But on closer inspection, that wasn’t the whole story. There was a Twilight book or two in the vicinity, but the books they were hocking were a bit older. In fact, they were classics. Playing on the black and red cover styles of the Twilight books, they had Wuthering Heights with the tagline “Love Never Dies,” and a sticker that lets you know it’s “Bella & Edwards favorite book.” They had Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with the tagline, “The Original Forbidden Love…”

They were attempting to fleece young people into reading classic literature. Kind of a good idea. There’s that hackneyed adage about not judging a book by it’s cover, but that’s exactly what everyone does. People who enjoy Twilight have probably read all the books by now, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to read. Repackaging classics into thicker volumes with larger print and a flashy cover just might get young people to read these fine works of art. Most of the time it’s all about appearances.

How can libraries steal this idea? How can we change the appearance of something to make it more appealing or relevant to users. An example might be your library’s website. There’s good content and useful tools on there, but maybe the way they’re displayed isn’t exciting or makes users turn to something easier.

Perhaps by reformatting the website content, making it prettier and more interactive, users might be more inclined to navigate to your website and stick around for a while.

Are there other ways we can change the appearance of something, either physically or online, to increase usage?

• Can do more than just read e-books – E-book readers need web access. In this world of multitasking and shortened attention spans an e-book reader that can only read e-books fails. The average person only reads four books per year. This makes devices dedicated solely to e-books into toys for gadget geeks or people that read voraciously. A device that only reads e-books is still playing to a small market. Also it would be useful while reading an e-book to look up a fact on Wikipedia or share a quote you just read on Twitter.
• Has multi-touch technology – Instead of having buttons to turn a page simply touch the upper corner of the page, or gesture across the screen like you’re turning a page. If you want to zoom in on an image within a book simply pull your fingers apart around it (similar to the iPhone’s technology). This would certainly enhance the experience of reading an e-book.
• Reads multiple formats – The perfect e-book reader would be able to read any format in which books happen to be, whether it’s in HTML, PDF, a Google Book, e-books from Amazon, e-books from library subscription databases, etc.
• Allows you to write in the margins – Like regular books, the perfect e-book reader would allow you to write in the margins and personalize your copy of the book. The reason we love books is because we form personal connections to them. We write notes to ourself and try to interact and have a conversation with the book. The perfect e-book reader would allow you to highlight passages and attach notes to them. It would also allow you to share these notes if you wanted. Then we really could start having conversations with our books.
• Is readable for long periods of time – It would have to use something like e-ink which more closely mimics a paper reading experience than a backlit LCD display and causes less eyestrain. The device would also have a long battery life. At least enough to make it through an entire book.

Some of these features are possible and in use, but there is still some growing that needs to take place in both technology for a device and e-book standards, practices and legal issues. To create the future, though, we first have to dream it. What else is needed for a perfect e-book reader?

photo from pcorreia on flickr

When you buy a physical book you own it. You can read it, dog ear the pages, and even resell it. It’s called the doctrine of first sale. This is not the case when you buy books on the Amazon Kindle. Yesterday they deleted copies of Orwell’s works 1984 and Animal Farm from customers who purchased them on a Kindle, while crediting a refund to their accounts. You can read about it in the Wall Street Journal.

This raises some serious questions about ownership, privacy, and the future of books and reading. People, especially librarians, have been questioning ebooks and their implications since they have come out. Something electronic is much easier to quickly change.  Much like in the deleted Orwell book 1984:

“Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”  Book 1 Chapter 3 (Also on diveintomark.org)

Ebooks, as evidenced yesterday, are also much easier to be destroyed. It reminds me of another dystopia: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. In that novel the firemen had to come into your house, remove the books and burn them (or just burn the house down). Now books can simply be deleted via wireless internet. Poof. It’s gone. Like you never owned it.

Amazon has now said publicly that they will not do this again. But this makes me question the Kindle and the impermanence of ebooks. Big fail on Amazon’s part.

The panel was composed of Steve Benen a political pundit blogger from the Washington Monthly, Cathy Resmer online editor of Seven Days Newspaper, and Ann DeMarle, head of the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College.  It was moderated by Jeff Rutenbeck Dean for the Division of Communication and Creative Media at Champlain College.

One thing that got people going in the audience was when Jeff said that books were an inefficient means of communication. Publishing online is much quicker and people can interact and have a conversation with the information, whereas books take years to publish and you cannot interact with a book.  The audience got defensive and sentimental about books, expressing that they did not want them to go away.  Someone actually stated how books were one of the most perfectly evolved forms of media.  Jeff also passed around a Kindle for people to gawk at.  The guy next to me was ogling it for about five minutes.

Photo by davidking

What was especially interesting was the discussion that ensued after Jeff brought up the idea that textbooks are “so superficial.”  He said that for his classes, “you could get 90 percent of the information in the textbooks from Wikipedia.”  At this a student commented that he did not go to textbooks first.  He went to Google or YouTube or blogs or other online sources.  Barbara Shatara, a librarian at the Fletcher Free Library asked him the same question I was thinking: how do you evaluate this information for credibility?  His answer was that he evaluated by cross referencing.  If he found info on one blog he would look and see if it was confirmed in other places.  If there were more people agreeing with something than disagreeing then he would believe it.

This gives a good insight into how information is being evaluated in this era.  Instead of looking for some authority people look to the masses.  “Do a lot of people believe this?  Ok, good then I will too.”  A lot of people believe that evolution is a falsehood and that global warming is a fabrication.   A great danger with this is when looking to corroborate or disprove a piece of information on the web, it very much depends on how you are searching.  If you search with keywords only  related to creationism, or find a creationist website and start following their links, the information your find is going to be colored in a very specific way.  With a mindset such as this, the tyranny of the majority can then determine what is true and not true, and that is very dangerous.

There were a number of debates back and forth and everyone really got into the session.  I was surprised at how many people were engaged and actually caring about these issues.  I guess information literacy is a real issue that people outside of libraries or academia care about.

This is a list of the top 106 books most often marked unread by LibraryThing users. The rules: bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. 

Write a note in the comments if you’ve done this one and link to your meme!

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey 
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad (This is the last book I finished [third time])
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (read this one studying abroad in Italia)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles 
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables (abridged version)
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences 
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

24 read for fun, 4 read in school, 4 started but never finished.

Wow!  I really did not have to read much in school.  I guess I read a lot of philosophical texts, but I was never required to read many classics…not even in high school.  I wish I had been.  There are quite a few on this list that I would really like to read (I’m looking at you “The Picture of Dorian Gray”), but some of them don’t even strike my fancy.  I will definitely have to add a few of these to my list.  My favorites on here are probably Don Quixote, A Confederacy of Dunces, and The Brothers Karamazov.

As for tagging I am going to have to go with Jonathan Bloy.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the effects of the interweb on reading.  Nicholas Carr and his fascinating article, “Is Google Making us Stoopid?,” brought up the idea that Google and the nature of the internet in general is making it more and more difficult to thoughtfully read books and longer texts.  The typical internet experience is made up of little kernels of information plucked from different locations, allowing you to create your own whole.  This is in opposition to the previous model where an expert writes his own coherent view of a certain topic and you get one view in its entirety.  These are two very different ways of thinking, as well as two very different ways of reading.

Another article, “Literacy Debate – Online, R U Really Reading?” by Mokoto Rich asks us if this new type of internet reading is an enemy of traditional reading or if it too should be respected as another type of literacy.  It is fascinating to hear how one of the children in the article, Nadia, does read, but instead of books it is fan fiction. These are stories produced by regular people who can have the story go whatever direction they want.  Nadia even writes her own story about a person who dies and is reincarnated as a half cat half human.  It is instances like this in which the internet really amazes me.

I am of the opinion that this sort of literacy is equally as valid as traditional book literacy.  In Nadia’s case, she is reading other people’s work, engaging with the material, and inspired to create her own.  This is literacy at its finest.  But what I have come to realize is there are all different sorts of literacy.  There is the basic literacy level where you gain knowledge of reading, grammar, spelling and can understand sentences.  But from there there are countless types of specialized literacies.  Being able to read a legal brief, a medical chart, or a philosophical tome aren’t things that many of us have to do unless we work in one of those professions, but they still all constitute different modes of literacy.  My point is that you can be literate in only the things that are necessary for you, your career and your interests.

I would argue, though, that in order to be a well rounded individual in this day and age one needs to have in some measure the two diametrically opposed types of literacy: web reading and book reading.  The web is so ubiquitous that there is no escaping it.  Even print newspapers refer you to their online content.  This is not anything groundbreaking but, the internet is shaping our culture, and if people want to be a part of that culture they need to know how to get information from the web and understand it.  A person is not engaged in society if they shun the web.

On the other hand, those who spend all their time on the internet reading blogs and social networking are missing out on a big part of humanity as well.  No matter how many wikipedia articles, blog posts, or sparknotes, you read about The Odyssey you will still never capture the same feeling as actually reading it.  You will not be able to understand Odysseus’ unbounded joy when he again sees his beloved Ithaca.  So much of our culture and knowledge is contained in books.  You can get much of this knowledge from the web, but it will be very superficial.  You will not have the same depth of understanding you would get from reading a book.  Thus, being able to sit down, concentrate, and read in depth books will continue to be a desirable skill.

Therefore, some degree of literacy is necessary to succeed in life, such as the ability to read and write.  It is not necessary though to be able to sort through web pages (John McCain has his wife do it).  It also isn’t necessary to read books or even long articles.  Even though neither of these things is necessary, I believe that they are still both essential to live a full and flourishing human life.