education must be exercised in a manner that comports with the transcendent imperatives of the First Amendment.”
In other words, school boards have discretion to pick and choose books, but that discretion is confined by minors’ rights to receive a wide swath of ideas and information, not just conformist doctrine.
Library of Congress
The court added that “just as access to ideas makes it possible for citizens generally to exercise their rights of free speech and press in a meaningful manner, such access prepares students for active and effective participation in the pluralistic, often contentious society.”
Lofty rhetoric aside, Justice William Brennan cobbled together a few rules that remain in place today: schools may not exercise their discretion “in a narrowly partisan or political manner,” and they “may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.”
The court concluded there was enough evidence to suggest the school district’s reasons for removal violated the principles noted above, and it denied the board’s motion to have the case tossed out.
Indeed, the ALA makes it clear that despite a constant drumbeat to pull books from the shelves, “most challenges are unsuccessful and most materials are retained in the school curriculum or library collection.”
Of course, a few challenges do result in bans.
Ultimately, the problem of book banning and challenging won’t go away. Public libraries and schools with limited budgets must make tough calls on what to buy, remove or put behind the check-out desk. Their choices tell us much about where we stand culturally, while their willingness (for the most part) to combat challenges reflects their unwavering commitment to free expression.
Clay Calvert, Brechner Eminent Scholar in Mass Communication, University of Florida
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Naomi Baron, American University
These days, when most of us think of a “book,” we have in mind something around nine inches by six inches, with mass market paperbacks shaving off an inch or two in each dimension.
But digital reading has redefined presuppositions about size and, more importantly, about what format is best for what’s being read: text messages, news articles, textbooks or fiction.
Conventional wisdom (including my own) typically suggests that serious digital reading calls for ample screen size (at least a tablet or e-reader), while one-off encounters with sports updates or tweets are fine on mobile phones.
But these rules of thumb are crumbling as users increasingly abandon larger mobile devices like Kindles and Nooks in favor of an all-purpose phone. While sales of e-readers and tablets are slowing, the real growth is in smartphones. In 2014, 1.2 billion smartphones were sold worldwide. With many newer generations of smartphones offering bigger screens – along with continued advancements in screen resolution – readers are turning to their mobiles for more and more of their onscreen reading.
Does size matter? For most of us, yes. When the reading platform size shrinks, it’s harder to focus on complex arguments or story lines. No wonder the bestselling e-books tend to be romance and erotica.
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It’s become commonplace to invoke Herman Melville or Leo Tolstoy when arguing about what kinds of reading work (or don’t work) on which digital media. “No one would read War and Peace on a mobile phone,” you might say – but that’s exactly what journalist Clive Thompson did earlier this year. Expediency was his basic motivation – knowing he was unlikely to lug the print version around with him, he turned to the device he was already carrying: his phone.
Thompson’s success story (he went on to polish off Moby Dick and Crime and Punishment on the phone) can be interpreted two ways: “I told you so” or “the exception proves the rule.” Knowing Thompson’s work, I’m confident he proved a serious reader of these meaty texts. But when my university students try the same feat, they often admit the results are more questionable.
To be fair, the main challenge of reading on mobile phones or smartwatches isn’t size, per se. (Historically, readers have been absorbed in books fitting in the palm of their hand – especially prayer books or poetry.) Rather, for the majority of readers, the issue is mindset. For those lacking self-discipline, there is Freedom software, which blocks internet access on digital devices if you’re trying to get some work done. Either way, reading serious literature on a mobile phone (rather than restaurant reviews or gossip) takes a level of concentration and self-discipline that few have.
Five hundred years ago, when people prayed using a book no larger than a mobile phone, there was no chance of being interrupted by a text message or a tweet. Today, our handy pocket devices are laden with temptations that snatch our attention away from an author’s words.
And distractions aside, there’s still the question of whether or not we can comprehend text on small screens at a level comparable to text in printed books or magazines. Here, there are several intertwined components: size, text length and the digital (as opposed to print) medium.
For size, when reading on a small digital device, the number of characters visible at one clip is abridged, from around 200 (on a mini-tablet or large smartphone) to, at best, a few dozen on a smart watch. Digital reading entails continual scrolling, and there’s little prospect of seeing a two-page spread (an essential format of the codex for nearly 2,000 years). Reading specialist Anne Mangen argues that constant scrolling on digital devices undermines mental absorption.
Now think about how much text people are willing to tackle in the first place. In the age of tl;dr (“too long; didn’t read”), those who read onscreen – even comparatively big screens – show less patience with lengthy prose (longreads.com informs time-conscious readers how many words each piece contains and how long it should take to work through them). As screens get smaller, it’s wildly unlikely that even our current attention spans will hold steady.
Finally, consider the medium itself. My research on university students in five countries revealed that 92% believed they could concentrate best when reading in print, not on digital devices.
If you’re reading on a laptop or average-sized tablet or e-reader, at least the physical spread of text offers an in-your-face inducement to read. As screen size shrinks, so, I’ll wager, does the mental holding power of a tiny window that displays only a small amount of text at a time.
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Once upon a time, reading was literally a big deal. Children actually learned to read by following the adventures of Dick, Jane and their dog Spot. My own first Dick and Jane primer was physically outsized – picturesquely called an elephant folio – measuring about 20 square inches and set in what seemed like 200 point type.
For me and others of my generation, those mammoth folios were a sign of the importance of reading. With today’s small-screen digital devices, can reading still be a big deal? For most of us mere mortals who yield to distraction and assume size matters, the answer will often be “no.”
Naomi Baron, Executive Director, Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning, American University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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