PVLD Director's Blog

Curling Up With a Kindle?

Anyone who knows me knows one of my great pleasures is curling up with a book.  While there is no doubt I am also a technology junkie, I've been very sceptical about e-books...but I have to confess that I am beginning to change my mind.

This started with seeing the first generation Kindle that a colleague bought to take on a European vacation.  The thought of being able to carry around the full text of multiple travel guides on a device that was roughly the size of a single book, and also use that device to download newspapers and other information while travelling was pretty appealing.

Then I got my Iphone, and while it's small size limits its usefulness as a medium for reading I have been amazed at how handy it is for reading newspaper articles and other shorter pieces.

A few weeks ago a friend emailed me to say she was thinking about getting a Kindle for her mother and asked whether the library had any for people to try. We don't but it is an interesting idea if we could find the money and figure out the licensing/copyright issues.

Monday morning as I drove to work I heard this interesting piece by Linda Wertheimer on NPR's Morning Edition (if you don't want to listen you can click here for the transcript):

And then just today as I was surfing some of my favorite blogs while eating lunch I came across this post about the Kindle Iphone app on colleague Genesis Hansen's Wrong Again blog. (As an aside Genesis is a Manager at the Newport Beach Public Library, and an up-and-coming library leader who was one of the inaugural participants in the State Library's Eureka Leadership Program for future library leaders).

Hmm...Linda Wertheimer curls up with her Kindle and Genesis uses her Iphone to have access to multiple books any time, anywhere ...maybe I need to give e-books a try.

On the other hand, since one of my favorite places to read is in the bathtub maybe I should wait for the waterproof version!

Books vs Bits

This Op-Ed piece by James Gleick from last Sunday's New York Times provided a nice counterpoint to the article on screen-based literacy that I blogged about last week.  Acknowledging that the role of the book  as "the world’s pre-eminent device for the storage and retrieval of knowledge" may be ending in this increasingly digital world, Gleick posits a new role for the book "as a physical object, and as an idea, and as a set of literary forms."

He talks about the unique immersion in a narrative that is the essence of reading a book, the feeling of possessing and being possessed by a book that a reader like me finds impossible to replicate when getting information via a screen. 

Gleick says this not out of sentimentality, but because of his view that the book will continue to have utility even when all information is digitized because as he puts it "it is a technology that works."  He writes

"As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars....It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover"

Thank you Mr. Gleick for helping me see why my inchoate feeling that digital technology does not mean the end of the book is not just wishful thinking!

Literacy in a Screen-based World

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine was headed "The Screen Issue" and dedicated to an exploration of how screen-based media are changing our world.  I was particulary intrigued by Kevin Kelly's essay "Becoming Screen Literate", in which he describes his view that "We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality."

He is not alone in this view, and there has been much written about how new screen-based media are transforming the very way we think.  Wht struck me about this article was Mr. Kelly's description of literacy as requiring a rich set of tools far beyond the basic building blocks of the ability to comprehend the meaning of a word on a page:

But merely producing movies with ease is not enough for screen fluency, just as producing books with ease on Gutenberg’s press did not fully unleash text. Literacy also required a long list of innovations and techniques that permit ordinary readers and writers to manipulate text in ways that make it useful. For instance, quotation symbols make it simple to indicate where one has borrowed text from another writer. Once you have a large document, you need a table of contents to find your way through it. That requires page numbers. Somebody invented them (in the 13th century). Longer texts require an alphabetic index, devised by the Greeks and later developed for libraries of books. Footnotes, invented in about the 12th century, allow tangential information to be displayed outside the linear argument of the main text. And bibliographic citations (invented in the mid-1500s) enable scholars and skeptics to systematically consult sources. These days, of course, we have hyperlinks, which connect one piece of text to another, and tags, which categorize a selected word or phrase for later sorting.

All these inventions (and more) permit any literate person to cut and paste ideas, annotate them with her own thoughts, link them to related ideas, search through vast libraries of work, browse subjects quickly, resequence texts, refind material, quote experts and sample bits of beloved artists. These tools, more than just reading, are the foundations of literacy.

He then goes on to propose that rapidly advancing computer technologies, including the use of technology to harness "the collective intelligence of humans", are enabling the application of the building blocks of textual literacy described above to be applied to visual images so that they can be searched, sorted, organized and retrieved much as words and text are today.

"As moving images become easier to create, easier to store, easier to annotate and easier to combine into complex narratives, they also become easier to be remanipulated by the audience. This gives images a liquidity similar to words. Fluid images­ made up of bits flow rapidly onto new screens and can be put to almost any use. Flexible images migrate into new media and seep into the old. Like alphabetic bits, they can be squeezed into links or stretched to fit search engines, indexes and databases. They invite the same satisfying participation in both creation and consumption that the world of text does." 

 Unwritten, but implied, is a sense that this new "visuality" will supplant text-based literacy as the primary means of communicating ones thoughts and ideas.  I have to admit that as someone who loves the written word this makes me a bit apprehensive.  Ispend very little time watching movies, television, or YouTube because I prefer to read instead; and while I love the new Web 2.0 and social networking tools I am drawn to those that are primarily based on the written word, such as blogs and written status updates from my Facebook Friends.

One of the things I love about reading is that the words on the page are transformed through my own experience and imagination into images of my own making, and I avoid seeing the movie versions of books that I have loved because the visual images on the screen rarely live up to what I have imagined.

I can't help but wonder whether something will be lost when communication is via a visual depiction in glorious technicolor that leaves little to the imagination, rather than words (whether spoken or written) that demand transformation into an image of my own making....but what do you think?

Banned Books Week

What do works by William Shakespeare, Shel Silverstein, Charles Dickens, Laura Ingalls Wilder, William Faulkner, Maya Angelou and Dante have in common?  All have been banned from a library at some point.  What else do they have in common?  They are on many school reading lists and as a result are among the most heavily circulated books at PVLD! 

This week libraries across the country are commemorating Banned Books Week, and PVLD is joining in to make people aware of what might be lost when books are banned.  We've typically had a somewhat low-key display of banned books, but this year we're doing something a bit more interactive...and perhaps a bit edgier -

• A mock pyre has been located in a highly trafficked area near the Reference Desk at Peninsula Center Library.  Adjacent to the pyre is a display of a number of books that have baeen banned at some time in the past.  Each book has a tag with the reason it was banned.  Ten of the books also have a certificate for a small prize inside!
  

• Library users can submit an entry form to win one of three "I Read Banned Books" book bags - one winner to be drawn weekly for three weeks starting October 8th.

• Many of the librarians are sporting t-shirts reading "Closing books shuts out ideas"...and last week some of them posed for this great shot! 

 

If you are interested in learning about what you might have missed out on if the censors had their way, stop by the Peninsula Center Library!

When Books Take Over the House

We didn't take a "real" vacation this summer, but my August has been marked by several stay-at-home mini-vacations which have provided an opportunity to catch up with projects around the house. 

Last weekend  I used some of my time off to go through our overflowing bookshelves to try to get rid of some books and make room for the teetering stack that is awaiting a home.  It was HARD! Even books I haven't taken off the shelf in years are associated with certain times, places and memories that make them very  hard to part with.  In the end only about 1/2 dozen made it into the donation box at the library.

Today, as I get ready to head off for an extended long-weekend (and another attempt to weed our book collection) I spent some time cleaning up my computer desktop and coincidentally came across this article from the Wall Street Journal's online newsletter that I had saved for future reference.

I sure could sympathize with Mr. Sante!

If books are taking over your house, you live on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, and you have more willpower than Mr. Sante or I - please think about donating some of them to the Friends of the Library where they will be sold to raise money to enhance library services...and wish me luck as I make another attempt to clear some shelf space this weekend!

Teens and Reading

The past couple of Sundays the New York Times has had two very interesting articles about teen literature and reading. 

The first, I'm Y.A. and I'm OK from the July 20th edition of the Times, is about the "increasingly porous border" between the realms of "adult" and "young adult" literature.  This is an issue PVLD has been discussing particularly with regard to our Science Fiction collection, where most of the best new works are classified as YA even though they would be of great interest to adults.  We are planning to create a single merged Science Fiction collection to address that particular genre, but as the New York Times article points out the problem exists across genres. Wonderful literature of interest to all ages is being "hidden" in the YA section of libraries and bookstores where adult browsers are unlikely to find it.  Merging collections across the board isn't really the answer, as our YA collections are an integral part of the "teen space" that we have worked so hard to establish as means of attracting teens to the library and encouraging them to read.  Parts of the solution may be in special, temporary displays of YA materials where adults are likely to see them or in "staff picks" lists for adults that include YA titles....

The good news is that if YA literature is flourishing to the extent that publishers want to classify items as YA, then teens must be reading...so I thought this past Sunday's NY Times article on online vs traditional reading was all the more interesting as it featured a number of teens who do their primary reading online and probably rarely if ever pick up a YA novel.  The article does a good job of articulating some of the differences between online and traditional reading without taking sides in the ongoing debate abou how important traditional, paper-based reading skills really are.  I thought some of the teens' comments about why they read online were really perceptive, and the idea that online reading might offer real advantages to people with dyslexia and other learning disabilities was something I had never thought about. 

Interesting stuff!

Everything old is new again - the history of children's libraries

My friend Debby Stegura shared this fascinating article on the creation of children's libraries and the evolution of children's literature from the current issue of the New Yorker.

As I read the article I couldn't help thinking how fresh some of the issues and controversies of the late 19th and early 20th centures seem.  The "morally corrupting" influences that so concerned upright citizens of the late 1800s were novels not video games, and it was Dickens, Scott and Cooper that were considered "trashy" not manga, graphic novels, or the LA Weekly, but the desire of some adults to protect the young (often the offspring of others, not their own) from exposure to materials they deem inapprpriate remains the same.

I loved reading about the creation of the first children's reading areas, and the determined women who put in place many of the things we view as core elements of children's library services even today - story times, services to all (even the children of immigrants), the extension of borrowing privileges to children, the role of the librarian in reviewing and recommending books for publication.....

Even the issue of the unclear boundary between "children's" and "adult" literature is one  wwe wrestle with today.  Here at PVLD we have been having an active discussion about whether the way the collection is organized creates artificial distinctions between "adult" and "kids" materials and, for example, some of our librarians are working on a plan to merge the "adult" and "young adult" science fiction collections on the basis that these books will be of equal interest to both age groups.  With that in mind I enjoyed this quote from Katharine White, wife of E.B. and a formidable force in children's literature in her own right:

"It has always seemed to us that boys and girls who are worth their salt begin at twelve or thirteen to read, with a brilliant indiscrimination, every book they can lay their hands on. In the welter, they manage to read some good ones. A girl of twelve may take up Jane Austen, a boy Dickens; and you wonder how writers of juveniles have the brass to compete in this field, blithely announcing their works as “suitable for the child of twelve to fourteen.” Their implication is that everything else is distinctly unsuitable. Well, who knows? Suitability isn’t so simple." 
 

As anyone who is involved with the operation of a 21st century library knows, questions such as "how do you determine what material is suitable for whom, and whose responsibility is it?" or "what constitutes appropriate material to be added to the collection knowing that today's trash may be tomorrow's classic?" are as topical today as they were in the days of the formation of the New York Public Library Children's Room or the era of E.B. and Katharine White.

Read the article....you'll enjoy it!

The Future of Reading...or who says the Internet isn't changing the way we read?

I went up to Sacramento today for a meeting of the California Library Association Legislative Committee.  I shared the Supershuttle from the airport with a middle-aged woman and her mother, who was well into her 70s if not older.

We got to talking, and when they learned I was a Library Director the mother told me how much the appreciates that her local branch of the Los Angeles Public Library will order her a book from anywhere at no charge, and only charges her a dollar if she doesn't pick the book up.  She said she has been a lifelong reader, and as a teen-ager used to check out 10 books from the library each week.

Then she said , "Now I read a lot on the Internet" (at which point her daughter hastily said "Not that much, Mother." and I got the sense she didn't want to offend me!)  The mother went on to say "I really like biographies.  I just Google the name of someone I want to read about, and up pops the Wikipedia article and I can learn all about them".   In her mind, the term biography didn't mean books at all.

And that's a woman who was past middle-age when the Internet became widespread...a pretty good indicator that reading ain't what it used to be!

Libraries and Reading

As I noted in yesterday's post, the topic of libraries and reading has been on my mind due in no small measure to the request I received from the Surfwriters (local writing group) to give them a talk on the topic of "Reading and Libraries in the 21st" century.  The text of that talk is contained here -

Download surfwriters.pdf

Readers of this blog know,a nd my talk to the Surfwriters reiterates, that I believe reading is at the core of the public library's mission, recent reports of its alleged demise notwithstanding.  It seems I am not alone in this belief...check out this New York Times Blog post from Timothy Egan, which I came across this weekend...unfortunately AFTER I had given my talk to the Surfwriters!

 

Books

I saw this sign on the cart of a homeless person in a shopping center near my home recently –