ALA, Publishers Go to the Table
One bit of good news from ALA Midwinter is that big publishers will finally be sitting down to some serious discussion about eBook lending. At the end of this month Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin will be meeting in New York with ALA to broach the topic in—we hope—civilized fashion. At this point, none of the three publishers allow public libraries to freely circulate digital copies of their books, although at Penguin the restriction only involves new releases, and this particular impasse is getting old, to say the least. It’s very clear that ALA officials think so, and it’s hard to imagine that publishers don’t feel the same, no matter that they’re the ones holding the higher cards. Nobody’s going to be happy moving forward until some sort of working model is hashed out, and a meeting like this one will be a step forward.
In an interview with Publishers Weekly, ALA executive director Keith Fiels talks about how the issue finally got pushed to the forefront, and some of what he’d like to see come out of the proposed meeting:
To the vast majority of people in the middle, and certainly, to the rest of the 99%, libraries play a really important role in creating equitable access. And the decision not to offer equitable access, not to make something available to libraries, is to deny fundamental, basic access to information. So, you asked about the carrot and the stick. I think it is very important to realize that we are not too far from the point where the media is going to figure out that this is an issue. Now, we’re very much eager to do anything we can to facilitate publishers making works available to libraries.
Fiels’ tone is pretty hard to miss; he comes on strong all through the interview, which only serves to play up the picture of libraries at a disadvantage in this standoff. I’m sure the idea of making this a legal issue has come up many times in the past year, and I deeply appreciate ALA’s hard stance on freedom of information. But I don’t know that he’s doing the cause any favors when he tacks on statements assuring us that, never fear, ALA is on the offensive here—
Let me be clear, when we talk about having a dialogue, it is, “Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, you need to start making e-books available to libraries. Now, let’s have a dialogue.”
The us-and-them state of affairs is pretty well established by now, and I doubt dwelling on it accomplishes much—and that’s considerably ratcheted down from his statements to Library Journal, where he calls publisher noncooperation “potential criminal liability.” Then again, a passionate ALA is an effective ALA, so maybe this is just a case of everyone playing out their respective roles.
I’m also curious about the equitable access for the 99% he holds up as a gold standard—exactly what proportion of the 99% are they shutting out by not making eBooks available to borrow? Which is to say, how ubiquitous are eReaders at this point, and are the numbers generous enough to hinge an argument on? I probably should have those statistics at hand, and perhaps they’re ephemeral enough not to really matter—I can remember when video games were rich kids’ toys, and that changed quickly enough. Presumably a discussion about freedom of e-reader information will float all future boats.
Fiels commends Random House for their cooperation, alone among the Big Six publishers, as well as many independent and university presses. And he gets into concerns of formatting a bit, and licensing vs. ownership, which I think are going to come out as the really crucial issues. He has a good point about libraries serving publishers as the archivists of digital information, which is one of the stronger justifications I’ve heard of for ownership. Aside from the other one where it just makes more sense, period. And for that particular argument I defer to Jamie LaRue, Director of Colorado’s Douglas County Libraries, who recently partnered with the Colorado Independent Publishers Association to not only buy digital works outright and manage them in house, but to allow actual purchases of e-books via library catalogs. LaRue’s point on the stewardship of libraries needs to be the last word here, I think: “If you can’t trust a librarian, who can you trust?” I hope both sides of the table are listening next week.
(Illustration is Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s A Bold Bluff, c. 1909. Because at the end of the day I’d still rather look at dogs playing poker than librarians or publishing CEOs.)
Short Shelf: The Periodic Table of the Elements
In this age of ever-present data visualization, let’s not forget one of the earliest, prettiest, and most enduring: The Periodic Table of the Elements. Devised by Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869, it has both genius and simplicity on its side. The 118 known elements are laid out in a table in order of their atomic weight and grouped by chemical properties, which are represented by colors. With its elegant grid, its staggered mix’n’match hues, and those enigmatic abbreviations, the Periodic Table is self-contained and at the same time something of a template for the literary unconscious. It evokes a keyboard, or Scrabble game, or secret code, lending itself to all sorts of taxonomic play—the Periodic Table of Typefaces, the Periodic Table of Storytelling, and in the mindbogglingly meta-meta department, a Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.
Even though it’s as hard as science gets, the Periodic Table is anything but dry. Here are three very different books, each one riffing in its own very particular way, arranged—like the table itself—from lightest to heaviest.
Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas
Although this is in many ways a traditional novel of a hapless 30-something heroine, it also hosts a grab bag of Big Ideas. Indeed, a lot of Meg Carpenter’s problems come from trying to move forward in her life in spite of a blizzard of abstract thought that threatens to crowd out actual motion. Some of this is fairly traditional stuff: Zen koans, post-structural theory, philosophical dialogues, and Russian writers. Then again, some of it is downright wacky. Much of the story is driven by a mysterious book about resurrection, and the hypothesis that we’re all living in a staging area in order to perfect ourselves, over and over, until we become immortal. And all this keys into another interesting concept, formulated by Meg’s boyfriend’s OCD-suffering brother Josh: The Periodic Table of Elemental Spirits. The idea here is that the aspects of personality can be broken down into elements, like all matter, and the closer someone gets to the pure state of immortality the further his personality is distilled down to one element or another. Of course it’s more complicated than that—for instance, Josh explains how
interactions with people [are] spiritual reactions or explosions, just like chemical reactions. Tragic interactions are interesting because they lead to the smashing up of these compounds, and the release of energy, just as Nietzsche said. And so it goes, on through time, as some higher spirits are distilled by life, and some made even more complex.
Well no, I don’t pretend to understand it. But it’s a weirdly catchy idea, and as far as I’m concerned every bit as good as Meyers-Briggs.
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean
No left-field theories here—this book is straight-up Periodic Table gossip, and I don’t use the term lightly. Kean is a correspondent for Science Magazine, and though his tales of the elements and their discoveries are backed with hard facts his tone slips easily into the anecdotal, as if he’s giving us the down low on a cast of friends and neighbors behind their backs. Not only individual characteristics but family trees and supporting characters—that is, chemists—come into play. But Kean reserves his greatest delight for the quirky leading characters themselves. Consider mercury, which first caught his eye when he was a boy suffering strep throat and breaking thermometers accidentally-on-purpose:
I’m from the Great Plains and had learned in history class that Lewis and Clark had trekked through South Dakota and the rest of the Louisiana Territory with a microscope, compasses, sextants, three mercury thermometers, and other instruments. What I didn’t know at first is that they also carried with them six hundred mercury laxatives, each four times the size of an aspirin. The laxatives were called Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills, after Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a medical hero for bravely staying in Philadelphia during a yellow fever epidemic in 1793…. As a handy side effect, Dr. Rush’s pills have enabled modern archaeologists to track down campsites used by the explorers. With the weird food and questionable water they encountered in the wild, someone in their party was always queasy, and to this day, mercury deposits dot the soil many places where the gang dug a latrine, perhaps after one of Dr. Rush’s “Thunder-clappers” had worked a little too well.
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
I don’t think it gets more elemental than this. A chemist, a poet, an Italian Jew, Levi spent most of 1944 interned in Auschwitz. His memoir If This is a Man tells his story of survival during those 11 months, but The Periodic Table brackets that time and distills the process of storytelling into something else entirely. In a series of fictional and autobiographical reflections, arranged in 21 chapters each named for an element, he gives us an almost cubist version of the truth broken down into facets. Traditional narrative structure is mostly stripped away here, and the chapters don’t immediately correlate. But his choice of metaphor reveals itself to be correct: these are fundamental, basal tales. Levi survived Auschwitz by working as a chemist in the I.G. Farben laboratory, and chemistry—distillation in all sorts of forms—is everywhere in his account. This is not an easy book to wrap your brain around, nor should it be. From “Potassium”:
I thought of another moral, more down to earth and concrete, and I believe that every militant chemist can confirm it: that one must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost the same as potassium, but with sodium nothing would have happened), the practically identical, the approximate, all surrogates, and all patchwork. The differences can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad’s switch points: the chemist’s trade consists in good part of being aware of these differences, knowing them close up and foreseeing their effects. And not only the chemist’s trade.
Special Bonus Track:
