One year ago, when HarperCollins Publishers implemented its 26-loan cap for library ebook lending, the new policy brought down upon the publishing house all the thunder that the library world could conjure — from petitions to boycotts.

But over the past year, as the library market has been further roiled, as other companies, such as Penguin Group, essentially stepped back from the market altogether, HarperCollins has remained not only committed to its model but also to the market. And for this, it is receiving from some librarians, if not praise, at least a sober reappraisal — even from some of those who are holding firm to their boycott.

It actually seems like a more radical turnaround than that suggests — as we noted in a MobyLives post a year ago, librarians accused HarperCollins of treating them like “benign pirates” with the 26-circ limit, and, as we noted in another report, the American Library Association came down on them hard, too.

Now, according to the Library Journal report,

“We have had no problems to date – smooth sailing,” said Robin Nesbitt, the technical services director for [Columbus Metropolitan Library in Ohio].  “I’m not sure we’ve even hit the cap – so for all of the hand wringing out there, we have been just fine,” she said.

The Municipal Library Consortium of St. Louis County (MLC), which consists of nine independent community libraries in Missouri, has now changed its mind about the boycott it approved last year.

“A couple of months ago we started purchasing from them again,” said Tom Cooper, the consortium’s president and the director of the Webster Groves Public Library. “The reality on the ground is that it’s more generous than what we are getting from other publishers,” he said.

Of course, there’s another side to this. Library Journal’s anonymously written ”Annoyed Librarian” column provides it:

The lesson this teaches publishers is that they can do anything they like and librarians will line up like sheep. HarperCollins is probably considering right now whether to lower that lending cap to 20, or 15. After all, what are libraries going to do, boycott them? [Gales of laughter from HarperCollins executives.]

Still, Kelley cites several librarians who disagree … could it be that the Penguin deal, or the fact that Hachette and Simon & Schuster still won’t  sell ebooks to libraries, is making librarians re-think their own position on ebook deals with the big houses?

It would be interesting to hear what other librarians think.

Jack Shafer

Leak overturns once and for all the romantic, popular interpretation of the Watergate saga of one inside source risking it all to save democracy. “Nixon’s downfall was an entirely unanticipated result of Felt’s true and only aim,” Holland writes. Although Holland never disparages the enterprise of Woodward and Bernstein, acknowledging the impact their reports had on Judge John J. Sirica and the senators who formed an investigative committee, neither does he bow to them. “Contrary to the widely held perception that the Washington Post ‘uncovered’ Watergate, the newspaper essentially tracked the progress of the FBI’s investigation, with a time delay ranging from weeks to days, and published elements of the prosecutors’ case well in advance of the trial.” [...] Holland makes the persuasive case that Felt, who died in 2008, used the classic techniques of counterintelligence he learned as an FBI agent to destabilize his main bureaucratic opponent inside the FBI (Acting Director L. Patrick Gray) with his leaks to Woodward (and other journalists). The goal of his leaks was to nudge President Richard Nixon in the direction of appointing him FBI director instead of Gray.

In praising Holland’s book, Shafer also gives a tip of the hat to Melville House author Edward Jay Epstein, who in 1974 both questioned the importance of Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting and correctly identified their source as Felt. Leak, Shafer writes:

[V]indicates journalist Edward Jay Epstein, one of the earliest critics of Woodsteinmania. In a Commentary piece published in July 1974, about a month after the Woodstein book came out, Epstein eviscerates what he calls the “sustaining myth of journalism.” Naïve readers believe that intrepid reporters expose government scandals by doggedly working their confidential sources. Of course such scoops do occur, but the more conventional route to a prize-winning series is well-placed leaks from well-oiled government investigations, which Holland maintains was the case with Watergate.

Scholastic hopes there are some surprises among the choices. The rankings are aimed at “generating controversy and conversation,” Nick Friedman, the magazine’s editor in chief, told USA Today. The list includes a variety of genres for different ages — from infants to middle schoolers, and attempts to be culturally diverse.

The toughest choice though was which book got the number one spot. It was a dead heat between E.B. White‘s Charlotte’s Web and Goodnight Moon, the 1947 picture book by Margaret Wise Brown.

Friedman and four other editors at the magazine made the final decision…and the winner is…. Charlotte’s Web.

Madeleine L’Engle‘s A Wrinkle in Time came in third, and A Snowy Day, Ezra Jack Keats‘ 1962 portrayal of an African-American child, came in fourth.

Scholastic, which is also a book publisher as well as a magazine publisher, had 14 titles on the list, including J.K. Rowling‘s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, in the No. 6 slot. Though Friedman assured USA Today “the judges looked at the books, not their publishers.”

The list is a useful collection of recommended books for kids of all ages. And a curiosity for adults who grew up reading voraciously. (Have you read most of these titles?)

As a bonus, Scholastic named  ”superlative award” winners, including (overall rankings in the top 100 in parentheses):

• Best Read-Aloud: Mo Willems’ Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! (28)

• Most Beautifully Illustrated: Jerry Pinkney‘s The Lion and the Mouse (61)

• Most Relatable Character: Jeff Kinney‘s Diary of a Wimpy Kid (38)

• Most Side-Splitting Hilarious: Dav Pilkey‘s The Adventures of Captain Underpants (97)

My #1 vote is for A Wrinkle in Time. What other children’s book taught the reader an alternate definition of the word “sport”?

Our podcast will soon be available for streaming and download to listeners anywhere in the world via our website. In addition, we’ll be creating partnerships with radio stations in Latin America and the U.S., in order to reach the broadest possible Spanish-speaking audience. Our goal is to create a community of storytellers and listeners from around Latin America and the U.S., using all available technology to create and share our work.

Nothing of this type currently exists for Spanish-language listeners, so as it (we hope) grows and prospers, it’ll be an invaluable archive, both of individual stories and of the great, underrepresented variety in Latin American cultures and Spanish-speaking communities in the US. There’s an audio sampler available, and if you like that and want to send a donation to help support production costs, you can do so here. And here’s Alarcón himself making an appeal:

Welcome to Radio Ambulante from Radio Ambulante on Vimeo.

Marylyn Monroe reads James Joyce's Ulysses

We read the following exchange in a tech column by Steve Alexander in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Are Education Publishers Really Innovating?

Whatever happened to digital audio books?

Ian Rankin: Publishers need authors, but authors really need publishers

Estate of Philip K. Dick drops lawsuit against moviemakers

B&N slashes Nook tablet prices

Stephen Colbert turns down Melville House for kids’ book, goes with huge cold-hearted conglomerate

LA Times Book Prize finalists announced

Bobby Brown shopping tell-all about Whitney Houston?

Ex-senator Feingold writes a book about what it’s like to be the only elected official to vote against the Patriot Act and other scary stuff 

Hugo the book vs Hugo the movie

According to the report by Salamander Davoudi (subscription required) ”Over the past month more than 6,000 academics across the globe have joined a boycott against Elsevier publications in what has been dubbed “an international academic spring” by Dennis Johnson, the co-founder of US publishing house Melville House.” The “hit back,” says Davoudi, has come from the head of Elsevier’s conglomerate ownership:

Erik Engstrom, chief executive of Reed Elsevier, said the growing academic backlash against the group’s core scientific publishing division was based on “misstatements” and “misunderstandings”, as he unveiled full-year results slightly ahead of expectations.

Get it? The company — Reed Elsevier also owns the company that puts on the London Book Fair and Book Expo America — made a lot of money last year, and has released those stats along with their defense as if making money meant the complaints weren’t worth listening to. Engstrom seemed emphatic: “All [objections] … are based on misstatements or misunderstandings of the fact,” he said, according to the FT report.

But financial analysts seem like they’re not going along with the bluster. According to the FT, “Claudio Aspesi, analyst at Bernstein Research, questioned how ‘a public relations incident of this kind could happen’ and urged investors to ask Reed why the crisis management had been ‘so tentative’. Elsevier contributes almost half of group profits.”

In fact, the results seem to have gotten an even more lukewarm response than that might indicate:

LexisNexis had been targeted by analysts as the most likely business for Reed to sell, amid claims that the division had suffered from under-investment as well as weakness in the US legal publishing market.

Group revenues fell from £6.05bn to £6bn in the year to December 31, while pre-tax profit rose from £768m to £948m. The company cut net debt from £3.5bn to £3.4bn year on year.

Thomas Singlehurst, analyst at Citi, said despite being mildly ahead of expectations the results did not mark “a turning point”. “Moreover, we don’t see any overarching catalyst for a broader re-rating of the group,” he added.

Even Elsevier’s own editors seem to be rebelling. “I regret the fact that Elsevier charge over three times the prices prevailing in my subject area. It makes the journal less accessible and less influential than it would otherwise be,” Tim Leunig, the editor of an Elsevier journal called Explorations in Economic History, tells the FT.

So what’s next? Despite his dismissive attitude Engstrom gives lip service to doing the right thing — “We are taking the petition very seriously and we are engaging with our stakeholders to better understand and address their concerns,” he says — but you just get the feeling his heart isn’t in it and he’s not going to take this as anything but an insult.

Meanwhile, according to the FT, “The academic backlash adds to pressure Reed Elsevier is already under from some analysts calling for a break-up of the Anglo-Dutch publisher.” Engstrom has, according to the FT, stated emphatically that that’s not going to happen.

As the uprising seems to be still growing, that remains to be seen.

The algorithm was based on recurring words/phrases/nonsense left in comments on YouTube comedy videos, like ‘lol’, or variations thereof including ‘LOL!’ ‘loooooool!’ and ‘lololololol!’. The whole project was inspired by the YouTube Music Slam, in which Google  ’used acoustic analysis and machine learning’ to study thousands of YouTube music videos and ‘automatically identify talented musicians’. If the results of the Comedy Slam are anything to go by, this is a neat gimmick but a deeply flawed way of finding talent—which is in line with what we and other publishers have been saying for a long time. Curating a list—be it at a record label, a publishing house, a comedy club—is a tricky business, and algorithms just aren’t up to the job.

Besides which, everyone knows that this is the funniest YouTube video. And it’s about YouTube user comments. Shit just got meta:

Bryan Stevenson, founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative

In honor of Black History Month, Leonard Pitts tells a story to give readers pause in a column for the Orlando Sentinel.

According to Pitts, Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery, Ala.-based organization that provides legal representation for the indigent and incarcerated, sent two books to prisoner Mark Melvin last year. Melvin is in jail for life for a murder he committed when he was 14.  The books were Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, about a doctor’s struggle to bring medical services to Haiti, and Slavery by Another Name, Douglas Blackmon‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of “how the South instituted a form of de-facto slavery by mass arresting black men on nonsense charges and ‘selling’ them to plantations, turpentine farms and other places of back-breaking labor.”

Melvin was allowed to read the first book, but was denied the right to read Slavery by Another Name. Stevenson told Pitts prison officials “felt it was too provocative, they didn’t like the title, they didn’t like the idea that the title conveyed. They didn’t read the book, but they were concerned about it and thought that it would be ‘too dangerous’ to have in the prisons.” 

According to Pitts:

Stevenson filed suit. As the case wends its way through the courts, it speaks with an eloquence to our complicated relationship with African-American history here in this 86th observance of what was once called Negro History Week. America, says Stevenson, struggles with “denialism,” i.e., a refusal to face its grim past of racial crimes and human rights violations.

The issue is not Mark Melvin. Stevenson says the attorney for the state — who declined to comment for this column — has told him the prison is not worried about Melvin; he is not considered a disciplinary problem.

The issue is not security. Since filing the suit, says Stevenson, he has heard from other prisoners who tell him that “years ago, there were a handful of Alabama prisons where the wardens would not let them watch ‘Roots.’”

No, the issue, it seems obvious, is a frightful, embarrassing history — and the suppression thereof.

“Other countries that have tried to recover from severe human rights problems that have lasted for decades,” says Stevenson, “have always recognized that you have to commit yourself to truth and reconciliation: South Africa, Rwanda. In the United States we never did that. We had legal reforms that were imposed on some populations against their will and then we just carried on.”

The key words being “against their will.” Indeed, Stevenson feels it’s “just a matter of time” before the nation begins to minimize “what segregation really was,” like a black version of Holocaust denial.

Pitts goes on to cite former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s 2010 statement claiming that integration in his state was “a very pleasant experience” …

Actually, integration in his state was marked by, among other atrocities, a firebombing, a fatal riot, the assassination of Medgar Evers, and the murders of three voting rights workers.

The only effective weapon against such lies is to learn the truth and tell it, shout it in the face of untruth, equivocation and denial. Bear witness.

 

"This is a photo as I would wish myself to look all the time. Then I would maybe have a chance to come to Hollywood."

Anne Frank is alive and well.

That’s the premise in Shalom Auslander‘s new novel Hope: A Tragedy, where Frank is old, uncouth, and typing away in the attic of a farmhouse. Frank is “alive” in a more figurative fashion in Nathan Englander‘s short-story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, in which the characters from the title story play the “Anne Frank” game, wondering who among them would have had the courage to hide Jews from the Nazis, and face moral and emotional consequences as a result.

As a guest blogger at The Jewish Forward‘s “The Arty Semite,” Leigh Stein, author of The Fallback Plan, describes Frank’s influence in her own childhood, when her greatest artistic ambition was to “be Anne Frank” in a local play:

When I was 12, I auditioned for the title role in a community theater production of the Goodrich and Hackett play. I’m pretty sure I was one of the few, if not the only, Jew(s) to audition (in a town known for its Evangelical Christian college), and I thought I had it in the bag. All they had to do, I thought, was look at my last name and cast me immediately, to lend credibility to their production.

At callbacks, it was between me and one other Anne. I wore a plaid skirt and a pale sage cardigan with tiny rosebuds around the collar. I parted my dark hair on the side. While the other Anne smiled and laughed and generally behaved like she was at a food court in the mall, I delivered my lines with gravitas. I looked at the imaginary sky with longing. I was sarcastic, but never silly. I never let myself forget that Anne was a victim of the Holocaust, and it was my job on stage to honor that fact. More than anything, I felt I deserved to be Anne because I knew her so intimately after reading her diaries.

Shocker: the other Anne got cast. “But you look so much like her,” the director told me on the phone, as a consolation prize. “It was really tough.“