New and Creative Leniency for Overdue Library Books

Reprinted from NY Times:

CHICAGO — In the Illinois towns of Joliet and Palos Park, the economic downturn has pushed the public libraries into the grocery business, of sorts. Patrons with overdue books and hefty outstanding fines were recently given a way to clear their records: Donate canned goods or other groceries through the library to local shelters and food pantries.
Dozens of library patrons in both towns jumped at the opportunity.
In Colorado, despite a multimillion-dollar deficit, the Denver Public Library has practically done away with fixed-rate fines. Now librarians there are free to negotiate a fee structure that feels fair to them based on individual cases, or to charge nothing at all.
Since the beginning of the economic downturn, librarians across the country have speculated that fines for overdue items are keeping people from using the library — particularly large families whose children take out (and forget to return) many books at a time. Some libraries learned that the fines, which are often as low as 25 cents an item per day, quickly multiplied for many people and were becoming an added hardship.
“We can’t push the cost to consumers because they’re also struggling,” said Richard Sosa, the finance director of the Denver system, which has $9 million worth of books in circulation through 23 libraries and two bookmobiles. “The library philosophy is: We do not want to restrict access to information. The use of fines or harsh collection tactics — and we could potentially do that — could essentially restrict people’s access to the library.”
And another thing: They need their books back.
As a result, libraries have been instituting amnesty days and weeks with increasing frequency this year, and offering programs such as “food for fines.” In Joliet, about 60 miles southwest of here, the program went well beyond groceries, and benefited a local social service agency that serves the needy.
Read the entire article>>>

Book sales in 2009 - not that bad it seems

Republished from LA Times blog:

Publishing has been hit hard this year: There have been bookstore closings across the country, big layoffs at publishing houses, warnings that the business model can't survive, the looming challenge of e-readers such as the Kindle and e-books. Yet with numbers out that cover book sales for 2009 through Dec. 20, it appears that despite all this bad news, people still like to buy books.

Crain's reports that Neilsen BookScan, which reports on about 75% of industry sales, suggests that sales numbers could have been much worse. The area that did the best was the important category of adult fiction -- it has held steady since last year, with 208 million books sold. Taken on their own, sales of hardcover fiction were up 3%.

Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol," the long-awaited follow-up to the mega-bestseller "The DaVinci Code," was part of the good news. The novel was the year's top seller.

Paperbacks in fiction were mixed -- trade paperback sales were up by 2%, but mass-market paperbacks, which have been struggling, were down.

Overall, the year's tallies have book sales down about 3% overall. That's because adult nonfiction did not perform well -- sales were down by 7% since last year.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Ready for the "Nook"? Uh, not quite sure it's ready for us.

David Pogue, tech-guy extraordinaire gives the thumbs down to Barnes & Noble's entry into the e-book reader market, The Nook. Never mind that these devices sold out early in the holiday season. I recently gave one a whirl with decidedly poor results. Try before you buy at a local store. You'll find the screen refresh as the pages change leaves much to be desired.
Pogue says. "And in the electronics business, Greed-Borne Insanity is contagious.
That’s when electronics executives, blinded by dollar signs on their corneas, rush a product to market before it’s ready."
I agree!
Read the entire review in the NY Times article here>>>

Dr. Suess won the bet!

Dr. Suess editor, Bennett Cerf, bet him $50 that he could not write a book with a vocabulary of only 50 words.

Suess won by penning "Green Eggs and Ham."

For more of these interesting bits from authors see the Chicago Tribune slideshow here>>>

Author Ann Patchett (writer of Bel Canto) makes writing her "job"

As a freelance writer, one doesn't have to sit and write for 8 hours a day. It IS a job, writers insist, as they walk out the door in the middle of the day to go to a movie or meet a friend for lunch and shopping. But, studies show more actual hours writing do produce more actual pages written. Imagine!

In this article from the Washington Post, Patchett explains how she changed her focus and now keeps at it during the day when other more pressing matters seem constantly at hand, well, at least for 32 days.

More>>>

New Sherlock Holmes movie reverts to original text's characters' characteristics

Readers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional character, the brilliant London-based detective, in the more than 50 short stories and 4 novels will delight in the new film version which shows both Holmes and his friend, Watson, as Doyle portrayed them - that of companions and intellectual equals - not the bumbling Watson and the snide Holmes most movie watchers are familiar with from the characters of the films from the 1940's. The new movie starring Robert Downing, Jr. and Jude Law manages to evoke a feeling of smart and witty fun while the "detecting" ensues in a fast-paced action.
Getting good reviews all around.

Most stolen book? Surprisingly, it's the Bible

In her essay for the NY Times, writer Margo Rabb notes when she asked Steve Bercu, BookPeople’s owner, what the most frequently stolen title was.
“The Bible,” he said, without pausing.
Apparently the thieves have not yet read the “Thou shalt not steal” part.

Read the entire article>>> 

Cute video! Wizard of Oz at the Library

Originally presented at the 2007 ALA Conference in Washington DC. A simple tale about library circulation. Presented by Salt Lake County Library. 

Watch

Even Bradbury couldn't keep Ventura Library from closing

Tight money is regrettably not science fiction. Even the author Ray Bradbury put up a fight, but it was not enough to save the H. P. Wright Library in Ventura, Calif.

The library, like so many around the country, had fallen on hard times as city and state budgets tightened. Mr. Bradbury, a fierce advocate for public libraries, appeared at a fund-raiser last June aimed at helping to save the ailing branch. While that helped the library hang on for a bit, the long-term picture was bleak, and a recent bond measure that would have helped close a $650,000 deficit sunk.

The library’s final day on Nov. 30 was met with a candlelight vigil. “Needless to say, they put up a good fight,” said Sydney Weisman, a spokeswoman for the San Buenaventura Friends of the Library, which tried to keep the library afloat. New York Times reports.

More at The Ventura County Reporter Online

Hear more author interviews: Sara Paretsky

Listen to audio of author interviews from Donna Seaman, an associate editor at Booklist for the American Library Assn. She's also a frequest reviewer for the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, and others.

She says, "Books compete with the machine media -- television, movies, video games, the Internet -- for our time and attention, yet they hold their own because books are intimate, nourishing, and resonant. Reading books stimulates the imagination, renews our love for the subtleties of language, forges bonds between past and present, links us to diverse peoples and all of living creation, and illuminates with singular clarity one of the universe’s greatest mysteries, how other people’s minds work. Off-the-grid objects of great sensuous, emotional, and intellectual pleasure, books mesh story and ideas. To read is to lose and find one’s self and the world. Reading is a form of listening, and literature is a grand and transcendent conversation. Our hope is that by opening books, hearts, and minds, you will help keep this rich and essential tradition alive and thriving."


I agree!
Listen to some interviews with authors now>>>

Book returned to Ohio library after 60 years

TOLEDO, Ohio — A book has been mailed back to an Ohio library after six decades, accompanied by an anonymous letter of remorse.

The biography "Napoleon" by Emil Ludwig recently arrived at Toledo's main library, with a brief note that read: "I removed this book from your stacks in 1949 and did not check it out. I apologize. It's an excellent book and in good condition."

The person who signed it "An ex-Toledoan" also wrote, "Carrying guilt for 60 years is a terrible thing."

Library spokeswoman Rhonda Sewell says the package, with its Beverly Hills, Calif., postmark, came as a shock. She says the holiday season may have moved the sender to right a longtime wrong.

Circulation clerk Harry Johnston speculates the book was taken by a high school student in a hurry.

On this day: Mark Twain spoke to Congress

December 7: On this day in 1906, Mark Twain spoke in Washington before a Congressional Committee on patents, arguing for a proposed bill establishing copyright at life + fifty years. Other eminent authors and musicians spoke - John Philip Sousa, for example - but Twain, just turned seventy-one and an advocate of copyright law for decades, got all the attention. This was due to his fame, his entertainment value and his white suit - the debut of the iconic garb which Twain wore over his remaining three-and-a-half-years. "Nothing could have been more dramatic," wrote William Dean Howells, "than the gesture with which he flung off his long loose overcoat, and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of his silvery head." Given the next day's New York Timesheadline, "MT in White Amuses Congressmen," the new suit may have been counter-productive to the copyright cause - or perhaps just counter to earlier statements:

We must put up with our clothes as they are - they have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us - to advertise what we wear them to conceal. They are a sign; a sign of insincerity; a sign of suppressed vanity; a pretense that we desire gorgeous colors and the graces of harmony and form; and we put them on to propagate that lie and back it up.   (from Twain's Following the Equator, a collection of travel pieces published in 1897)

Tips for Growing Bookworms: Make Sure Your Children Have Books of their Own

We all know that reading can inspire, educate, and transport one to different lands and encourage imagination and creative thinking in everyone. It's best to start 'em young and make life-long reading a habit they'll come to love.

Great article from PBS: Inspire a love of reading in your child with help from these children's book experts.

NY Times picks for best of 2009

Topping the list of the Fiction best books of 2009 is Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy. This book is among many of the "best books of 2009" lists that are popping up everywhere just now. I've heard this book is very good, the author writes in a concise clearness without sentimentality. Hmm.

For the entire list>>>

Study: Amazon has fewer bugs than Walmart.com; Target.com

Amazon beats out other online book retailers. According to the study Amazon's website is easier to navigate and has fewer problems.
Read more from USA Today.

Funny comic from the SF Chronicle

A Christmas Rewrite, as Dickens Edits Dickens

I re-read this classic last year and was throughly delighted. Hard to believe Dickens simply dashed this off in a quick moment. In the picture above young visitors to the Morgan Library view the marked up manuscript.

From the NY Times: It is an enduring mystery of English literature: What secrets lie entombed beneath the thick scribbles that Charles Dickens made as he wrote, and rewrote, the 66 pages of “A Christmas Carol” in 1843?

The manuscript of this classic holiday ghost story, written in six weeks to raise much-needed cash, is housed at the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan, where it bears all of Dickens’s additions and subtractions in his own hand.

On page 3, he inserts “his eyes sparkled” to amplify the portrait of Scrooge’s nephew, whose beneficence is crucial to the plot.

On page 12, where Scrooge takes Marley’s ghost to be evidence not of the supernatural, but of his own indigestion, (“more of gravy than of grave,”) he converts the offending bit of food from being a “spot of mustard” to a less digestible “blot of mustard.”

A CLOSE READING

Examine high resolution images of Dickens’s manuscript for yourself and discover additions and deletions he made to “A Christmas Carol” before sending it to the printer.

•  Examine the manuscript

•  See all 66 pages

Scholars, on occasion, have been given access to the manuscript, or facsimiles, to learn more about these shapings and shadings.

Read more in the NY Times article