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Have been up to ears in marking, and took a break to read something quite inconsequential. Part of what I read was this, something that a number of us might relate to:

An attractive young woman student entered her male professor's office, closed the door, leaned over the desk, and said, 'I would do anything to pass this examination'. The professor was taken aback, and she continued, with eyes half closed and lips seductively pouting,'Do you understand me? I would do anything'. The professor said, 'Anything?' She replied, 'Anything'. In a whisper, the professor again responded: 'Would you .... study?'

I had a smirkle.

Folk may be interested in a massive public project being undertaken by the National Library of Australia. It has initiated its Australian Newspaper Digitisation Project, one of the biggest such underatkings anywhere in the world, which will make 40 MILLION historic newspaper articles avaialble by the end of 2011. Anybody who has ever sat through those hours of reading through microfilm for their research will understand just what this would mean for researchers. Microfilm and that it entails will be a thing of the past as all those old articles will soon be able to be searched using the technology that allows this. But to get all that stuff onto computers is not easy, for every single one of those 40 million items needs to be manipulated into a form that can be loaded for computer access using optical character recognition (OCR) software. It is not just a matter of scanning the old microfilmed material in...each item needs to be massaged into a form that the software can deal with. This is a massive undertaking. Each scanned page needs to be cleaned up, with all old ink flecks and various other marks removed, and the copies made perfectly straight on the page, so that OCR can do its thing with the material it is fed. But that's not the news. The person hours for 40 million items and the cost of this is staggering, much more than the library can manage. What is the news is one most remarkable feature of the project: that a commmunity of about 3,000 volunteers has come on board to deal with those articles, spending up to 50 hours per week at their computers to work on each item as it presents and preparing it...doing subject tagging, and some even do some annotating of the items before them. One such volunteer has already corrected more than 160,000 lines of text for the project. It is an amzing human response, a response from a community of scholars and readers to a technology problem. The combination of their efforts with the possibilities that the technology suggests is one of those uniquely 21st century phenomena that will itself become part of the historical fabric of this project.

It may be obvious by now that I have a particular interest in children’s and Young Adult literature, and yesterday I received a copy of a new publication to review. What arrived today is the news that this book, ‘Sarah’s Heavy Hear’t by Peter Carnavas made Number 1 last week on the Brisbane (in the Australian state of Queensland) Independent Booksellers best sellers list, beating Barack Obama’s Dreams of my Father and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight!. Rarely would one ever see a children’s book topping such a list, beating books written for adults, especially that Obama one. The publisher, in giving us the news, describes Carnavas as having, ‘with extraordinary insight and brilliance, portrayed the female emotional burden in a light hearted and fun children’s picture book. It is destined to become a classic, appealing to women of all ages, with its minimal text and delightful illustrations. Some of the blokes may even get it!’ I have to agree that ithas the look of a classic about it; well wroth having a look at. Carnavas is a newcomer to the scene, but this 28 year old primary school teacher from country Queensland has already been shortlisted for a Crichton Award for his first book ‘Jessica’s Box’. That book also received a notable award in this year’s Children’s Book Council of Australia awards and was shortlisted for the Queensland Premiers award. He may just be the coming thing. I know that the qulity and number of children's book is staggering, and truly delightful, and many high quality books simply do not come to adult attention, unless we are buying for our own children or children's children. Any on the current CBCA list of outstanding books published in the last year qualify for remarkable writerly and illustratorly skills, but none really manage to have this sort of sales success. But beating Obama! Truly remarkable.

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I came across this item, by Celia Lindsay, in the April 2009 edition of inCite, the magazine of the Australian Library and Information Association, of which I am a member. I had heard about this idea before, and it struck me then as an incredibly good idea. It is speed dating for book lovers. Men and women turn up with a favourite book, and in their dating time talk about the books that they love, perhaps striking a chord with other lovers of similar books. Hosted by the National Library, it was so successful that people had to be turned away, there were so many interested in participating in the event. The article has its appeal, of course, but one paragraph took my fancy:'Some men revealed more than they intended by their book choices. I suspect that "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell"-apparently a recount of a six-year pub crawl-dind't enhance the dating potential of its owner. "1000 Aussie Jokes" may have fallen into this category also. On the other hand, the young man who brought Dr Seuss' "Foxes in Soxes" managed to carry off this daring choice, and appeared lighthearted and funny, rather than juvenile or borderline illiterate'. A great idea, I think, and certainly more appealing than nightclub encounters that would appear to be quite incongruent for the bibliophile. A nice twist on being a literary lover.

I thought that folk might be interested in this latest bit of news from Amazon:
"In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature”.
I was alerted to it through a group email, and followed up on the site suggested: http://www.minalhajratwala.com/2009/04/amazon-and-invisibility/

It’s that ‘invisibility’ concept that is most suggestive, I think, as the blogger on that site says: ‘It’s unclear what criteria Amazon was using besides the “Gay & Lesbian” label, but an awful lot of titles were suddenly rendered invisible’.

I am a heterosexual person, and perhaps it may seem that therefore such things do not necessarily have any relevance to such as I. But that comment on ‘invisibility’ suggests that it does. Such books on such lists not being referred to means that they are marginalised, and if it can happen with these books, it can happen with any others as well. It's a form of censorship that, covert as it is, is nevertheless most effective in these days of Web searches for titles, subject, author and so on. Folk may like to follow up with a visit to the sites that deal this action of Amazon:

http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15293.html

http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15507.html
http://www.blogrunner.com/snapshot/D/2/2/amazon_deranks_socalled_adult_books_including_national_book_award_winner/


I am not sure what is to be done about such book seller policies, but we need to be aware of them,at least.

We are all familiar with Barthes' concept of the death of the author,an abstract concept, and have indeed seen more of this than abtractions, with physical deaths resulting from writing and publishing books throughout history. Such is the power of books. We have seen the results for Salmon Rushdie in relation to a book that he wrote. Now, we have the case of Roberto Saviano. Late last year thousands of people, wearing Spartaus-type T-shirts emblazoned with 'Io sono Saviano' (I am Saviano), protested across Italy in support of this author, who is under very real threat of death, but not from any religious or ideological source. The source for him is the Mafia, for as he says, 'To set oneself against the clans becomes a war of survival'. What has he done? He has written a book called 'Gomorrah: Italy's Other Mafia'. I read an article on this by Susan Chenery (2009, April 4-5. Roberto's war. The Australian, The Weekend Australian Magazine pp. 26-31). Perhaps the most telling point is what Saviano himself points out, that 'his book has a life of its own out there in the world. The Camorra can't kill a book'. He lives in hiding, as a prisoner who has committed no crime that we would recognise, and the personal toll of this is enormous. In these days of digital text production, it seems that the power of the book remains undiminished.

I am waiting with bated breath for a book that seems to have gone out of print almost as soon as it has been published: Baez, Fernando (2009)
A universal history of the destruction of books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq, published by Atlas. I have managed to track one down, and should have it in a week or two, but in the meantime, folk might be interested in the following: another form of book destruction that has a most positive twist. It was sent to me by one of my graduate students, and it’s a video clip about Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk, and his project Connexions. This is his open-source, online education system which cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world. It’s the free bit that is particularly appealing in relation to the dissemination of knowledge currently or previously published in book form. This ‘burning’ refers to digital forms, and it’s an interesting twist on the idea. Folk may get the video on this at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_baraniuk_on_open_source_learning.html

One of the most interesting things to read, I think, is authors' own reflections on what they produce in their books. Australian children's picture book author and illustrator Graeme Base is finding a new dimension to his work, 'Animalia', in a cartoon series based on that book, but I was delighted to arrive home from work to find my partner had bought me a copy of Julie Watts' book on the body of work produced by this wonderful author and illustrator. One of the things Base has to say on the 'C' page of his ostensibly (but much more multilayered than the genre suggests)alphabet book, 'Animalia', is his reluctance to find all that there is on the page, in response to questions regarding all that might be found in his illustrations of words starting with 'C', for example: '...It's a game which can be endless: on the C page there's a camera, the cow, and some cats, but over here there's a piece of cake. What sort of cake is it? Chocolate cake. Chocolate cream cake. Chocolate cream cake crowned with a cherry. Chocolate cream cake crowned with a cherry with a crisp, crunchy, caramel crust carefully cooked by a consummate chef and containing calories and carbohydrates and cholesterol...it goes on and on'. Animalia, for those of us that know it, is a wonderful book (I just took this quote from the page opposite showing 'Zany Zebras Zigzagging in Zinc Zeppelins') but Julie Watts' take on the complete body of Bases's work is just delightful.

I don't know how far afield this message is being sent, but I have copied it in here for us, just in case folk are interested:

The Books and Publishing Knowledge Community develops through in-
person meetings at conferences, publication of conference papers and
virtually through the Books and Publishing Community Blog. We are
pleased to announce that one factor in this development, the Community
Blog, has been greatly enhanced with the inauguration of a new
blogging environment. This new environment provides a significantly
improved forum for discussion and resource sharing.

We are currently looking for bloggers who are interested in posting
items to the Blog and, in doing so, assisting in the further
development of the Community around its common interests. Bloggers are
welcome to post a wide range of items, including links to relevant
articles, information on conferences and symposia, and opinion pieces
that contribute to the discussion of key issues.

If you are interested in becoming a Blogger for the Books and
Publishing Community, please contact me at emily@commongroundpublishing.com
, and I will send you additional details. Thank you.

Best regards,

Emily Kasak
http://booksandpublishing.com/

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Emily Kasak
Conference Assistant
Common Ground Publishing
University of Illinois Research Park
2004 S. Wright, Suite 105
Urbana, IL 61802 USA
http://commongroundpublishing.com
Ph: +1-217-328-0405 / Fax: +1-217-328-0435


Check it out, eh?