MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 20): Ebooks in the Classroom, Writers Life, Libraries Matter, Bob Marley

Inside Higher Ed on the use of eBooks in the classroom (almost an ongoing series):

E-textbooks, meanwhile, have continued to lag. Only 5 percent of the survey respondents said they purchased access to an e-textbook this spring. Two percent bought e-textbooks for more than one class. The most common reason for going electronic? “My professor required me to.”

Tablet computers, and especially the iPad, have nonetheless seized the cash and imaginations of students. As far as cachet, the Apple device is not quite as “in” as beer — but it is neck-in-neck with coffee, according to the survey, which polls students on a broad range of media and "lifestyle" tastes. More relevantly, the iPad is just as “in” (Student Monitor did not qualify the term) as laptops, even though 87 percent of respondents owned a laptop while just 8 percent owned an iPad. Nearly half reported being “interested in purchasing a wireless reading device,” with 70 percent of those students saying they had their eye on an iPad.

In fact, various forms of technology nearly swept the top trends on college campuses, with “drinking beer” the only non-tech interruption in a top 5 dominated by Facebook, iPhones, text messaging, and laptops. (“Working” and “going to grad school” were considered less “in” — though to the extent that the term might be interpreted as an observation of what is cool and/or new, that might not come as a surprise.)

Unique approach to testing at the University of Southern Denmark (IHEd):

On the issue of plagiarism and cheating, Petersen said that while there would always be legitimate concerns, online assessment presented a novel solution to the problem. "One way of preventing cheating is by saying nothing is allowed and giving students a piece of paper and a pen," she said. "The other way is to say everything is allowed except plagiarism. So if you allow communication, discussions, searches and so on, you eliminate cheating because it’s not cheating anymore. That is the way we should think."

Southern Denmark currently uses a plagiarism-detection program called SafeAssign, which is produced by Blackboard. Papers are checked against databases of source material before being delivered to lecturers for marking.

Petersen said that another benefit of the new Web-based system was that a strict limit could be imposed on the length of work submitted by students. This would force them to rethink how they write and prevent them from copying and pasting from other sources, she said.

Aspiring to be a writer yet with no idea what that means (Intelligent Life):

Stunned by a survey that showed "writer" as the number one career goal of British youth—ahead of astronaut and footballer—Sarah O'Reilly at the British Museum saw the project as a way to put across the real challenges that come with the profession. Culled from hundreds of hours of archived interviews, the excerpts "provide a useful corrective to the idea that the writing life is a glamorous life," she says. Indeed, aspiring writers should anticipate inhabiting a "place of total and complete solitude," offers Linda Grant, a novelist included in the collection.

Yet these CDs are instructive, too, with authors weighing in on developing characters, finding ideas, researching context and figuring out how it all works together. The nitty-gritty of when, where and how—pencil, pen or computer? Morning or night? Each day or as the spirit calls?—are as varied as the writers. If there is a single bit of common advice, it is to (in the words of Penelope Lively): "read, read, read". About this, everyone agrees. "You learn how to structure a novel from looking at the great novels of the past," says Philip Hensher, a novelist. As Peter Porter, a late Australian poet asks, "If literature had no effect on you, why would you write it?"

Laura Miller in Salon writes about Why Libraries Still Matter (Salon):

Some would also say that it's a superfluous part. Public libraries across the nation and the globe now face drastic funding cuts from politicians and administrators who often claim that they're obsolete. For months, Britain has been rumbling with protests against plans to close as many as 400 local branches. Earlier this year, Gov. Jerry Brown announced that he was cutting all state funding to California's libraries, leaving cities to pick up the slack. Defenders of such cutbacks typically ask why, in the age of Google and e-reader devices, anybody needs libraries.

Let's set aside the obvious rejoinder that many citizens can't afford e-readers and, furthermore, can only access Google via a library computer. The anniversary of the NYPL's main building is an occasion to talk about why the library needs to be a place as well as an ethereal mass of data residing somewhere in "the cloud." Not everything we need or want to know about the world can be transmitted via a screen, and not every experience can be digitized.

Related is my write up from a talk at NYPL a few weeks ago (PND) On Bob Marley and his death after thirty years (Slate):

Marley has had an astonishingly successful commercial afterlife—the booming sales of his catalog virtually created the world-beat music category, paving the way for countless Buena Vista Social Clubs and Gipsy Kings—but his artistic reputation may never recover from it. His musical legacy has been hijacked and simplified by his cheesier fans (all those trustafarians toking in his memory). In turn, the music cognoscenti and hipsters seem to hold his mainstream appeal and lame followers against him. The fact that Marley is known by his weaker recordings like Legend or Exodus (which Time magazine—bizarrely to anyone familiar with the Marley canon—named "album of the century") doesn't help his cause.

Bob Marley's golden period was the three albums he cut with the original Wailers and the brilliant, certifiably insane, Jamaican producer Lee "Scratch" Perry: Soul Rebels, African Herbsman, and Rasta Revolution. These records are more satisfyingly complex, both lyrically and instrumentally, than much of Marley's later work. The Perry recordings are steeped in R & B and soul harmonies, but also tough. (Marley's earliest British fans were punk rockers.) The albums' layered rhythms—trancelike and jolting, like reggae by gunfighters—anticipated dub music and later stars like King Tubby and Augustus Pablo. When the English producer Chris Blackwell took over in 1973, intent on making Marley a star, the music, despite a couple of great albums, notably Catch a Fire! and Natty Dread, became steadily more mellow and digestible.

The Economist asks why the Patent Office can't keep up (Economist):

INNOVATION and jobs have become a modern version of motherhood and apple pie in Washington, DC. Everyone in America’s capital wants lots more of both, or so they say. So how come Congress and the White House have decided not merely to underfund a crucial cog in American’s innovation machine but actually to take away revenue it earns? And that at a time when that cog, the Patent and Trademark Office, is already struggling to keep up with the growing demands upon it? The recent budget deal for fiscal 2011 (the year to September 30th) allows the Patent Office to spend only $2.1 billion. That is less than it expects to collect in fees from applicants—$100m or so will disappear instead into Treasury coffers—and far less than it needs to do its job properly.

From the twitter: The Original Chick-lit - Telegraph Richard and Judy in WH Smith deal - News, Books - Independent Elmore Leonard: 'To have a clear head in the morning was a new feeling for me' Independent GO the Fuck to Sleep - How it all happened. Forbes EBSCO Publishing Extends Reach of Content with New iPhone App PrWeb Audible Creates Audio Rights Exchange, PW Associated Press Report: Borders has possible bidder on some stores (Forbes)

Repost: Pete Townshend's Biography

Pete may finally publish his autobiography according to Crains. In 2007 he was blogging as a mechanism to organize his possible book. He's a very good writer but unfortunately he stopped writing publicly and the link no longer work as they did in 2007.

Repost from March 3rd, 2007:

Mr. Townshend was blogging on and off during the last stages of the recording sessions for Endless Wire (which is great by the way) but he has now jumped in fully and is using the blog format to organize his biography. Here is a sample from last week:

Later. I parked my car in the Wardour Street underground car park next to the Intrepid Fox pub. I walked past the Marquee Club towards Brewer Street, and looked up at the beautiful big half-moon windows of my old apartment on the top floor at the corner.

I felt comfortable in Soho because I had once lived there; I felt comfortable because the Marquee Club was where the Who finally proved themselves at our residency there at the start of our career five years earlier in 1964. This wasn’t Soho, this was my home, my manor. And yet as I turned the corner down Old Compton Street towards Frith Street my heart began to pump. I reminded myself, in a familiar mantra, this is futile. To feel fear is pointless. There is nothing to fear. I am a man now. No one can hurt me any more. In thirty minutes time The Who were to play their new rock opera Tommy to the press at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, our first Live performance before the critics. As I crossed Dean Street I imagined I heard a voice shouting ‘Judas’. Did I fancy myself to be Bob Dylan? I realized someone was shouting ‘Trousers’, one of my nicknames used by insiders.

I looked towards the voice and saw a small group of men I knew to be a travelling party of fans of the band from the Marquee days, led as ever by a bombastic music journalist, already a little drunk, who I had always regarded as an ally. He would not catch my eye. I did not want them to join me on the last steps of my journey, carrying my guitar, on my way to face an inquisition of sorts. I didn’t want them to catch any scent of fear; fear I could not allow myself to feel. One of them spotted me and ran to catch up with me. Breathless, smelling of alcohol, he asked me how I felt. I said I felt all right. He told me not to worry, even if everyone was saying that Tommy was sick, it was controversial, a little controversy never hurt anyone in show business.

Pete is also close friends with Steve Riggio and there is a post about Melissa Riggio and some poetry she wrote that has been set to music by Pete's partner Rachel Fuller.

Bit of a confession from my side, I had a bit of a winge a few months ago when The Who came through NYC that I wasn't going. Well, almost immediately after posting that day I checked on tickets and ended up going. It was pricey but absolutely fantastic. I saw Steve there as well.

(Note: Sadly, Melissa died in 2008.)

BISG's Making Information Pay: The Presentations

The presentations from last weeks Making Information Pay (MIP) conference are now available on line:

Caesar and the Pinto

Another weekly image from the family archive. This one obviously from Las Vegas around 1973 although I am guessing at the date. Pretty much everything in this picture is no longer there. The hotel was demolished and if I recall the Pinto had a tendency to explode on contact.

Caesar and the Pinto, Las Vegas 1973

Join me on Flickr.

A Cool eBook Platform

The link to the TED site for non Flash users is: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mike_matas.html

A Library for Human Capital

Andrew Carnegie spent his lifetime building physical capital and used to advise nascent industrialists that wealth could be used to “bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.” By the end of his life, Carnegie had invested heavily in the establishment of public libraries around the world and, while most of this investment occurred at the beginning of the 20th century, he would have felt right at home at the New York Public library last Friday when the discussion turned to the future of libraries. Of the several themes discussed last week, he would have appreciated the continued need for private investor support (even for large libraries like the NY Public) but, most importantly, he would have agreed that public libraries help build public capital.

The “future of libraries” topic is a vibrant one, although broad discussion is often overwhelmed by those who suggest the end of all libraries is just a matter of time. Even at this discussion, which included President of the NYPL Dr. Paul LeClerc and President of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France Bruno Racine, moderator Paul Holdengräber started proceedings by quoting from Anthony Grafton who, to paraphrase, suggests that libraries face a Hobbesian choice: Carry on regardless, eventually becoming gigantic ghost ships with “all the lights on but nobody home” or reconstitute themselves by shipping books off to offsite storage and building nice buildings with open space, computers and internet access but, ultimately, offering nothing the patron can’t get anywhere else.

LeClerc took this one on and prefaced his comments by noting that, while he and “Tony” are good friends he doesn’t agree with him. Later in the conversation, he was more pointed when he expressed his frustration with people who speak “cavalierly about “libraries” and ignore the many differences between libraries”. There is a similar misreading of the situation in the publishing community: You would think that libraries exist at the will of the publishing industry and, implicitly, that libraries will cease to exist – vanish – once publishers stop shipping books.

Books – or, more accurately, published materials – are only one component of the value libraries provide to their patrons. A little past opening time at any one of the satellite outlets of the New York Public library, the library will already be full in a mélange of indigent, industrious, curious, educated, disenfranchised, foreign, young and old. All these patrons are embarking on explorative journeys both big and small whether they be reading the newspaper, looking for a new job, investigating vacation destinations or researching their dissertation or new business idea.

LeClerc noted two important aspects of the NYPL community: Firstly, that during 2010 there were 40 million physical visits to the library and, secondly, that an enormous number of people in NYC live marginal lives and can’t afford to buy books or other media. The library in this context is seen as an anchor of many communities offering a multiplicity of services often unrelated to books that go underappreciated by many prognosticators. Perhaps these services are considered irrelevant to the puffed-up value publishers place on their own products.

Predictably, LeClerc would also say he has no patience for people who say libraries will be an anachronism in the foreseeable future, especially in light of the fact that 68% of US citizens visited a library last year. In a recent Harris Poll of those visiting a library more than 25% of respondents did so more than 10 times in the past year and they visited in person rather than online or some other method. The library is embedded into the social network of our communities and lives but, perhaps, less so in the minds of people relied upon to fund libraries. Even the NYPL, which is a private library open to the public needs to raise a $1mm per week from public fund-raising activities.

Both speakers highlighted the influence of technology on the activities of the library, noting that Google has been more transformative that Gutenberg and that we can’t ignore the digital era. Responding to a question about the role of librarians, there was general agreement between the two that librarians are increasingly being asked to navigate the patron experience in an increasingly complex and chaotic content world. LeClerc said that librarians are ‘drowning in materials’ which is causing a whole new approach to information services dependent on technology. Younger patrons are “incredibly gifted” at retrieval but lack deep cultural education or awareness which continues to represent an opportunity for librarians, especially in the academic setting.

Naturally, this was a very positive discussion about the future of libraries and largely underscored the view that many people writing off libraries are really fundamentally unaware of their functions and the position of libraries on campus, on 5th Avenue and in the barrio. Libraries are attendant to, but not dependent on, the whims of publishers and the breadth and extent of their services to their communities is likely to be sought out for a long time to come. In closing, the two were asked about preserving digital content and, in the deliberations over the costs of doing so and issues related to storage, Racine suggested that it might be necessary to print content to preserve digital materials. And where would they put this but a library?

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 19) EBooks on Campus, Jeffrey Archer, LexisNexis Sued, Archiving the Web

Don't let the date stamp on this press release fool you as the National Association of College Stores announce findings from their March 2011 OnCampus Electronic Book and E-Reader Device Report. Here is their press release:

The results showed a 6% increase in e-book purchases of any kind when compared to a similar study done in October 2010, while fewer students are relying on laptops or netbooks to read the material. Nearly 15% fewer students said they used those devices to read e-books, while 39% said they used a dedicated e-reader, up from 19% just five months ago. “Although the vast majority of students still do not own a dedicated e-reader, this is a significant jump in five short months,” says Julie Traylor, NACS chief of planning and research.

Nearly 15% reported owning an e-reader, up from 8% in October. Of those now owning a digital e-reader, the Amazon Kindle was the most popular, with 52% of college students owning one, compared to 32% five months ago. Other top e-reader devices included Barnes & Noble’s Nook (21%), Apple iPhone (17%), and Apple iPad (10%).

Students interested in purchasing a new e-reader are most interested in the iPad and Kindle (both 27%), followed by the Nook.

Curiously, print textbooks continue as the preferred media option among this demographic. Fully 75% of the college students in the March 2011 survey said that, if the choice was entirely theirs, they would select a print textbook. This is similar to the findings of the October 2010 e-reader survey, as well as one done in the fall of 2008.

Jeffrey Archer interviewed by The Telegraph:

And we’re only 10 minutes in. I’m trying to steer the conversation towards writing techniques, towards inspiration and the existential angst of being a writer. I don’t think Jeffrey does existential.

More to the point, I’m painfully aware that of the two writers in the room, only one has an original Monet on the wall. “Kane and Abel!” he explains, pointing to it with a laugh. Just the one book, then. I don’t think Jeffrey is deliberately trying to trash me, but he does seem to have a strange reflex action that manifests itself as one-upmanship.

I mention that I’ve enjoyed the daily tours at the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York. Well, he has a famous academic who takes him around the world’s greatest galleries once a week. I tell him I walked the two miles to his home. Cue an anecdote about his running the London marathon. It really matters to him that he sells tons more than other famous writers he names, although he doesn’t want to offend them so asks me not to.

None of this is boasting, not exactly. Here’s the strange thing, or perhaps, not so strange, given those past crimes and misdemeanours.

Jeffrey seems to have an impulse to prove everything he says. He tells me that for six weeks he’s been the bestselling author in India. His assistant immediately pops down a second time with a printout of the Indian chart. And yes, there he is, well ahead of Mirza Waheed and Manju Kapur.

Interviewer: I once had to go to detention. Archer: That's nothing, I once did 2yrs for perjury. More NACS news and they've asked the Better Business Bureau to their claim that Amazon is misleading consumers of college textbooks (InsideHigherEd):

On March 25, the National Association of College Stores asked the National Advertising Division of the Better Business Bureau, a self-regulatory body of advertisers, to look into the three claims made by Amazon. On Tuesday, Amazon filed for a declaratory judgment from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington that the company’s advertising claims were not misleading.

While the price of textbooks has long been a hot topic of discussion -- prompting among other things the formation of student groups and legislation to combat high prices -- rarely has the market been competitive enough for advertising to be a point of legal contention. But the dispute between college bookstores and Amazon could indicate a new, more competitive era of textbook sales.

“NACS and the 3,100 college bookstores it represents are threatened by the lower prices that Amazon offers students on the sale of textbooks, and the high prices it offers to buy back books. It is actively seeking to limit Amazon’s ability to advertise these prices,” reads Amazon’s complaint. Amazon did not cite its market share in the complaint or respond to a request to comment on the subject.

LexisNexis is being sued in a class action that accuses the company of categorizing some potential employees as 'thieves' (CourtHouse News):

The problem, the plaintiffs say, is that LexisNexis doesn't "impose on members any rules, procedures or criteria regarding what constitutes an 'admission,' how admissions may be obtained, the form of admission statements, or what, if anything, employees signing an 'admission statement' must be informed of about Esteem or the purpose of the statement." The class adds: "And, where the statement refers to circumstances that could be interpreted as something other than a theft, defendant does not require the contributing member to furnish any clarifying information and, instead, resolves all doubt in favor of the contributing member." LexisNexis styles the supposed admission a "verified admission statement," but the company does not do its due diligence to investigate or verify it, the class claims. Named plaintiff Keesha Goode says that after she lost her job as a cashier at a mall in October 2008, she applied for a position with Family Dollar Stores, an Esteem subscriber, in May 2009.

A unit of Elsevier Health and Microsoft have joined forces to offer a new Nursing product in the Philipines (PressRelease);

Elsevier, Redfox Technologies and Microsoft today announced the launch of the iCitizen Nursing Skills Netbook, an integrated and affordable e-learning netbook for nurses and nursing students in The Philippines. As part of this landmark partnership, the Redfox Netbook is being powered by the revolutionary Windows 7 operating system and enhanced with the Microsoft Office 2010 productivity suite. This world renowned software within the netbook is further complemented with a selection of the Mosby's Nursing skills software from Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. "With more and more hospitals expected to adopt information technology to provide better quality healthcare at the point of care, nurses will increasingly need to keep up with the latest technological changes and innovation in the workplace," explained Pascal van den Nieuwendijk, Director Public and Private Partnerships for Microsoft in Asia. In addition to juggling their workloads, nurses are faced with the challenge of constantly updating their skills, not only to keep abreast of the rapidly evolving standards of local health ministries but, more importantly, to provide a higher quality of healthcare to patients. This is where the iCitizen Nursing Skills Netbook comes in, as both practicing nurses and nursing students can easily access up-to-date knowledge in critical care skills and patient care procedures. "The iCitizen Nursing Skills Netbook demonstrates the seamless integration of a netbook, software and specialized content which underpins Microsoft's ability to drive innovative solutions in collaboration with our valued partners in one of the Philippines' key sectors," Van den Nieuwendijk added. "This project will support the overall government's drive to provide world class healthcare providers and remain one of the world's leading countries in this growing segment."

From IHEd an article about archiving the web (IHEd):

Many libraries are beginning to use the Internet Archive, and its popular WayBack Machine, to develop scholar-friendly archives of websites. The organization currently hosts collections of archived websites for more than 60 different colleges and universities.

The idea is essentially to preserve websites the way libraries have long preserved newspapers via microform. As the Internet has increasingly become society’s medium of record, it has become common for the authors of scholarly papers to cite Web content that has no corresponding print documents. (Several academic style guides recently added guidelines for citing Twitter and Facebook content.)

“In many ways this is just a continuation of what libraries have always done,” says Robert Wolven, an associate university librarian for bibliographic services and collection development at Columbia University.

From the Twitter: Judith Regan Settles Lawsuit That Threatened to Implicate Ailes NYMag UK Vice Chancellor calls for universities to publish their own journals. UniversityDiary Alibris Announce Rental Program for Book Sellers PND And in sports: BBC

Alibris Announce Rental Program for Book Sellers

As a bookseller on Alibris I just received this in the mail:

Come July, Alibris will unveil its new Book Rental Program to buyers on Alibris.com. Get in on the growing book rental market and boost your revenues by upgrading your seller program from Basic to Gold and apply now! This exclusive Gold program is free and easy! And it opens up a whole new market to Gold sellers, just in time to jump on the back-to-school rental rush.

Upgrade to Gold and take flight with the rental market Students flock to rent textbooks each semester. Only as a Gold seller can you apply to the Alibris Book Rental Program. This opportunity is not available to sellers on any other marketplace. Make your inventory available to a fresh new batch of customers Get your Gold seller account to experience the benefits of the Alibris Book Rental Program on the Seller Hub. Not only do you gain access to crucial sales tools like agile pricing and exclusive sales data for as little as $19.95 a month, you can rush your rental application to Client Services and nab a piece of the exploding rentals market for free. Please visit the Policies and Procedures page to read the participation agreement for a full explanation of how the program works. If you still have questions, Client Services is a click away. How do rentals enrich Gold sellers? Let us count the ways: > You can't argue with 'free'. • No additional fees apply to reach this growing market • Free return shipping is paid by Alibris • Alibris processes transactions as usual > Reap the benefits of being an exceptional seller. • Our rental option is offered exclusively to Gold sellers (US only) with at least a 4-star rating. > Leap the competition. • Only through Alibris can sellers like you also rent > Keep it simple. • Takes just 60 seconds to apply > It's always up to you. Participation is completely optional, but Client Services is available to support you all the way Don´t let the rentals market leave you behind. The Alibris Book Rental Program is the only marketplace where sellers can also rent and it´s exclusively for Gold sellers. It´s never been easier for Gold sellers to take advantage of this booming market. Read more about it, or upgrade to Gold so you can get your slice of the pie now! Thank you for your partnership! Happy Selling, Heather Burns Client Services

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 18): Higher Ed, Author Promotion, Harper Lee, Libraries + Others.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Is there a Higher Education Bubble? The writer takes issue with this suggestion (Chronicle)

College degrees have value in the sense that they provide important signals to employers and in many industries serve as a passkey without which access to labor markets is closed. But they have no inherent worth. They are secondhand testimony of something valuable–the knowledge and skills associated with a unique person. You can’t transfer or sell your property rights in a degree to somebody else. There’s no open market where degrees are bought and sold, no cable TV show called “Degree flippers,” no retirees planning to live off the accumulated equity in their degrees, no reverse degree mortgages or associated lines of credit, no shoeshine boys offering doom-portending tips about which degrees are likely to spike in value next week on the degree exchange. ... One could argue that the values of both real estate and higher education are dangerously subject to collective delusion. Research suggesting that many college students don’t learn much of anything in college lends some credence to this idea. But it’s a lot easier for hot air to flow in and out of a market where assets can be freely bought and sold. In the late 1990s, stock market investors collectively decided that Internet companies with no actual plan to turn a profit were nonetheless worth billions of dollars. A year later they changed their minds and the stocks were worthless. In the 2000s, cookie-cutter homes in the Las Vegas suburbs doubled and then un-doubled in value. It was imaginary money; the homes themselves didn’t change.

In the NYT Sunday book review an essay on how authors build brand and suggests correctly that it not a recent phenomena. (NYT):

But the tradition of self-promotion predates the camera by millenniums. In 440 B.C. or so, a first-time Greek author named Herodotus paid for his own book tour around the Aegean. His big break came during the Olympic Games, when he stood up in the temple of Zeus and declaimed his “Histories” to the wealthy, influential crowd. In the 12th century, the clergyman Gerald of Wales organized his own book party in Oxford, hoping to appeal to college audiences. According to “The Oxford Book of Oxford,” edited by Jan Morris, he invited scholars to his lodgings, where he plied them with good food and ale for three days, along with long recitations of his golden prose. But they got off easy compared with those invited to the “Funeral Supper” of the 18th-century French bon vivant Grimod de la Reynière, held to promote his opus “Reflections on Pleasure.” The guests’ curiosity turned to horror when they found themselves locked in a candlelit hall with a catafalque for a dining table, and were served an endless meal by black-robed waiters while Grimod insulted them as an audience watched from the balcony. When the diners were finally released at 7 a.m., they spread word that Grimod was mad — and his book quickly went through three ­printings.

In The Telegraph Philip Hensher takes a look at Harper Less and the trouble with being a literary heavyweight (Telegraph):

The novelist of social texture, of the quiet relationships between people, is perhaps one peculiarly vulnerable to the impact of fame. We have plenty of witnesses to Jane Austen’s personal modesty, the way in which she would hide her writing at anyone’s approach. A novelist who had become a celebrity would find it almost impossible to pursue their task of listening, of modest disappearance into the background, of observation. Some writers manage to tough it out; others find the weight of expectation impossible to manage.

The cynic would say that Harper Lee, with a novel which still sells millions every year, over half a century after its pt ublication, hardly needed to go on writing anyway. Would she have wanted her career to work out like this? But writing is not like hedge-fund trading. The author who voluntarily retires from writing, after having made a pile, is a rare creature; it is the strangest of facts about Shakespeare that he stopped writing, apparently of his free will, at the height of his artistic powers after The Tempest, and retired to Stratford.

The secret life of (UK) libraries in the Observer:

Attempts to do so often end up in trouble. "The council once asked us for an assessment of outcomes, not output," says Ian Stringer. "Output was how many books we'd stamped out, and outcome was something that had actually resulted from someone borrowing a book. So say someone took out a book on mending cars and then drove the car back, that's an outcome; or made a batch of scones from a recipe book they had borrowed. It lasted until one of the librarians told the council they'd had someone in borrowing a book on suicide, but that they'd never brought it back. The council stopped asking after that. "The great untold truth of libraries is that people need them not because they're about study and solitude, but because they're about connection. Some sense of their emotional value is given by the writer Mavis Cheek, who ran workshops within both Holloway and Erlestoke prisons. At Erlestoke she had groups of eight men who so enjoyed the freedom and contact of the writing groups they ended up breaking into the prison library when they found it shut one day. Which authors did they like best? "Graham Greene," says Cheek. "All that adventure and penance. His stuff moves fast, it's spare and it's direct."

Happy thoughts on technology in the Guardian where John Naughton suggests that the unchecked rise of malware could culminate in armageddon that would change forever the way we use the internet (Guardian):

Spamming works because it can be very profitable. It costs very little more to send 10m emails than it does to send 100. If you're selling a packet of Viagra for $20 and you have a response rate of 0.1%, you'll make $20 from 1,000 emails. But if you send out 10m and have the same response rate you'll be earning $200,000 a day. This is the kind of serious money that makes organised criminal gangs sit up. The idea of covertly suborning networked PCs was a critical breakthrough for malware because it enabled malefactors to set up "botnets" – networks of compromised machines that could be remotely controlled. Nobody knows how many of these botnets exist, but there are probably thousands of them worldwide and some are very large. A list of the 10 largest in the US in 2009, for example, estimated that they ranged in size from 210,000 to 3.6m compromised machines. In addition to spamming, botnets can be used for a wide variety of purposes. They can, for example, launch "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attacks on e-commerce or other web sites. Each machine in the botnet bombards the targeted site with simultaneous requests, repeated incessantly, to the point where the site's servers buckle under the load or the site becomes unusable by legitimate customers. More sinisterly, botnets can be used for blackmail, effectively extracting protection money from retail sites to ward off the threat of a DDOS attack. Nobody talks about this in public, but it goes on.

A profile of Ian Hislop in the Independent:

The new editor was young in years but not in his ways as he defined his role as to "criticise vice, folly and humbug". Now, having edited Private Eye for 25 years, the young fogey is not about to go shopping for training shoes. "There is a Ross and Brand culture of not growing up to be a man, of remaining a lad into your fifties," he complained to the Daily Telegraph in 2008. "That would have been alien to our grandfathers' generation. They wanted to join the world. They weren't afraid of being judgemental. That's what I'd like to encourage in my son." The cavalier Piers Morgan couldn't understand such puritanism and sent reporters and photographers to dig dirt in the Kent village of Sissinghurst, where Hislop lives with his wife Victoria, a successful author, and their two children. One of Morgan's team even pleaded with the local vicar for scandal on one of his church regulars. Morgan, who had promised readers of the Daily Mirror a "Hislop Dossier" but produced nothing, later remarked that "barely a day goes by now when I'm not racked with guilt about how I treated this Mother Teresa of journalism". Despite the sarcasm, Hislop's integrity was untarnished.

Looking at long form journalism: It ain't dead yet (Independent):

The industry is already aware of an enthusiasm for long-form journalism. Former New York Times magazine editor Gerry Marzorati recently observed that the longest pieces in the magazine were almost always the most read. What is driving this development, according to Longreads founder Mark Armstrong, are apps such as Instapaper, which allow us to save stories for reading at our leisure on phones, tablets and e-readers. "In my opinion," he says, "it's this time shift that's going to make long-form journalism viable." Armstrong's own interest stemmed from a question he posted on Twitter asking for things to read during his 40-minute commute. "People caught on very quickly," he says, "and the whole thing snowballed." A Longreads event in New York co-promoted with Rolling Stone magazine last week was hugely oversubscribed, and Mr Armstrong earnestly believes a golden age is dawning for storytelling on the web. There's an irony in the 140-character medium having spawned a resurgent interest in weighty pieces that are allowed to reach their "natural length", as Amazon puts it. But the obvious question hovering over the declining fortunes of print media is where the money will come from to pay for these pieces, which take time to produce.

No room for books at the University of Denver (Inside Higher Ed).

Once the renovations are complete, the university will bring back some books and leave others at the storage facility. The original plans -- which did not cause alarm -- called for 80 percent of the materials to return to the renovated library, leaving behind seldom-accessed journals and those with digital replacements, government documents, and little-used books. But the university announced to faculty members last week that the renovated library would now only hold 20 percent of its current collection, much to the surprise of professors. In an e-mail, Allen said the books that will return to the library after renovation "will comprise a teaching collection carefully built with the input of faculty, especially those in the social sciences and humanities who depend in both teaching and research on monographs as the key form of scholarly communication." She said the rest of the collections would remain in the Hampden Center and be deliverable within two or three hours of a request.

Should teaching be outsourced (IHed):

"When you outsource classes like this, you lose a little control over the content," said Mark Paxton, a professor in the journalism department who opposes any broader outsourcing of courses without faculty consent. "If this happens on a larger scale, then what makes us any different than the University of Phoenix? What makes us unique is our faculty teaching courses." But other faculty members in the journalism department said the characterization of the program as “outsourcing” is incorrect. Andrew Cline, a professor in the department of media, journalism and film who said he will observe Missouri State’s course closely, stressed that the class was a partnership rather than “outsourcing,” since Poynter relied on the syllabus for Missouri State’s course and a Missouri State faculty member will meet with students in-person throughout the course in addition to contact they have with instructors at Poynter. He also stressed that the program was only a one-semester experiment.

From the twitter: Data Privacy, Put to the Test in a Supreme Court Case - NYTimes Obama ROASTS Donald Trump At Correspondents' Dinner CSPAN Pearson bets on growth in US education - Telegraph Cengage Learning MindApps™ Partner Program Encourages App & Services. PRNewswire Why The Nook Upgrade Is A Big Deal For The E-Reader Market PaidContent How rock music is saving books Reuters

BISG Reports Accelerating Migration to eContent

From their recently released report on Consumer Attitudes to eBooks:

“This is a market in fast motion and identifying trends early is the key to gaining a competitive edge,” said Scott Lubeck, BISG's Executive Director. “This on-going BISG baseline study of consumer behavior toward e-books and e-book reading devices is essential to understanding both the velocity of change and its significance to every stakeholder in the book industry.”

Some of the specific results show:

• Fiction continues to dominate downloads, with literary fiction, science fiction, and romance each comprising over 20% of all format purchases.
• The most influential factors leading to an e-book purchase are free samples and low prices.
• “Power Buyers” (respondents who indicated that they acquired e-books at least weekly) have moved away from computers to dedicated e-readers and tablets much faster than the overall pool of respondents.

Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading also explores the use of e-book reading devices. Current results indicate the emergence of a bifurcated market, with preference for e-reading devices such as Kindle and NOOK as devices of choice for most fiction readers, while the iPad and other tablets are preferred by those engaging in more interactive types of reading that includes charts, graphs and multimedia.

The report is available from BISG here.

Bangkok: Wat Benchamabophit 1971

Bangkok: Wat Benchamabophit 1971

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.
Little has changed here from this view taken in 1971 and today. As with many of these images from our family history, it is interesting that I traveled years later to the same places but never recalled the first visits. This is the Interior courtyard at Wat Benchamabophit, also known as the marble temple.

Flickr set.