Archives for the month of: November, 2024
« Older Entries

Pubeasy and Pubnet

November 29, 2024 //
0

If you didn’t know, this title might take you back to your college days of wasting time, money, and no doubt brain cells, hanging out in bars. Pubnet almost sounds like a kind of King Street Run.

But Pubnet and Pubeasy are of course online facilities allowing booksellers to order books from publishers, including via EDI (electronic data interchange). Pubeasy is directed at the smaller bookstore, Pubnet at larger companies, often with more than a single location. Both versions are run by MVB who claim at their website “We take Books across the Finish Line”. They continue “Books can change the world. To do so, we want them to show their full potential. As the central interface of the book industry, it is our task at MVB to make books visible. Therefore, we dedicate ourselves to books worldwide, connect the various book markets and shape the future of the industry with diversity and innovation.” MVB is a 75-year-old German company, part of “the Börsenverein Group, along with the German Publishers & Booksellers Association, Frankfurter Buchmesse and Mediacampus Frankfurt”. They have established an important place in the UK and US book trade. You can go to their website and watch a video (in German) setting out their services.

This ad perhaps explains it all.

Categories Book publishing, Bookstores

Cotgreave Indicator

November 27, 2024 //
1
Alfred Cotgreave, shown here with one of his library inventions, the “Long Reacher” for getting books from high shelves.

Alfred Cotgreave (1849-1911), born in Ecclestone, Cheshire, invented the Cotgreave Indicator, a proto-digital method of telling library patrons which books were available for loan and which we out. It’s a large rack holding little tile-like containers. “Each slot contains a tiny ledger (like a notepad) with a reference number, linking to a book in the Library. When someone borrowed a book, the Librarian would take out the corresponding ledger, filling in the date and the borrower’s membership number. The trays have a blue end and a red end, which was turned to indicate if the book was in or out – blue was out, red was in.”

Photo: Guille-Allèz Library, Guernsey.

Emerald Insight, quoting the abstract of a 1968 article in the Library Review tells us that Mr Cotgreave worked “first at the Royal Exchange Library in Manchester and then with Birmingham public libraries. In 1877 he received his first appointment as librarian at Wednesbury on the northern fringe of Birmingham. Wednesbury at that time was a small town of 25,000, engaged principally in the production of iron and steel; the economic crash of 1872 had dealt its economy severe blows from which it was only now beginning to recover. On 21 March 1878 the library opened for its first day’s business with a stock of 4,446 volumes classified by the Birmingham scheme and an Elliot indicator, the type which had been in use in nearby Wolverhampton since 1870.”

Just how the Elliot Indicator worked it difficult to discover, but apparently it kept misplacing readers’ tickets within its mechanism. We are told in The Library World of November 1899 that Cotgreave “tried various schemes to prevent such mistakes, but ultimately decided that movable numbered blocks, filling up every space in the Indicator would best meet the difficulty. An Indicator on this principle was thereon designed, and later, the numbered blocks were replaced by wooden blocks having a record book attached. The Handsworth Public Library first adopted this Indicator. Subsequently the wooden block was superseded by a metal slide in which the little book carrying the record of issues was placed. In this form the Cotgreave Indicator has existed for a number of years, and it is so well known that it is almost unnecessary to give a description of it in detail.”*

Clearly this sort of indicator would work fine until the library had acquired so many books that the scale of the indicator could no longer be accommodated. The fact that Wednesbury’s library had a presumably less efficient Elliot Indicator taking care of over four thousand books, shows that the limit was larger than I’d have thought likely. The question of whether or not a particular book is available or not is still answered by digital means — no longer red/blue — now 0/1, as the librarian checks for you in their computer.

___________________

* That last clause, from 1899 remember, tells its own story — time moves on, and we forget the little things that were once so obvious and omnipresent that we never bothered to pay enough attention to them to describe how they actually worked. This very impulse was one of the reasons for my first writing this blog. I lived through the dying days of letterpress, the development of computer-assisted typesetting, and then the arrival of digital printing to knock the apparently unassailable offset lithography off its perch. Attention needed to be paid.

Categories Libraries

Apocalypse tomorrow afternoon?

November 26, 2024 //
0

Publishers Weekly tells us that according to Bowker “the number of titles that were self-published in 2023 rose 7.2% over 2022, topping 2.6 million . . . The number of self-published titles released annually first crossed the million-copy mark in 2017 . . . By comparison, the number of traditionally published titles fell 3.6%, to 563,019. Self-published titles outpaced traditionally published books by more than two million titles in both 2023 and 2022.”

PW doesn’t mention the fact that Bowker knows what it knows as a consequence of people applying for an ISBN. I’ve no idea how many, but there are self-published books being issued without an ISBN, so the numbers are even more divergent.

There are four and a half times more self-published titles being published each year than traditionally-published ones! So? Sales numbers and profit levels are notoriously difficult to get ahold of for traditional publishing, and for self publishing the scene is even more opaque. The facts, in so far as we know them, are not in dispute: we can, I think, assume that there are in total more self-published books sold than traditionally-published. We can also assume that the proportion of ebooks to print books is radically different if we (were able to) include the self publishing numbers in the total. What conclusions you draw from the numbers may be more open to debate. Kris Austin, CEO of Draft2Digital is quoted as saying “I believe we are in a new era of publishing. An era that’s being led by indie authors.” On an obvious, trivial level, this is clearly true — self publishing was not an option twenty years ago. Vanity publishers existed, but that didn’t mean publishing the book for yourself, it meant paying a “publisher” to do it for you. Now you can do it yourself, and there are lots of service companies (like Draft2Digital) which have popped up in order to make the job even easier.

I have often argued that self publishing is a different business than traditional publishing — again obvious on a trivial level — but what I mean is separate and different. What happens in self publishing has no effect on what happens in traditional publishing; beyond the obvious occasional picking up of a Fifty Shades of Grey. There turns out not to be a single finite market for books such that the only way self publishing could succeed would be by their cannibalizing the traditional publishers’ sales. Self publishing seems, amazingly, impressively, to have created its own new market, to have quadrupled the universe of readers. Of course there’s lots of overlap — lots of people who go into bookshops to buy books will also go online to read indie books. But we seem to have witnessed the birth of a whole new book-buying community, at least in part stimulated by shut-in pandemic life.

Clearly the revenues of traditional publishers depend as much on the “salability” of the books they publish as they do on the number of titles they release — and as far as we can tell these days traditional publishers are doing very well thank you. Despite title output being down 3.6% or whatever, revenues are robust. The “new era” Mr Austin identifies does not, I think, imply any decline in the future success of the traditional publishing business. Industry comparisons are difficult, but one might see traditional publishing and self publishing as being in a similar relationship to one another as network TV and streaming services — CBS and Netflix can both be doing nicely. Going further back similar non-conflict conflicts might be seen in radio and TV itself, even further back coal and oil, rail and the automobile. Just because one business does the same sort of thing as another one does not mean we have to get rid of the first one, or all do things the latest way. No apocalypse yet, I think.

Categories Book publishing, Self publishing

Don’t worry . . . Be happy

November 25, 2024 //
0

Anne Trubek, of Belt Books, a small publisher, writes at her blog, Notes from a Small Press (subscription required I think), about her fear that people are not reading books any more. Her post is entitled My Friends Aren’t Reading: What should a publisher do?! I believe the right thing to do is not to worry, because I don’t altogether agree with her premiss. More and more people come on stage every year: we may see a dip in books read this year, but long term there’s surely only one way for the numbers to go (percentages are a different story of course). Despite her anxiety Ms Trubek has, nevertheless, to admit that “Lots of books are still bought and sold in America! So very many! Current trends in corporate publishing favor those who are already famous (celebrity memoirs, celebrity cookbooks, celebrity children’s books) and genre, especially romance, which is booming. There are clearly enough readers — or at least buyers — for those.”

Ms Trubek sticks up for the mid-list, which she fears is endangered by those friends’ behavior. Now, Moses did not come down from the mountain with any commandment along the lines “Thou shalt maintain a good market for the mid-list book”. The best we can hope for is that most of our books will sell enough copies to wash their face. Face-washing happens at a lower total sale that you’d think — unless the book’s rashly underpriced or over-advanced. There’s no “normal” sales level. If mid-list books used to sell 5,000 to 10,000 copies (and I rather doubt that they did) then the fact that they may now sell between 2,000 and 5,000 (and again I’ve no knowledge that they really do) then that’s nothing more than a fact. Value judgement doesn’t come into it. Failure to buy such novels should not be held against us. Daringly, one can even admit that lots of mid-list novels are just not very good — but the same may also be said of the big sellers. And of course sales are not registered by something called “mid-list” — they are registered by this or that individual and unique book. I rather think that mid-list is a post hoc definition — “this one sold a disappointing but not disastrous number, so it is a mid-list title”. Nobody plans to publish mid-list titles — we publish books, and those that sell really well are called best sellers: the rest get talked of as mid-list. Cut your cloth to fit your budget, and on we go.

Mass sales, of the sort we are now rather fixated on, are a recent phenomenon — less than a couple of hundred years old. Cheap books, a consequence of mass sales, which in turn are a consequence of mass education as well as technology, are also a recent phenomenon. Of course, as a book reader I’d rather books cost less, but if they have to cost more — and I really need to have them — then I just have to pay more. A consequence of this would of course be that books were bought more on the basis of need than as an entertaining pastime. But stop a moment, and think what this means. Do you recognize here a hint of the academic and scientific publishing business? We tend to focus on the entertainment side of our business, the trade publishers, where large numbers in sales are aimed for. But most publishing (in terms of number of titles published) is not trade publishing, and tends to flourish on much lower sales allied to much higher prices.

Ms Trubek rashly departs from diagnosis and slides into prescription — “And longer term, one can’t but think that the publishing industry per se needs to contract, if its most loyal constituency is dwindling. It should become harder to get a book contract. There should be fewer jobs in publishing. There should be fewer creative writing programs. Monographs should not be required for tenure. Etc, etc—topics, again, that are not new, and the shifts have been in place for awhile. A certain kind of book—say those reviewed in the NYRB—will become like opera, or theater, or ballet, and their readers like their patrons. It’ll be an increasingly minor art.”

This of course is unduly defeatist. It really doesn’t take much to get by at publishing. (Doing really well is a lot harder.) And anyway what’s so wrong with a “minor art”? I rather like “opera, or theater, or ballet”; nobody suggests these “minor arts” are on their death beds because most people watch television, (and I’m not sure Richard Wagner would have agreed about that “minor” bit either). Serious publishing and the writing and reading of its output has never been anything other than a minor art.* Try not to allow the glare of the Penguin Random House headlights to blind you to all that’s really going on. If you need Evolution’s Witness: How Eyes Evolved by Ivan R. Schwab, you’ll pay your $125 for it; if not, not. As long as there are enough people to buy entertainment, to the extent that Taylor Swift’s latest ends up “washing its face” and maybe allowing for a bit of make-up purchasing too, trade publishing will continue merrily on its way providing fun books for you — if you buy them, they will come. There’s absolutely no evidence “that the publishing industry per se needs to contract” — indeed unless people take Ms Trubek’s advice that “there should be fewer creative writing programs” we will probably need expansion rather than contraction! Publishing may ultimately need to raise its prices (duh!) but as long as people need the information in books, and the entertainment they supply, books will be provided for them.

_______________

* Actually I’d argue that 99.99% of the output of our trade houses was at best minor art, but let’s not antagonize. Great art is surely a rarity in any artistic medium, and while I just don’t know, I’d be amazed if any of our recent bestsellers turned out to be anything other than minor art — if they can even aspire to those heights.

Categories Book publishing

‘The Book’ by Henry Vaughan

November 22, 2024 //
0

Eternal God! Maker of all
That have lived here since the man’s fall:
The Rock of Ages! in whose shade
They live unseen, when here they fade;

Thou knew’st this paper when it was 
Mere seed, and after that but grass;
Before ’twas dressed or spun, and when
Made linen, who did wear it then:
What were their lives, their thoughts, and deeds,
Whether good corn or fruitless weeds.

Thou knew’st this tree when a green shade
Covered it, since a cover made,
And where it flourished, grew, and spread,
As if it never should be dead.

Thou knew’st this harmless beast when he
Did live and feed by Thy decree
On each green thing; then slept — well fed — 
Clothed with this skin which now lies spread
A covering o’er this aged book;
Which makes me wisely weep, and look
On my own dust; mere dust it is,
But not so dry and clean as this.
Thou knew’st and saw’st them all, and though
Now scattered thus, dost know them so. 

O knowing, glorious Spirit! when
Thou shalt restore trees, beasts, and men,
When Thou shalt make all new again,
Destroying only death and pain,
Give him amongst Thy works a place
Who in them loved and sought Thy face! 

Trees, beasts and men are going to be made all new again, replaced, refurbished. The book, however, potentially your ticket to salvation — if you’re reading the right stuff — goes on for ever. Of making many books there is, of course as we know, no end. Here Vaughan shows us the text paper, made from linen rags from old clothing worn by all sorts of people, some of them good corn, others fruitless weeds; then the boards, made from the tree with its green shade, made eternal by the soaking of its wood pulp and then smashing it together with hammers to make it into a stout cardboard for the sides of the binding; and finally the calfskin with which the boards are covered. It’s all enough to make you, or Vaughan at least, weep for your own mortality — it certainly does not sound as if he was (ever) involved in any kind of light reading.

Poetry.com tells us that Henry Vaughan (1621-95) “was a Welsh author, physician and metaphysical poet. Vaughan and his twin brother, the hermetic philosopher and alchemist Thomas Vaughan, were the sons of Thomas Vaughan and his wife Denise of ‘Trenewydd’, Newton, in Brecknockshire, Wales. Their grandfather, William, was the owner of Tretower Court. Vaughan spent most of his life in the village of Llansantffraed, near Brecon, where he is also buried.”

Categories Book manufacturing, Reading

Book It!

November 21, 2024 //
0

Pizza Hut are celebrating the fortieth anniversary of their Book It! program, in which kids get free pizzas in return for fulfilling reading requirements set by their teachers. The New York Times reports that “The initiative was founded in October 1984 by Arthur Gunther, then the president of Pizza Hut, in response to a call from President Ronald Reagan encouraging America’s businesses to get involved in education.”

“Here’s how the program works: In exchange for meeting their monthly reading goals, students are given certificates by their teachers. Readers can then bring these documents to a Pizza Hut location and leave with Book It! swag, like buttons and bookmarks — and, of course, their very own pizza.” So obviously the program requires the participation of teachers. Charlamagne Tha God is among those quoted as crediting the program with improving their reading.

Food for the body: food for the mind. Book It! obviously represents a rather different category of incentivization, but there is an unavoidable link between good nutrition and literacy/education. At a moment when conservatives are about to wrestle with the question of state funding for education all over again, I suspect we’ll need whatever nourishment we can get.

Categories Reading

Dan Dare or Desperate Dan?

November 20, 2024 //
4

In the fifties the Eagle* promised us, in the person of Dan Dare, a future in which we’d enjoy unbounded leisure, lying on the beach for most of the time while machines did our work for us: we’d only need to turn up for work for a few hours a week. It hasn’t quite worked out as the Eagle promised — we’ve not all gotten more time off because of efficiencies, surprise, surprise, we’ve just ended up sharing fewer jobs among more people, leaving lots of us with no real work at all. Underemployed Dan has turned into Desperate Dan, as recent voting suggests. Living off the welfare state may keep life and limb together, but isn’t exactly as fulfilling as Eagle‘s vision appeared. (Be it noted however that the original Desperate Dan, from The Dandy,º was not desperate in this rather depressing way; indeed he started out as a desperado. Sorry DD — it’s just wordplay.)

The latest route for Dan to dare to hope for that beach life is represented by Artificial Intelligence’s potential to take care of lots of operations for us. I fear that doubled desperation is the more likely outcome as businesses (continue to) use technological efficiencies to limit the number of people they employ. AI’s going to be a huge benefit, but in all probability not for you, or you, or you. In the long run employment may get back to the status quo ante because of novel business opportunities, but breath should not be held.

Although, I think, we do make some kind of progress all the time, nevertheless human nature remains, stubbornly, human. We can’t quite get beyond the point where we look on our work as giving value to our life. Desperate unemployed Dan worries that his failure “to provide for his family” must be something that everyone is sniggering about behind his back. Dan Dare’s somewhat futuristic chums might happily be able to spend most of the week at the beach, but most of us would probably be tortured by guilt at our “laziness”. Maybe we’ve gotten to the point where half of the people don’t think that “being on welfare” is “living off charity”; maybe we’ll all get there ultimately. Maybe AI will help us learn.

Shady Characters does a nice roundup on the current state of play with AI, our latest entrancing glimpse of machines doing most of our work for us. One concern is the huge amounts of energy its operation consumes. Are we not however on the verge of coming up with completely free energy as we capture more and more of the power of the sun, and less significantly of the wind, the tides and water currents?† For all the visionary dreamers among us, Keith Houston points out that “if history has taught us anything, it is that technologies are tools rather than panaceas, and that work-free utopias are far less durable than, say, exploitative labour laws and unequal distributions of wealth”. So don’t buy that Kool-Aid, Dan.

____________

* I can’t help noticing that this Eagle, from 1956, was priced at 4½d., fourpence ha’penny. Those were the days!

º I’m a little surprised to see that in 1962, D. C. Thomson, the Dundee based publishers of The Dandy were able to assume that their readership of “boys and girls” would be familiar enough with moussaka to be able to work out the pun on this page. You can click on the picture to enlarge it. The Dandy ran from 1937 until 2012; its closing left a yawning gap in the Scottish cultural landscape. Happily The Dandy Annual continues to be published. LATER: Alan Aitken points out in a comment that with a decimalized price of 28p, this comic can’t date from 1962. It’s either 1982 or 1992 which makes moussaka more believable.

† Surely once we’ve installed the infrastructure, the capture mechanisms, our electricity will cost us almost nothing. I wonder if this is not what’s at the root of conservative disdain for the green economy — that it’ll be impossible to profit off it. Of course there’s a large capital investment needed to get there, and from this these guys are no doubt expert at profiting. So don’t reach for your hankies just yet.

Categories Uncategorized

Edinburgh Central Library

November 19, 2024 //
2

The Central Library of the City of Edinburgh (stop 2 on your Edinburgh Print Trail) was opened in 1890, funded by a £50,000 gift from Andrew Carnegie — rather more than Lytham St Annes got, but, hey, Edinburgh’s bigger, and he was a Scotsman! Enough for him to get his bust in there, as you’ll see in the videos below.

Old Edinburgh, being a rather vertical place, the library’s main entrance is, as shown, on George IV Bridge, but the building extends deep beneath, down to Cowgate. The original building, the one on the left, was designed by George Washington Browne — later on the Library took over the next door building, on the right, previously a bank.

On the front of the first library building are nine rectangular panels commemorating printers:

Firstly Scottish printers. Left: Andro Myllar; Center: Walter Chepman; Right: a logo unknown to the internet it seems — though they must have known in 1890! The banner reads “Consilium pietas politeia coronam . . .” and a final upside down word I can’t make out.

Next English printers. Left Richard Grafton; Center: William Caxton, adopted later by his successor Wynkyn de Worde; Right: John Day.

And thirdly European printers. Left: Christoph Plantin; Center: the Elsevier family; Right: Aldus Manutius.

YouTube hosts a three-part tour of the library by Fiona Myles, Central Library manager. The music is a bit loud I fear, but if you watch it in YouTube, you’ll get subtitles: but of course if you turn down the volume you’ll miss Ms Myles’ beautiful Edinburgh accent.

Thanks to my cousin Patrick Mark for sending me these printer’s logo photographs as well of course as the Edinburgh Print Trail map.

Categories Libraries

Fountain Bookshop

November 18, 2024 //
0

It’s an unusual experience to be able to welcome a new independent bookshop not five hundred yards from your own front door — but here comes Fountain Bookshop, which opened its doors at around 2pm on Friday 15th November at 803 West 187th Street between Fort Washington and Cabrini* Boulevards: a crowded block as you may see. It’s not a large shop, though there’s an upstairs and a downstairs, which is where the children’s books are shelved. You could hardly get in on Friday and Saturday. And Sunday was even worse, but then they’d just rolled out the ice cream for the first time. Books were nevertheless being sold briskly, and emergency reordering is under way. Demand has clearly been pent.

We seem to be living through boom times for the establishment of independent bookstores. You get the feeling that Shelf Awareness is telling us of two or three openings every week. The crowds besieging our latest bookshop provide a good augury — best wishes to them, and let’s hope it all continues equally busily. Their website seems to still be under development: they’re working on it.

________________

* Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917) was canonized in 1946, the first American citizen thus to be singled out, and is now the patron saint of immigrants. Her body is preserved in St. Francis X. Cabrini Chapel just a couple of blocks north of Fountain Bookshop. (Keep going for about twice the distance northward and you’ll get to the Cloisters, the Met Museum’s medieval galleries, set picturesquely in Fort Tryon Park. Come visit us.)

According to the website Strange Remains, “When Mother Cabrini’s body was exhumed [in Chicago, where she had died in 1917] as part of the canonization process in 1931, the Apostolic Delegate discovered that most of her body has decayed except for some soft tissue on her face and arms. During the exhumation, her skull and heart were removed and sent to the Instituto Suori Missionarie del Sacro Cuore di Gesù in Rome. Most of Mother Cabrini’s body is now displayed under glass in the altar at St Frances Cabrini Shrine in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan. Mother Cabrini’s bones are encased in a wax replica of her body.” The shrine tells us “When Mother Cabrini’s remains were exhumed prior to her beatification, they were found to be subject to normal decay with one exception: her heart. This is particularly apt, since Mother Cabrini, like Catherine of Siena, experienced a mystical ‘exchange of hearts’ with Jesus. St. Frances Cabrini’s heart remains in a reliquary in Codogno, Italy, at the convent where she founded the Missionary Sisters.”

It might be seen as a paradox that this sort of rigmarole is indulged in in the hope that it will increase our propensity to believe. Notwithstanding, the church has been pretty discrete about this exciting relic. I have lived up here for a number of decades, but I only found out about Mother Cabrini’s body a few weeks ago when a loquacious local — he may have had a drop taken — buttonholed me in front of Hilltop Pharmacy and told me I could go and observe at her body in the chapel. Her body, he assured me was miraculously preserved, although the head had been chopped off “and sent to the Pope in Rome”. I’m not quite sure why his mother came into the story, but I think she must have provided some sort of evidentiary confirmation.

Categories Bookstores

Walking library

November 15, 2024 //
2

This does look a bit like an ambulatory Little Free Library, I guess. The Facebook post from which this is derived tells us it’s a London scene from the nineteen-thirties. Maybe this was not a lending library but rather a mobile bookshop, the British equivalent of selling apples in the street.

Actually, ultimately it all looks a bit staged to me — can you imagine spending more than the time it takes to make a photograph carrying that laden wooden bookcase on your back, hanging as it is by a couple of thin cords? Surely you’d at least fit it up with padded leather straps. Plus, the ladies are rather smartly dressed, and I can’t help thinking that turning the pages with those gigantic furry gloves would have been nigh impossible.

Thanks to Nathan Barr for the picture.

Categories Bookstores, Libraries
« Older Entries