Last spring I checked out from the university's library the esteemed Enlightenment historian and (Harvard University) librarian
Robert Darnton's
The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009) to gauge his arguments about the present and future state of the world of books and literature for my own edification and to preview it for a class. Darnton, one of the most important figures in his fields, has a gift for subtle argumentation and narration, and I ended up skimming the book, which replicated in longer and more polished form
a number of the essays he has been publishing along these same lines in the
New York Review of Books, for the last several years. Many concern the role of the computer behemoth
Google, and its relationship to the publishing and library worlds, and he has also made a passionate case in the pages of the
NYR for a
national (which would also be an international) digital library, drawing from the resources of private libraries like the one he heads, public ones like the unmatched
Library of Congress, and the trove of 7 million and counting books that Google has already scanned in, with the cooperation of institutions like Harvard and the
New York Public Library, but also against the wishes of some publishers and authors, who successfully prosecuted a lawsuit to gain compensation from Google for copyright infringement.
In the current issue of the
NYR, in "
The Library: Three Jeremiads," Darnton returns to the arguments he has made before, but this time with a trio of "jeremiads," as he calls them, concerning three pressing economic and resource-related issues that American research libraries face which also negatively affect scholarly publishing; universities and college library collections, along with those of public libraries; library patrons, which is to say, readers; and, to a degree not yet fully understood, the humanities, intellectual life, and knowledge production themselves. The first two of Darnton's jeremiad's focus on the exorbitant cost and terms, verging on extortion, of subscriptions to scholarly journals, especially in the sciences, relative to other kinds of texts, which has forced libraries to cut their purchase of scholarly monographs, thus harming libraries' budgets and university presses' bottom lines. Over the longer haul, this economic problem, juxtaposed with constrained university and research library budgets, threatens the sustainability of the academic research enterprise as a whole. To give a sense of the astronomical prices charged by some publishers, information about which many professors are completely unaware and which have far exceeded the cost of inflation, the chemistry journal
Tetrahedron costs $39,082 per year, while
The Journal of Comparative Neurology costs $27,465 per year, and both, like many journals from a given publisher, must be purchased in bundles, with high kill fees to end subscriptions for specific journals and so forth. Humanities and social science journals total less per year but are still high and part of this system, with the result that the average cost in 2009 of a US journal title was $2,031 and $4,753 for a non-US title, and that year the journal publishing giant
Elsevier made $1.1 billion in profits. Moreover, there is little transparency in this system, according to Darnton, giving the journal publishers an advantage over libraries, which, for the sake of the scholars they serve, cannot opt out.
Scholars and librarians have attempted to respond, with mixed reuslts. In the case of the
Mellon Foundation-funded
Gutenberg-e program, which sought to publish digital monographs of award-winning PhD dissertations in scholarly areas under greatest threat, the potential was great but it did not work out as planned, and the project is now defunct; in the case of digital, open-access scientific journals, there has been some success after scientists at
University of California-Berkeley and
Stanford circulated a petition in 2001 calling for colleagues to patronize only these journals. The publisher
BioMed Central, according to Darnton, has shown since 1999 that this model can work. But the larger question of the effects on libraries and particularly on the humanities and social sciences remains. Darnton had been holding out hope for the
Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE), founded this year, would lead universities towards the open-access model in terms of publishing, and also subsidize authors who could not get grants or subvention money from their home institutions, with the texts ultimately available in both digital and print form via the
Espresso Book Machine, about which I've written on here. But, and this is the core of his third jeremiad, there loometh Google.
A 368-page "settlement" between Google and the authors and publishers who sued the company (the publisher of my first book was party to this agreement, as
Annotations, I gather, was scanned without permission) divided up the profits produced by Google Book Search in a 1/3 fashion: Google would 37 percent and the authors and publishers would get 2/3rds. Fine. But, as a result of this, Google has proposed that
libraries, some of which (like Harvard's) provided books for scanning
free of charge, now pay a subscription fee to access Google's vast digital storehouse, which is now the largest digital library (and as recent announcements have shown, potentially the largest digital book retailer). Darnton's fear, quite reasonable given the history of such things, is that "cocaine pricing" will occur, which is to say, Google will start out with low subscription fees and then jack them up to unspeakable--unaffordable rates--once it has libraries and everyone else in its clutches.
Of course most people are completely unaware of all of this, both in terms of what's going on now and what could occur in the future. As he has in the past, Darnton is proposing a counterweight to Google, which is a National Digital Library, which would draw primarily upon the extraordinary collection of books, particularly those no longer under copyright or still in copyright but out of print, whose authors cannot be located, and so forth, belonging to the Library of Congress, but also from other vast library systems, like Harvard's. Darnton points out that in December 2009, French President
Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he would set aside €750 million (roughly $900 million dollars, correct?) to digitize France's "cultural 'patrimony,'" and notes that the national libraries of the
Netherlands, Japan, Australia, Norway, and
Finland are digitizing their complete collections, and that European nations in collective fashion will have digitized over 10 million texts, from libraries, archives, museums, and audiovisual stocks, by the end of 2010. Darnton believes that Google has shown that for less than the cost Sarkozy appropriated, it is possible to digitize the Library of Congress's complete holdings, a good deal of which are already converted, but that Google itself might be persuaded to share--for free, with a great deal of praise--the 2 million or so materials in the public domain it digitized. Even if Google does not participate, Darnton believes private foundations might be able to underwrite this project, especially if its costs were spread out over time, but he does not believe that a Digital Library of America would solve or resolve the interrelated and waxing crises research libraries, the scholarly profession, and journal publication face. Rather, this vast digital storehouse, freely available to all, might change the "ecology" (back?) toward the idea of the public good, or public common, but even if it didn't do so completely, it would be an important start.
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Speaking of books and reading, I just noticed the other day that
Kamau Brathwaite has published a new book of poems,
Elegguas (Wesleyan University Press/UPNE, 2010). Wesleyan's site says of the book
Elegguas—a play on “elegy” and “Eleggua,” the Yoruba deity of the threshold, doorway, and crossroad—is a collection of poems for the departed. Modernist and post-modernist in inspiration, Elegguas draws together traditions of speaking with the dead, from Rilke’s Duino Elegies to the Jamaican kumina practice of bringing down spirits of the dead to briefly inhabit the bodies of the faithful, so that the ancestors may provide spiritual assistance and advice to those here on earth. The book is also profoundly political, including elegies for assassinated revolutionaries like in the masterful “Poem for Walter Rodney.”
Throughout his poetry, Brathwaite foregrounds “nation-language,” that difference in syntax, in rhythm, and timbre that is most closely allied to the African experience in the Caribbean, using the computer to explore the graphic rendition of nuances of language. Brathwaite experiments using his own Sycorax fonts, as well as deliberate misspellings (“calibanisms”) and deviations in punctuation. But this is never simple surface aesthetic, rather an expression of the turbulence (in history, in dream) depicted in the poems. This collection is a stunning follow-up to Brathwaite’s Born to Slow Horses (Wesleyan, 2005), winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize.
Kamau is, as it also notes, one of the major poets of the 2nd half of the 20th century, and one of the leading lights in Caribbean, African Diasporic and Anglophone poetry, and I would add without hesitation one of the most important experimental and
political poets alive today. This fall has brought a marvelous harvest of new books by marvelous poets, and this appears as if it surely is among this bounty.
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Speaking of more books and reading, the
National Book Foundation is sponsoring an
Innovations in Reading Prize. For whom and what is this?
For individuals, institutions, and collaborative programs using innovative approaches to successfully inspire a lifelong love of reading
POSTMARK DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 22, 2011
The complete application process is available in the Application Form. -
PDF Application form to be filled out by hand and faxed or mailed to the Foundation. Download > -
PDF Application form to be filled out on your computer using Adobe Acrobat and emailed to the Foundation. Download >
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 Each year, the National Book Foundation awards a number of prizes of up to $2,500 each to individuals and institutions--or partnerships between the two--that have developed innovative means of creating and sustaining a lifelong love of reading. In addition to promoting the best of American literature through the National Book Awards, the Foundation also seeks to expand the audience for literature in America. Through the Innovations in Reading Prizes, those individuals and institutions that use particularly innovative methods to generate excitement and a passionate engagement with books and literature will be rewarded for their creativity and leadership.
Questions? Contact the Foundation at 212.685.0261. |
Sponsored by a generous grant from
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What you are about to read is one of the most awesome letters I have ever come across. And really, I wouldn't have come across this at all if it hadn't been for something called The Last Angry Fan. It appears to be sports related and, if I'm judging on this item alone, completely awesome. It seems that back in 1974 (why it took this long for something this great to be known to the public is beyond me) there was a disgruntled Cleveland Browns fan who was also a uptight asswad. He seems very concerned about spectator safety due to the reckless abandon with which other rowdy fans are endangering innocent bystanders. By throwing paper airplanes. Read on. I swear. (If it's not big enough, just double click the image and that should enlarge it. If it doesn't click on the link above and read it there.)
On a related but different note, a while back a friend in New Zealand alerted me and other sports fans about the Australian Casula Powerhouse's Body Pacifica 2010 calendar, which coincided with a June 25-August 2010 (winter in Australia) exhibit, as well as a 3-day weekend festival in June, celebrating "island culture." I can't speak to the exhibit itself or how well or poorly it was pulled off, whether it trafficked in exoticism and so forth, but my friend sent the link to the Body Pacifica calendar, which features Pacific Islander ruggers, including Frank Puletua, shown above, in what I thought was a surprising light, not posed in rugby gear, but as they themselves wanted to be depicted. A few shots of the calendar below (it's huge), and worth picking up!
I should explain something about the clip I've included below. See, I'm trying really hard not to hate the kid in the video. And I'm guessing that your first inclination will be to hate the kid in the video. After all, that was my first inclination, so I can't imagine why yours would be any different. But the kid is only three. Three years old. And really, I completely blame the parents for how this kid has turned out so far. I know, I know. It seems judgmental. It probably is in its own way. But there's really nothing wrong with a little judgment in certain situations. This is one of those situations. 
the proud parents who are responsible for raising this child to get to this point are watching and videoing their precious little snowflake. The child was, well, surprised at one gift that he opened. He apparently had some preconceived notions about what Christmas is/was all about (and those notions don't include books). Those notions being that it's all about him and what he gets and he had better like it otherwise, you're going to hear about it. And the parents are going to just laugh and laugh and laugh as to make sure that this sort of behavior is encouraged in the future. Let's take a look, shall we? 
the proud parents who are responsible for raising this child to get to this point are watching and videoing their precious little snowflake. The child was, well, surprised at one gift that he opened. He apparently had some preconceived notions about what Christmas is/was all about (and those notions don't include books). Those notions being that it's all about him and what he gets and he had better like it otherwise, you're going to hear about it. And the parents are going to just laugh and laugh and laugh as to make sure that this sort of behavior is encouraged in the future. Let's take a look, shall we? 
See what I mean? I really want to dislike the kid, but I have a hard time because he's only three, for cryin' out loud. I have absolutely no problem what so ever disliking the parents, however. Laugh it up a little bit more there, Mom. Make sure your kid knows how cute you find it for him to be ungrateful. And you too, Dad. Make sure your kid sees you laughing over there so that he can throw a fit every time he doesn't like something. 
If he is old enough to understand that he is going to get presents on Christmas, then he is old enough to have the concept of gratitude instilled within him. He is at least old enough for a little talk about how much Santa likes books and how much Santa wants kids to like books and that those books from Santa are very special. Something. I don't think he needs a full blown lecture. He's three and it's Christmas morning. But I do think that he doesn't need an audience of laughing parents. He knew that they thought it was hilarious and he just went with it. I'm sure that reaction is going to go over real well if he ever has his friends over for a birthday party and one of them, God forbid, gives him a book. I'm sure that his little friend will love being screamed at by the kid telling him that books aren't for birthdays.
If he is old enough to understand that he is going to get presents on Christmas, then he is old enough to have the concept of gratitude instilled within him. He is at least old enough for a little talk about how much Santa likes books and how much Santa wants kids to like books and that those books from Santa are very special. Something. I don't think he needs a full blown lecture. He's three and it's Christmas morning. But I do think that he doesn't need an audience of laughing parents. He knew that they thought it was hilarious and he just went with it. I'm sure that reaction is going to go over real well if he ever has his friends over for a birthday party and one of them, God forbid, gives him a book. I'm sure that his little friend will love being screamed at by the kid telling him that books aren't for birthdays.
