Daily Thoughts 5/9/2010

Public Library Muses, Boston, MA, Early Postcard

Daily Thoughts 5/9/2010

Ebooks and Print On Demand

Happy Mother's Day. Sometimes, you read a blog post which catches your attention.
http://carriagereturn.typepad.com/carriage-return/2010/03/365207-my-digital-manifestothe-future-of-our-publishing-world.html . This post caught my attention because it talks about two trends which are affecting libraries tremendously; the first is print on demand, the second is ebooks.

My understanding is that 30% of books sent to bookstores are returned. I think this changed with print on demand. We are getting a lot more cancellations lately for books which we order. I think this is due to print on demand. Publishers have much tighter control of how many books can get printed with print on demand, they can track the number of books ordered and more closely match print runs with what is being ordered in a more timely manner. This means there can be a much quicker decision about canceling titles and inventory. If there are not enough orders for a book it will be cancelled much quicker than before.

This means a lot less books are kept in inventory. Machines like the Espresso Book Machine can print a trade paperback in four minutes from a digital file. Google Books is partnering with the Espresso Book machine to be able to print and sell books quickly. This includes a huge number of public domain books at a very reasonable price. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/09/google-books-publish-on-demand/

There is a second thing which is happening, one of the largest distributors for books, Ingram, owns Lightning Source which is the largest print on demand publishing source. Lightning Source has also partnered with Baker and Taylor for distribution. They are now printing to order as people buy the books, the warehouse prints then sends them. It is called Print to Order. This eliminates lots of inventory and saves money for the publisher. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Baker-Taylor-and-Wiley-Ink-prnews-579997220.html?x=0

Print to Order is not just for publishers, libraries and bookstores are putting print on demand stations inside their buildings as well. This is a short article on the growth of print on demand which shows its growth in the last five years 2005-2010 http://www.infotrends-rgi.com/public/Content/INFOSTATS/Articles/2006/09.05.2006.html

The other area which is growing is ebooks. In a way ebooks obscure the growth of print on demand. People are adapting ebooks very rapidly. There was a 307% increase in sales this January over January of last year. http://ereads.com/2010/03/january-10-e-book-sales-almost.html

Just as important is the incredible proliferation of free ebooks and material online. I find myself looking for material on the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/ for people a lot of time, recommending readers like the Stanza ereader, or Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page, I also sometimes recommend Creative Commons books to read. There are a few titles worth reading in the mix of grand and terrible. http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Books. I don't think the industry is tracking the use of free ebooks. It probably is even more than the books being purchased. I have read a lot of books which I never had to pay for. Groups are making entire free libraries available online like the Baen free library which is a nice sampling of free science fiction books. http://www.baen.com/library/

Both of these technologies are digital, they are not mutually exclusive. I can imagine a world where you can choose whether you want a hardcopy book or an ebook. Books will be born digital much like television is now. This is a Library Journal article which covers the subject. http://ereads.com/2010/03/january-10-e-book-sales-almost.html . I can easily imagine a world where you can walk into a bookstore and have a choice of whether you want your book to be digital or hardcopy. The paperback will not be that much more expensive to buy than the digital download. An example of ths would be a science fiction book I bought recently from Baen Books, Live Free or Die, $6.00 for the ebook, $7.99 for the mass market paperback, or $26.00 for the hardcover.

There still we be hardcovers, but the hardcovers will have features which the cheaper ebooks and paperbacks can't match, very nice pictures, lots of photographs, artwork, quality paper, excellent layout, quality indexing, glossy finishes, and other features which appeal to having and holding a book. They also might be in larger formats, coffee table books still will probably be printed the old way. There will be a lot more specialty books. I haven't found anything which supports this trend other than watching as books come out. The kind of book which I am thinking is books like Teach Yourself Visually series. http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-305624.html

There are other changes as well, the world of reference works is changing completely as well, but this is something for a later collection of thoughts.

Other Thoughts

I finished reading Soulless An Alexia Tarabotti Novel at the laundromat. You can add romance to Victorian steampunk, werewolf, vampire, supernatural thriller. It was good enough for me to want to read the Second book in the series, Changeless.

I went to Barnes and Nobles today in the shopping mall near my house. I did not buy anything. I did look at a few manga, VIZ media has a series called VIZBIGBOOKS which are compilations of three volumes in one for manga at a discount price. I was looking at Vagabond and Ruruoni Kenshin which are interesting series. There were also a few titles that I noted for future reading.

Daily Thoughts 1/13/2010

Poster promoting reading by Charles Dickens in Nottingham1869

Daily Thoughts 1/13/2010

Based on my wanderings through the interweb, I found out that China Mieville has a new book coming out in June 2010 called Kraken. An urban fantasy about a giant squid. I wonder what he is going to do next.

Every single day I read about how ebooks are going to change the publishing world. There is an obsession with ebooks. The real game changer has not been ebooks. It is print on demand combined with self publishing. The only sector of the publishing world which has grown continuously has been the print on demand sector. It is easier and easier to get print on demand books from distributors like Baker and Taylor or Ingram. Ingram owns Lightning Source which is the largest print on demand service for books.

There are also many self publishing options that allow people to easily cut out the middle man. Companies like http://www.lulu.com/ and http://www.smashwords.com/ are growing in popularity. On our end we are getting many more local authors coming into our library wanting to have their books added or do readings. Big publishers are less and less willing to support author tours. It has become easier for us to look for authors websites on the internet and ask them to come to our library than for us to go to publishers.

Many of these authors are self published. It is kind of exciting to have a local poet come in and read from their book. Some of the work is better than expected because a lot of people who might have been previously published by the big houses are finding it hard to get there.

In addition, there are experiments with print on demand at the bookstore level. Some bookstores have even used The Espresso Book Machine as a tool for print on demand for local authors. I see print on demand continuing to expand and create new opportunities for authors much quicker than ebooks.

This morning we had our reference sharing meeting where we discussed different reference books. I discussed Writers Market 2010 which is a good basic tool on where to submit material to get published. Another person discussed the Library of Congress Subject Headings for religion.

We also looked at several internet sites. The head of reference discussed the Internet Archive first going to the wayback machine, then looking at several different things in the archive including a recording of PT Barnum's voice, a Libri Vox recording of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, a song from a Grateful Dead Concert, and the short cartoon Sergeant Snafu.

Another site discussed was http://511ny.org/ which monitors traffic and public transportation around New York. If you know how to look, it can help spot speed traps and traffic cameras. There was also a mention of http://thomasnet.com/ which is the Thomas Directory of manufacturers online. Thomas now has cad drawings online. Finally, if you are looking for a genealogy expert, you can go to Ancestry.com and get experts for a fee through their website. http://expertconnect.ancestry.com/Home.aspx .

I spent a little time this afternoon weeding the literary criticism section. I also worked on designing a flyer for a movie which we are showing for the graphic novel club on January 25, 2009 as well as an update of the flyer for the 2nd meeting of the graphic novel club. Hopefully this will go well.

On the way to work I read some of Choosing Civility by P.M. Forni. The first maxim of the book is to pay attention, and the third maxim is to listen. These always seemed to be two of the most important things to do in life. Without attention you can't learn anything and not listening leads to lots of mistakes.

I am looking at a rather silly book, Boilerplate, History's Mechanical Marvel by Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett. They built a man sized robot model of a clockwork robot and took pictures of it. It is a rather silly looking thing. It is very much like Frank Reade's Steam Man of the prairies in a more modern version. There is a website with images. http://www.bigredhair.com/boilerplate/index.html

The clockwork robot has been photoshopped into a variety of historical images from all over the world. These are mostly from the late 19th century to the beginnings of World War I. There are pictures of the robot with Pancho Villa, Theodore Roosevelt, Buffalo Bill and other famous persons. Also, there are images from historical events; The Boxer Rebellion and the Russo Japanese war.

It is a mashup with pictures taking old images and adding new technology to create a different kind of book.

Daily Thoughts 5/25/2009

Daguerrotype of Emily Dickinson.

Daily Thoughts 5/25/2009

I just finished reading Escape From Hell by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It is a sequel to Inferno. After finding the exit to hell in the last novel, Inferno, Allen Carpenter, a science fiction writer returns to hell to try and help some people escape. He believes that some people are redeemable.

This hell is the hell of Dante's Inferno. The whole novel is one of poetic justice. The authors, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle throw various modern day villains into hell, including Kenneth Lay, the people who watched the levees in hurricane Katrina, Anna Nicole Smith, and other sundry characters. I especially like the motorcycle riding preacher, Aimee in this story.

The novel is not scatological or prurient. It is primarily philosophical, ironic, and sometimes darkly funny. Allen Carpenter visits the different places in Dante's Inferno and attempts to rescue people. The best part of the novel is when he rescues Sylvia Plath from her eternal state as a tree. Sylvia Plath travels with him through the whole novel. There may be some philosophical points of contention, the novel will not be agreeable with everyone. I did enjoy reading it very much. It is clearly a fantasy novel. I hope they write another sequel featuring Allen Carpenter, Dante did write Purgatorio.

Happy Memorial Day. Today is Memorial Day in the United States. I watched the parade go by my house. They had the usual groups, the veterans associations, the fire, police, ambulance, boy scouts, girl scouts, the sports leagues, the mayor, and the local car club. The car club had a number of old Chevrolet Impala's, Fords, a few army trucks, and some sports cars. Remember those who fought for your country.

I read some more of Fool's Gold by Mark Y. Herring. In the last chapter, he was railing against the Paperless Society. I don't think paper will ever completely disappear. What I think is happening is that people are getting much greater control over what they will put on paper. It is very easy with all the reviews of books all over the web and in print magazines to get reviews of books. There is also another phenomenon that is happening; the ability to look inside the book or sample a book. Many publishers are giving away the first set of chapters for a book. Amazon has their look inside the book program, and Baen gives away the first several of their science fiction books.

I think this selectivity is fueling print on demand which is the fastest growing segment of the book publishing industry. This is an article from Library Journal on On Demand Books. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6659232.html?industryid=47175

An Essay Pulling Ideas from The Long Tale By Chris Anderson

An Essay, Stream of Ideas, Rant, Pulling Ideas From The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson is a book about how ecommerce changes the nature of niche products and the products available for people to buy. With places like Amazon it is possible to maintain a huge backlist of books, more than any physical bookstore can hold. On the other side Alibris can do a similar thing and aggregate huge numbers of used bookstores together. The ultimate endpoint however is with products like Itunes which can essentially build huge backlists of information products, over a million songs available for download.

I am using some of the ideas from reading this book as well as my own ideas in writing this essay, rant, or collection of thoughts. I am just putting down my thoughts as they come.

Physical stores become shallow with the most on demand immediately buyable titles. For example when I went to Barnes and Noble, I looked for the most popular recent titles that were available which I could add to my selection list. These titles in a way were not ideal because they might not be things that people will use over and over again across a long time period. Barnes and Nobles focuses on general material. It cannot match specialty retailers which sell used material that people still want like the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan. Barnes and Noble at one point had a used book annex in lower Manhattan. It closed.

Libraries will have a place with older and specialty material. Publishers often rely on libraries to sell their backlist. Titles like The Prince, Huckleberry Finn, The Iron Heel, The Color Purple, are much more likely to be found easily in a library than a bookstore.

However, things will not remain the same. Increasingly many of the books not under copyright have become freely available on the internet through sites like Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org. Also many out of copyright images have been made available through http://www.wikimedia.org . People still prefer reading these books in the physical form. Reading on a screen is not very easy. However, this will change as new technologies change the resolution of computer screens.

Also, because of Print On Demand, books are no longer considered out of print anymore. This is still being resisted because of the problem of returns. However, I think with a focus on greening books, this will change. Already, the concept of "Cradle to Cradle" is seeping into the book industry. It is possible to redesign books so they are much easier to dismantle, recycle, or reuse.



Changes in how books are made and used will make it much easier to handle the problmes of returns and disposal of books.

It is not just books which are possibly going to be made on demand. With more advanced fabbing technology, it will be possible to make a greater variety of manufactured goods available on demand. Incorporating the Cradle to Cradle concept into fab manufacturing could create easily reusable products that can be dismantled for their components quickly. Another book whch talks about this is Bruce Sterling's famous essay, Shaping Things



Getting back to the idea of print on demand. Print on demand is available to practically anyone to make books. Through a service like lulu, http://www.lulu.com I can turn a book which I made into a print on demand product for approximately $200. Then I can sell the book through Amazon. This opens the market to an incredible variety of new material.

Even if physical books are available as print on demand, there is still the potential for ebooks. Like itunes, there could be an almost limitless backlist if you could have the choice of print on demanding at a kiosk or simply downloading a book to a reader. This is not as far off as many people think. The Kindle and The Sony Reader are the first generation of E-ink. Electronic ink is not a mature technology. It is what allows people to read on their cell phone or blackberry.
It will mature and get better. http://www.eink.com

According to Chris Anderson people seem to want to have more choice. The more choice they have the wider they read or listen. Effectively, less bestsellers are being sold and more niche products are being used. With unlimited choice in information, along with guides on how to get and use that information people vary their information choices.

In The Long Tail he criticizes the library for using the antiquated dewey decimal system. He calls it a dead system. In many ways, he is correct. He also says that it is biased towards western thought. I think in some ways he is correct. As a halfway step, many libraries have introduced merchandising to pull together similar subjects in an area that would be under different dewey numbers.
A few libraries have even adopted parts of the bookstore classification scheme. The proper term is Book Industry Standard And Classification.
http://www.bisg.org/publications/bisac_subj_faq.html#What%20does%20BISAC%20stand%20for

Also, when Yahoo looked for its classification scheme to organize one of the first internet directories, they found that they could not use Library of Congress Subject Headings. The subject divisions were counterintuitive and most people simply could not understand them. Yahoo had to create its own classification system. Google had to create its own taxonomy as well.

The concept of Wikipedia is discussed in
The Long Tail. Wikipedia entries are non-authoritative. Libraries are bastions of authoritative information. Virtually everything which we buy is supposed to be reviewed by us or sourced from review material. This is of course quite difficult. Despite having massive amounts of magazines and reviews, we simply cannot get coverage on everything which we buy. We usually preface something when we look it up on Wikipedia, this is not authoritative and we cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information provided. This is true of much of the internet.

There is a lot of material in The Long Tail that is quite useful for librarians, book people, and publishers seeking to understand the changing context of information. I would recommend that if you work with publishing or writing you should read this book.

I can see myself in a changing environment where my job is no longer to just search for what is available within our four walls, but instead to direct people to places outside of the physical four walls to location in cyberspace as well as go to other locations as well as recommend material for people ro read and use.

Many of the things he talks about are in the context of marketing and ecommerce. When I am writing this article, I am interpreting and using the information he provides in a different context. I took what I found useful out of the book. The litte chart with the tale wasn't my primary interest. This makes my interpretation different than the writer probably originally intended.

This is a link to the original article which the book was based on.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html . Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail, is the chief editor of Wired Magazine.

Cradle to Cradle Print On Demand Kiosk Book System-- A Syncretic Idea

Occassionally, I get syncretic ideas, ideas which combine two or more things into something new. The idea is that you would take a print on demand book kiosk system and design the books coming out of the system so they can be recycled completely back into the system. A person would buy the book from the kiosk, then get a deposit when they returned the book.

You would go to the kiosk look at a selection of materials then key in the material you were interested in and the book would be printed once you made your selection and paid for it.

The books would be designed as a cradle to cradle product. The pages would use ink that could be reclaimed, instead of paper you would use a thin plastic which could be printed on multiple times, the glue could be removed as well, the cover could be stripped off and reused.

Initially the book would cost a little more, but costs would be reduced because the books would be recycled. I was thinking you would have a few standard size formats and would initially focus on plain text books without illustrations. Maybe the classics or things which people would read a lot over and over again.

Please comment on the idea.

A Few Duds.

I took some books home to read over the weekend, but I can't really get myself to read them. They are not as good as I thought they would be. I had to put one of the books down after reading the first chapter of the book. I try to read at least the first chaper before I put down a book.

The second one might be alright. I am not enthused with it. Sometimes there just isn't that much interesting to read. Or maybe, I want to look at something else.

$100 Laptop Prototype-- Design Continuum.

Quite honestly, I am not enthused with the idea of having masses of books around. I really do think there is such a thing as having too many books. When you read as many books as I do, you get to realize that a lot of books probably shouldn't have been published.

A lot of people will hate me for this. I am not impressed with a house full of books, unless there is something exceptional about them. If you have a house full of books on horses I might be impressed, or if you have a house full of beautiful art books, or mystery books I might be impressed.

Part of this is the way people use the book as a sign of intellectuality. You can buy books by the foot with certain types of binding, or request a certain type of book as a backdrop for a film or television show. This is more a sign of having a hoard of jewels than intellectual prominence. Lawyers and CEOs buy books to fill their offices often to show they are smart.

Most books do not survive. I think the average shelf life of a book in a bookstore is about two weeks to a month. Imagine a giant room full of paper where in a month or two, the majority of it will be recycled.

I don't think everything in print should be saved. A lot of people think of a book as a sacred object. The content inside the book is what is sacred. It would be incredible if we could preserve everything that was written for all time. I look forward to the day when I can go into a bookstore and in five minutes have a choice of having a bound book, or an electronic download of everything ever printed. The same goes for libraries. It would also be interesting if we could also do the same thing with movies, music, and other forms of expression.

Packaging does not fascinate me. I wouldn't mind if I could see what the book looked like when it was finished before I bought it, but I don't need to see piles of 25 copies of it arranged in different patterns.

I am not a luddite. The main value of having printed books is if they are illustrated-- The resolution of paper is still much higher than digital books. But, if they are not illustrated, it is a waste of resources to have a building stuffed with paper.

I am saying this in the sense, that if we could put all of the books inside a print on demand machine or download on demand machine, it might be better than having a house of paper. Also we would need to have the machine easily searchable and readily available for people to use.

I understand the comfortableness of the used bookstore. It has an air of coffee and old things. The propietor might be your grumpy neighbor. There might even be a nice cat, or even a dog.

I also understand the need to hoard things in piles. Messy piles of paper on desks, bookmarks, old books, videos in piles, drawers full of forms, and fliers. It happens to me like many librarians.

I too am afraid of the mad path of "creative destruction" running through American capitalist society tearing apart my profession. I have watched the positions for librarians shrink as well as the number of booksellers. There are less and less of us in the world.


I would be less concerned with this if more books were designed with the cradle to cradle philosophy. Cradle to Cradle Rethinking The Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Baungart is a fairly radical idea. It says you should design things so they can be completely reused. The book Cradle to Cradle is designed this way. You can remove the ink with natural solvents and reuse the ink to print an entirely different book.

There is a certain ambivalence in all this. I am not sure if I am lying to myself on this one, people are so good at self delusion...

To Read or Not To Read-- NEA Study

The United States Library of Congress

This is a commentary on the NEA-- National Endowment for the arts study, To Read or Not To Read, A Question of National Consequence, http://www.nea.gov/research/ToRead.pdf . This is an incredible study, it shows that American reading and writing skills are declining in every category. People are losing their interest in literature in general. If you want to think of it this way on the web, not a single keyword in the top ten lists of keywords includes books or literature. Movies and music, but not books.

We are in essence creating our own Fahrenheit 451 by turning away from the habit of reading. As people buy less books, they become less of a commodity and they lose their importance in our minds. This study says even if we are reading, 35% of the time we are distracted by something else, the computer, music, email, the telephone, or any of another plethora of available media. We live in a distractive instant gratification environment which reinforces itself.

Teens are not reading, they are watching television, listening to music, or using one of a million different devices to fill their time, the ipod, the iphone, the pager, the portable psp play station, or the portable computer. When they come into where I am working, they head in to sign up for the computers, mostly to do "graphical research", look for images, anime, cartoons, drawings, or music, very rarely for books. And if they are at the library, a lot of the time, they are not there to get books, they are there to get videos, talk to their friends, or get on the computer. Reading is an assigned habit focused on reading the classics which many of them find dull, complicated, and harrowing. I can see the statistic that half of Americans don't read for pleasure writ clear every day I come in to work.

It is mostly the older Americans who are coming to us to get reading materials for pleasure, the middle aged and the teenagers don't do it so much. And those who do come up to talk to us, often talk about the large amount of books they have in the home. The more books they have, the more prosperous they often are.

In the study, there is a lot of material on how those who have a lot of books in the home do well in school, move up into management, are more likely to be involved in civic activities, and are more likely to succeed in life. This does not just reflect in America, it reflects in our place in the world.

Finland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden all have higher reading scores. This may translate into being more competitive in the international marketplace because quite simply they are better able to use the tools given to them. In my opinion, if Americans don't address the central issue of education for competence in reading and wrting we will lose out in the end.

Our prisons are filling with illiterates. There are far more people in prison who are illiterate than on the outside. It must be manly to not read books.

On a most important note, employers consider reading and writing to be essential skills in the workplace. 93% of employers consider the ability to read and write critical. They seem to be looking for the ability to write with clarity and accuracy to be very important.

When people read less it impacts my profession badly. We are partially funded by circulation statistics, how much people use and read material. So, if you are in a library take that book out when you go home.

The more people that use our libraries, the more money we get. This creates a downward spiral with less funding for libraries as people read less. Will they go to a bookstore instead? Even the bookstores seem to be carrying less reading material and is diversifying into other products, audio books, videos, and software. The bookstore is becoming a media center.

This is a personal example. I used to go to Forbidden Planet in Manhattan to look at science fiction books. They had rows and rows of science fiction boks. Now, they have one book case full of science fiction books, have introduced video games, increased the amount of Manga, a foreign import, and expanded their action figures. People aren't reading the fantasy and science fiction books they were once known for so they had to change considerably.

Even in places where there is a successful bookstore, they are not focusing on literature necessarily, they are focusing on tie-ins, a further sign of distraction. You go see Harry Potter, buy the book by J.K. Rowling, visit the web site, and maybe even listend to the sound track. Media is now a complete package where you have to listen, concentrate, and read. A bookstore is a business, at least that is the way we normally think of it. However, this is changing. A lot of bookstores are folding.

Many of the surviving bookstores are becoming nonprofits and inviting in other forms of entertainment. Nkiru books in Brooklyn, New York for example, an African American bookstore changed into Nkiru cultural center. Housing Works, one of the most successful used bookstores in Manhattan uses its proceeds to help homeless people with AIDS-- Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome. It takes donations and sells them. It is a really high quality bookstore. I have seen other bookstores starting to change their status to nonprofit.

So what is happening with those young adults who are not reading, how are they making it through the school system. They can now listen to their assignment, plenty of them come in requesting the complete audiobook of Lord of the Flies, or if they really can't be bothered and can't understand Hamlet, they rent the video instead of reading the book. Reading is a difficult skill for a lot of people.

Less than a third of American teenagers are reading daily. This is problematic. I like to think that as an adult people will at least read the morning paper each day, or listen to someone reading it to them.

We need to do something. I think part of that something comes from the world wide web. People are turning to the internet to do a lot of their writing and reading. The study mentions newspapers losing ground to the internet. The study states the internet is less formal, less edited, and less linear than newspapers. In a way, I approve of this. My grammar is far from perfect, and I do have quite a bit to say. If blogs weren not available, I would not be able to say it to you.

Also people are turning to places where they can talk about themselves like myspace.com, there are over 98 million myspace.com pages a huge amount of writing and reading if you think of it. Also facebook.com has over 17 million pages. The internet is a giant collaborative open book. It gives people an opportunity to express themselves that simply wasn't there before, like I am expressing myself now.

I think the internet is quietly generating a new generation of readers. We can see it in the explosion of interest in urban fiction which comes from the street from people who you normally don't think of as readers and writers. It is violent, full of sex, drugs, and darkness in many ways, but it creates new readers. With the availabiliity of the internet and computers, it opened whole new opportunities for people who would not normally be reading. I can see the hunger for many people who want to read Zane, Noir, Omar Tyree, Chunichi, and other urban fiction writers.

There is a real renaissance in African American writing and reading. This site http://www.aalbc.com/, has grown tremendously since one of my colleagues saw it at Book Expo America in 2005.

People want reading, they just want it to be relevant to their experience. I think a lot of publishers are out of touch and are not producing material that jibes with every day American experiences. I will probably take the time to read "A Free Life" by Ha Jin, because it looks like it reverbates with the American experience. America is becoming a more diverse society. Publishers are just beginning to wake up to change. We are starting to see change with more international writers becoming available in American like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Umberto Eco, Isabel Allende, and Jonathan Carroll who has an amazing personal website http://www.jonathancarroll.com/ .

Also we are seeing a real explosion of poetry. Poetry in print from small presses has just exploded in availability because it is so easy to print books. It is also a form of free expression which takes well to the web. I was at a workshop, Poetry In the Branches, and the presenter said that were five times as many poetry books being printed as there were ten years ago.

We can now print exactly what people want when they want it. Maybe, bookstores and libraries need to be a little more flexible in how they get books to people. With companies like http://www.lightningsource.com/ , it is possible to print books just in time and on demand. We are not far from a future where books become instant as well. Instabook http://www.instabook.net/web/content.php?content.5 . This will change things considerably. It will lead to a different place and job for books and reading in the world.

Maybe we can reverse this trend. I am not quite sure how, but it needs to be done to keep Americans educated, employed, and free.

This is my daily rant. How did this start? I went to my library and found my library card was expired and I needed to go back the next day to renew it so I could take out some books. I found an article about To Read or Not To Read and decided I should look at the study and comment on it instead of going in to the library and getting a book to read. Sometimes, a little bit of the busman's holiday can be bit overwhelming. After all, this study has a chance to have a real impact on me.

I took a walk to my local library again today, but found it was closed. I guess, I should have called beforehand. Tomorrow is Turkey Day, so it will be closed. The walk was very nice though. It gave me a chance to stretch my legs. I always liked walking better than driving.

I went back again to my library at around three o'clock, it was open. I got a new library card, paid a few dollars in fines, and went and sat down at the free computers for an hour. It is kind of funny sitting there acting like a library patron. I also picked up four books to look at: The Alton Gift by Marion Zimmer Bradley and Deborah J. Ross, The Atomic Bazaar, The Rise of the Nuclear Poor by William Langewiesche, a graphic novel called American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, and The Bonehunters A Tale of the Malanzan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson. I have not started reading any of them yet. I might start tonight. Signing off and wishing you well for now.