Mean Cold Lady

I found this letter to the editor in which a woman with a cane claims she got to the library five minutes early on a cold day and the library wouldn't open despite the people waiting outside. I was sympathetic; poor woman, handicapped, c'mon, just five minutes, people! Then I started reading the comments.

It turns out this woman knows exactly when the library opens and could have waited in her car until the proper time; it seems people often want to get there first so they can get to the computers. The comments from other library goers indicate this woman is unpleasant to deal with and prone to complaints. My sympathy waned.

Then, of course, there were the comments about how handicapped spaces should be moved further away from the doors because 'many peoples' only handicap is being fat and lazy'. Ouch.

I believe libraries should be accessible to people with disabilities. I also believe having a disability doesn't mean a person can use it as an excuse to be a jerk.

Taking Books Personally

This NYTimes article by Mokoto Rich discusses how some readers like to keep books to themselves; they don't enjoy discussing them or feel a sort of ownership of the ones they love to the point where they're disappointed if others like them ('that's mine!'). Interesting, I think.

Personally, I'd rather talk about a book. Preferably with someone I know and like, but I love hearing other people's impressions.

With Enough Libraries, All Content is Free

From Jessamyn West:

“With enough libraries, all content is free.” That is to say… if the world was one big library and we all had interlibrary loan at that library, we could lend anything to anyone. The funding structures of libraries currently mean that in many cases we’re duplicating [and paying for] content that we could be sharing. This is at the heart of a lot of the copyright battles of today and, to my mind, what’s really behind the EBSCO/Gale/vendors. Time Magazine is losing money and not having a good plan for keeping their income level up, decides to offer exclusive contracts to vendors and allows them to bid. EBSCO wins, Gale loses. Any library not using EBSCO loses. Patrons lose and don’t even know they’ve lost.

Black vs. White Covers

Author Justine Balestier writes about the ARC* cover of her book, 'Liar', misrepresenting her protagonist. Justine's main character is black, but the US cover showed a white girl**.

This post is about a lot of things: how much say authors get regarding the covers of their books (not much), how common a problem 'white-washing' book covers is, how unwelcoming it is for young black readers to walk into a YA section and only find white faces on covers.



* ARC stands for 'Advance Reader Copy'.
** There is a new cover now.

The Amazon/Macmillan Thing

I wanted a good place to read up on the kerfuffle about Amazon unlisting books from Macmillan and I think I found one: All The Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed the Weekend from John Scalzi's blog.

Five Lessons Learned From an E-Book Experiment

Shane Richmond decided to read only e-books from October 2009 to January 2010.

Five lessons he learned:

1. The weight is a nice advantage
2. Page turning is less irritating than you’d think
3. Being able to search a book is very useful
4. Text formatting can be annoyingly sloppy
5. Availability of titles is the biggest problem

Read the article for explanations of these five points. I was sort of surprised by number two, but it made sense; you get used to pressing the button to turn a page before you finish reading the last words on the page.

Book Reading as Racial Harassment

In 2007 a student working his way through college was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book in public. Some of his co-workers had been offended by the book’s cover, which included pictures of men in white robes and peaked hoods along with the tome’s title, Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The student desperately explained that it was an ordinary history book, not a racist tract, and that it in fact celebrated the defeat of the Klan in a 1924 street fight. Nonetheless, the school, without even bothering to hold a hearing, found the student guilty of “openly reading [a] book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject.”

An article about political correstness on campuses and how it's changed. It quickly becomes centered on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), but fair enough.