Kobo, a Rakuten company, has partnered with the American Booksellers Association (ABA) to introduce a new program that encourages digital reading on a local level.
The program is called eRead Local and is designed to get ABA members to sell eBooks via Kobo and compensates booksellers for doing so. Participating ABA members will receive $5 USD for every reader they sign up for a Kobo account. In addition, these customers that create Kobo accounts through an affiliate ABA member will receive a $5 USD credit toward their first purchase of a Kobo eBook. Here is more from the press release:
ABA members who acquire 100 new customers will be entered for a chance to win an in-store event with a bestselling author, and those who acquire 50 new customers will be eligible for a chance to win Kobo eReaders for in-store customer contests to help generate further in-store foot traffic.
The program will run for 100 days beginning this summer, with the exact timing still to be decided.
The American Booksellers Association has partnered with the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc Foundation) to provide a financial assistance program that will benefit employees of independent book stores with financial emergencies.
Follow this link to learn about the program. ABA book store member employees who are experiencing hard times caused by anything from medical bills to natural disasters can apply for tax-free grants through the fund.
“Our goal is to stabilize the household finances so that an emergency situation does not overwhelm the household and spiral into a more extreme financial need,” explained Pam French, executive director of the Binc Foundation, in a statement. “It is our vision to be an organization dedicated to book people helping book people.”
continued…
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
There are opportunities for genuine growth and a renewed vitality in bricks and mortar bookselling if the business model is reinvented, Oren Teicher, c.e.o. of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), told the Book Industry Conference yesterday (16th May).
read more
Here are my old Banned Books Weeks posts: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2008. I skipped 2005.
I’ve been down with The Crud for the past few weeks. Not really sick, but not having a lot of extra energy to get involved in things outside my own library and jobs. Banned Books Week started on Saturday and runs through this week. I’ve been invited to an evening with readings from banned books tomorrow night and I think I’m staying home.
I’m not sure if I’m getting complacent, sick of this holiday, sick generally, or there really is a lot less enthusiasm this year from years previous. The ALA page is usually my starting point and it seems a little less lively than usual. Their calendar of events is Chicago based (wouldn’t it be great if they were an aggregator to BBW activity worldwide? Does such a thing exist) and indicates to me that they still haven’t learned to resize images before uploading them. The ALAOIF blog hasn’t posted yet this week though they did link to this cute video put out by ALA which I enjoyed. The main ALA BBW page doesn’t even link to the Banned Books Week page which is supposedly the “go to” page for current information — and does have a calendar of sorts — which has a broken stylesheet declaration which makes all the pages look like they were designed in 2003.
As usual, I clicked through from the ALA web page to the home pages of all the organizations who are co-sponsors of Banned Books Week. Here’s what I found.
Even ALA’s home page doesn’t mention Banned Books Week except on page six of their slide show where they tell us what we can buy to support it.
I wonder a little bit if this is what a post-Judith Krug ALA looks like? On a brighter note, let’s look at some Banned Books Week web pages that are useful and/or interesting
While I’m talking about this, I’d also like to mention the data on the PBS page.
According to the ALA there have been 3,736 challenges from 2001-2008:
* 1,225 challenges due to “sexually explicit” material
* 1,008 challenges due to “offensive language”
* 720 challenges due to material deemed “unsuited to age group”
* 458 challenges due to “violence”
* 269 challenges due to “homosexuality”
* 103 challenges due to “anti-family”
* 233 challenges due to “religious viewpoints”
I think we need to look hard at this list and draw some conclusions about what sort of people believe that restricting access to books for these reasons is both a good idea or a reasonable thing to expect to be able to get away with. And then, if we want to get serious, I think we need to hit these points directly and ask people why they’re afraid of sex, or gay people (or penguins), or swearing. It’s nice to say that “free people read freely” but it’s another to be in a situation where your institutions are getting pressured by people who are intolerant and thinking that speaking truth to power is all you need to do. I’ve talked a little more about this in the MetaFilter thread about Banned Books Week, it’s always a reflective time of year for me.
Also, ALA knows that BBW means something else, right?
We briefly interrupt our celebration of indies to pass on some important information!
First off, I wanted to let readers
Jen Robinson and
Debbie Freedman know that I just discovered that they had also submitted recommendations for both
Hicklebee's and
The Alphabet Garden. The two of you are I-N the big raffle, along with Becky Levine and Jennifer Stewart, who were listed in the blog. Mea culpa for the oversight. The train is back on track!
Secondly, as we move into Week 2(.5) of our celebration, I want you to be thinking hard about potential nominations for the
Bookseller of the Year. This special award goes to an individual who works at an indie, who in your opinion epitomizes all the best qualities of a bookseller-- a love of books, great customer service, expertise, and enthusiasm.
Does that sound like someone that works in your favorite haunt? And, if so, and you don't know their name, just call the store and ask. We'll do the rest! If your bookseller wins, we will do a blog all about them, and send them a dinner certificate for their favorite place to eat in their town. I'm going to try to nab an interview with our reigning Bookseller of the year,
Kris Vreeland from Vroman's in Pasadena. And, if you bookseller wins, you'll recieve one of our classic Shrinking Violet coffee/tea mugs. So, get those nominations in!
We mentioned in a recent post about
Book Sense and I want to make sure everyone knows what this is, and how you might use that to support your indies all year long.
Book Sense is a community of independent booksellers across the country who share five attributes that "... collectively distinguish them in the bookselling marketplace." The attributes are
Knowledge, Passion, Character, Personality and
Commitment to Community. Many of these stores offfer Book Sense gift cards, which is a wonderful alternative to-- let's say, oh, I don't know, a chain store gift card. If you want to send a gift to a friend in another town, or state, you can go on to the
Book Sense website and enter their zip code. Booksense.com will send you to the indie local to their area, and you may be able to purchase them a gift card for their nearest store.
You can also sign up to become a Book Sense affiliate and put their logo and link on your author/illustrator website. Your customers can then purchase your books directly from an independent bookstore. This is a great additional option for you, instead of sending them exclusively from your site to a chain store that might start with the letter "B", for example, or a maybe even an "A". :-) I have both on mine so people can make a choice.
(ABA) which is the national trade association for independent booksellers. BookExpo America (BEA) is the industry's premier trade show. Held annually, it is a great opportunity to get a sneak peek inside the world of bookselling at their biggest national bookselling event of the year. In addition to the floor show, where exhibitors show their Fall titles, there are education and information sessions, author breakfasts and lunches, and a number of special events. Robin will be signing books their this year, and I will in tow wiping her brow and drying the sweat of her pen.
Lastlier, or lastliest, I am thinking that our reader TadMack should be voted Head Cheerleader for the Indies. Tad, are you game? Need a squad to help you? As HC, you get to pick. Get ready for try-outs, everyone!
:0] ~'-}
Mary & Robin
Whew, this week sets a new standard for busy-ness. Debriefing and follow-up work on TitleWave is consuming at BookStream; there's a full slate of events at the bookstore; and biggest of all, Tuesday through Thursday I'll be taking part in the ABA Focus Group Meetings here in New York.
The funniest part: the meetings will be taking place for three straight days at the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge Hotel. So I'll be spending two nights in a hotel that's 15 minutes walk from my house. Ah well -- kind of a treat at that.
So that's where I'll be this week. Hope y'all have a good one -- I'll try to pipe up on Friday.
The Jonathan Lethem/Philip K. Dick event at Cooper Union was a real delight. It began with Max Rudin, publisher of the Library of America, announcing that a second volume of PKD's novels will be released from the LOA in August 2008, also edited by Lethem. He rattled off the titles of the five novels quite quickly, but -- assuming I heard him correctly and nobody involved with the book changes their mind between now and then -- the included novels will be:
Lethem then read some excerpts from his introduction to the
selected stories
collection from a few years ago (which, Lethem informed us, would not be released in paperback because the paperback rights to the stories are owned by somebody else) and the whole of his own story
"Phil in the Marketplace". Lethem then answered a number of questions from the audience. I took some notes, but missed as much as I got, and all of it is at best paraphrase. Nonetheless, here 'tis:
To a question about why, when other writers also write about paranoia and such, Dick is so special, Lethem replied that when he speaks of Dick, he often also finds himself (or other people) bringing up Pynchon, DeLillo, and Vonnegut, among others, but that for him the difference is a matter of distance and emotional reserve -- Dick's difference is defined by his emotional investment in the situations. His empathy is his only compass. He possessed an obvious satirical impulse (or worldview, even), but he doesn't make fun of his characters' situations. He seems to grapple with the world and seek for solace.
Lethem had mentioned early on that one of the things he found most interesting and challenging about putting together the first LOA volume was working on the timeline, where 40 years of disappointments and struggles were not buffered by a biographical narrative, but were, instead, tied to particular dates. An audience member asked him to elaborate on this, and on the timeline's effect on his story "Phil in the Marketplace". He got a bit off topic and talked for a while about
Hampton Fancher, who wrote the
first version of the script of
Blade Runner, mostly as a way to explain that it seemed Dick was deeply uncomfortable with his growing fame, and feared the encroaching outer world as much as he desired it. Who knows, for instance, how uncomfortable he might be with the kind of canonization he's recently received? Yet he would also, hopefully, be hugely gratified. "Phil in the Marketplace" is about his exile temperament -- he wrote from the margin and drew energy from what he saw as the fate of the pulp writer. Lethem said he wants, and has wanted since he was young, what every PKD fan vociferously wants -- legitimacy for Dick. And yet he noted that he and many fans also have another side, one that no matter what sort of accolades or canonization Dick receives, still feels slighted, denied, defiant. But, Lethem noted, Dick is now in the Library of America, and nobody can remove him.
The next question referred to
I Am Alive and You Are Dead
, and the questioner asked if Lethem thought Dick was ever really in control. Lethem said he admired that book, but thought it played to the Romantic view of Dick as a crazy artist, and that we have to remember that he had other sides to his life and personality, and that he also really enjoyed wearing masks (playing a role) and being a raconteur. He loved to create theories, test them, and test the credibility (and gullibility) of his audience with them. He didn't stand on one patch of ground. It's as hopeless, Lethem said, to defend him against the word "crazy" as it is to defend Faulkner against the word "alcoholic", but we also have to recognize how generally functional Dick was, and how much more to him there is than just the crazy stuff.
Another questioner asked if he liked Dick's
Transmigration of Timothy Archer, and Lethem said he did, and he thought it was, as Dick's last completed novel, a very encouraging place for his career to end up, because it's a sensitively-written novel told from a woman's point of view -- and if you're going to have trouble with any element of Dick's writing, Lethem said, you're going to have trouble with the female characters in many of his books, because they are often treated as [I think this is the term he used, but had some trouble hearing it:] dark lords. Dick wrote 40+ novels, Lethem said, and on any day at least 8-10 of them seem to him to be among PKD's best, and
Transmigration is up there.
He then made a point I think is insightful -- that you have to read at least 3 Dick novels, preferably in different modes, to really understand his accomplishment. (I should have raised my hand and asked him to elaborate on this, but he's probably done so in an essay or interview somewhere.)
Finally, someone asked what Lethem thought of the
movies made from Dick's writings. He said two or three are worthwhile.
Blade Runner he said he hated when he first saw it, because of its huge divergences from the original novel, but that later, and particularly with the
director's cut, he decided it was one of the great American movies, something any PKD fan could be grateful for the way a Hemingway fan, for instance, could be grateful that something by Hemingway inspired a movie as great as
To Have and Have Not [the obvious difference being, though, that that great movie -- with a script that William Faulkner, among others, worked on -- was based on one of Hemingway's lesser novels, whereas
Blade Runner was based on one of Dick's best]. Lethem said he liked
A Scanner Darkly, though it certainly shows some of the limits of adaptation. Of the other films, he said there are some scenes that he likes very much, and wished he could put together a movie just from some of those. He said we can be grateful that most of the movies based on Dick's writings have been made from the short stories, leaving the major works for future
Richard Linklaters. Or so we can hope.
Jonathan Lethem is going to be at Cooper Union on Thursday night, and according to Galleycat he will be revealing the contents of the second Library of America collection of Philip K. Dick's novels. I'm going to try to be there, and will report as much as I can back here. For those of you in the NYC area, here's the info (from the Cooper Union website):
Jonathan Lethem: Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s
Lecture and book signing
Thursday, September 27, 6:30 pm
The Great Hall
7 East 7th Street at Third Avenue
Free
Acclaimed writer Jonathan Lethem is the editor of a selection of novels written by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick from the 1960s. Dick left behind more than 160 short stories and novels when he died in 1982. Many of his tales have become successful films, such as Blade Runner and Minority Report. Lethem bundled four of Dick's novels into one book to give a new generation the opportunity to discover Dick's futuristic visions. Jonathan Lethem is the author of seven novels, including Gun, with Occasional Music; The Fortress of Solitude and You Don't Love Me Yet. Motherless Brooklyn, his fifth, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
On December 18, Warner Home Video will release the long-fabled full director's cut of Blade Runner in three different packages: a 2-disc basic edition, a 4-disc edition with all previously-released versions of the film and tons of extras, and a 5-disc edition that includes the original "workprint" version.
I first saw the movie in my cousin's apartment in Chicago when I was probably much too young to be watching such things, but what are older relatives for if not to corrupt the minds of children? I watched it again after discovering Philip K. Dick, because for a time the only easily-attainable PKD novel was the movie tie-in version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
, and at first it caused me to be angry with the film for having so little to do with the book, but soon enough I thought of them as the very separate entities that they are. I think I saw the first "director's cut" when it was released to theatres in 1992, and I know I later saw it at a midnight show at the Angelika. It then became one of the first DVDs I ever bought. I forgot a lot of the differences between the two versions until last year at Dartmouth I watched a laser disc with the theatrical release. (The voice-over was even worse than I remembered it being...)
All of which is just to say ... that 5-disc version was made for suckers aficionados like me...
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[...] at librarian.net, has a very depressing listing of all the sites that should be promoting Banned Books Week – but aren’t. Read it and [...]
[...] in the midst of Banned Books Week 09, and there seems to be a collective yawn this year. Librarian.net notes that most of the organizations co-sponsoring the event with the American Library Association [...]
[...] to date information available to those who count on them to provide it. For more information click HERE and see those whom you think should promote Banned Books Week and aren’t. At least not when that [...]
Did you read the editorial in the Wall Street Journal? “Finding Censorship Where There Is None” by Mitchell Muncy. He makes an interesting point that libraries celebrating banned books week in effect stigmatizes patrons who wish to register concerns about materials.
Forgot to include the link to the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204518504574420882837440304.html
My thinking is that most everything about BBW is overblown and borderline absurd, starting with the title. My state is relatively rural, relatively conservative and every single one of the “banned” books is available in every public library, and we have very little in the way of challenges because the libraries are well connected with their communities and take parental responsibility as the guiding principle.
ALA should rebrand the whole concept- there are plenty of authors and librarians in other countries who take real risks and face real threats. self-congratulatory navel-gazing based on the fact that we slap down anyone who suggests that TTFL is a s****y book that probably damages girls self-esteem if they read it is parochial and bordering on insulting.
I’ve never really understood the purpose of this event. Does the public really need to be lectured to about censorship? The people who want to censor or ban books are certainly gaining nothing from our well-meaning library displays, and I don’t really see any teenagers running out to get a book BECAUSE it has been banned in other places. We can tell kids that they have freedom to read whatever they want, but if they are reading books that their parents don’t approve of or let them check out what are we really telling them, that other people also read books that their parents don’t like? “uh… thanks.” We aren’t changing anybody’s mind here. The most I ever get at my library is “Huh, To Kill a Mockingbird was banned in some high school? That’s weird.” How about instead of talking about banned books we talk about banned people. We talk not about “Annie on my Mind” but about real gay teenagers who are facing abuse and how people in the community can help.
I have never been a real fan of the name of the week, Banned Books Week, but I am a fan of the spirit of the week and the opportunity to acknowledge that we are mostly a free society where free expression is not just tolerated but encouraged. Yes, many other countries have significant censorship of materials and expression where we do not, which is why we celebrate this week and the 1st Amendment of our Constitution.
Today on the Thom Hartman Program, http://www.thomhartmann.com/, was a very good segment about Banned Books week with Kenneth Davis. To get a little bit of the flavor of the discussion here is a short video, http://www.dontknowmuch.com/2009/09/banned-books-week/ .
We have had a lot of press about the event locally, newspapers and radio. We are too rural for our own tv outlet. Statewide, Oregon, the ACLU has sent out great little yellow buttons for free to libraries that we are handing out to our patrons. The buttons, of course, say “I read banned books.” The people coming into the libraries are seeing the displays and happily leave the library wearing a button.
I spent some time this afternoon on the Mapofbookcensorship.html website looking at the specifics of the listed complaints. Everything I looked at fell into the following general structure:
1. Parent or other community member had a concern about the content or appropriateness of library material
2. They registered the concern with an agency that had authority over the issue
3. The agency considered the concern within its governing policy
4. In some cases, the outcome of the initial consideration was felt to be unsatisfactory
4a. In very few cases, access to the library material was limited in some manner. Typically this was by changing the grade to which the book was assigned (which seems perfectly legitimate to me), or by changing the location of a book within a library (less legitimate IMHO)
5. In most of these cases, there was a further consideration by the same or other agency
6. The outcome of every case was that library material remained available.
It seems reasonable enough that in effect there is a structure that allows participation and influence by people with an interest in the matter, and that this structure is subject to a number of checks and balances. Maybe the motto of BBW should be “Librarians know better”? In any case, ALA is spending a lot of resources every year to point out that a very few people don’t want their kid to read Bless Me Ultima, and that their complaints don’t really have any impact.
It looks to me like ALA breathed some life into their site this year at http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/ . It would’ve been nice if they’d linked there from their old page.
I also like what I’ve seen of the Kids’ Right to Read program, co-sponsored by the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression: http://www.ncac.org/Kids-Right-to-Read .
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by DElibrarian and PostRank – Library. PostRank – Library said: what’s happening from the middle of “banned books week”… http://bit.ly/XffeA #postrank #library [...]
Perhaps it would be more accurate to call the week “Challenged Books Week.” It lacks a certain umph though.