Well-Read Life™

Why We Are Entering the Golden Age of Books—Sixth in a Series

How some libraries around the world are leaping into the 21st century

It was the first time any guests had asked to be shown the local library. But my son and I were interested not only in cycling this famed region of Chile during his spring break, but also in seeing all the bibliotecas we could along the way. As we walked the few blocks from our hotel in Temuco to the municipal building, our three guides, who lived in the area and were proud to show us its ample charms, tried to manage our expectations. “No muy bueno,” said one. “Not very good.”

Our progress was slowed by scattered groups of teenagers in school uniforms chatting and laughing. Schools had begun their fall sessions a week earlier in this city of a quarter million, located as far south of the equator as Washington, D.C., is north of it.

Arriving at the somewhat worn municipal complex at a busy intersection, we entered the darkened foyer and obtained permission to pass through a windowed hallway. Sunbleached glass cases exhibited the books of the city’s two Nobel-winning poets, Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda. We entered a room about the size of a grade-school classroom. This constituted the public space of the Temuco Municipal Library.

To our left, eight computer terminal seats where full with attentive patrons—mostly young people—while two other people waited their turns. Our chief guide, Alejandro Levy—whose English was nearly as poor as my Spanish—motioned for me to follow him to the counter across the room, where he asked the librarian for a Spanish-English dictionary. She retrieved a well-worn tome with a cracked plastic cover over its yellowed spine. Alejandro turned to a Spanish word and put his finger under it so I could read the translation.

The word was vergüenza. The translation is shame.

Connecting in Chile

I shook my head no. While the library was humble by American standards for a city this size, the free Internet access and avid patrons gave the room a vitality. Outside the door to the room was a painting of Neruda next to the Biblio Redes sign, the Gates Foundation initiative to spread free Internet access around the world.  The words on the sign translate to:

“BookNet: Open your world: Free Internet here in your public library.”

We were to come across this welcoming blue sign outside many libraries on our tour of the Lakes and Volcanoes region of Chile. Some of the libraries were architecturally beautiful, as in the town of Pucon, not to mention the stately Biblioteca  Nacional in Santiago.

Where public-access computers were absent, however, the difference was stark. In this photo set of the Orsono Municipal Library, perhaps you can feel the dull atmosphere that enveloped us despite the brilliant blue morning outside.  Empty seats before empty tables, a lonely counter where one submits one’s requests, after having looked up books in card catalogs. Quaint is perhaps the kindest term one might use to describe Orsono’s library.

But this will change when public-access terminals arrive in Orsono, as they surely will in this country that enjoys the highest Gross Domestic Product, per capita in Latin America.

Aspiring in Egypt

Facing a more daunting challenge is Egypt. Its population of 82 million, compared with Chile’s 16 million, is younger, with a median age of 24 versus 31. Moreover, Egypt’s literacy rates are lopsided and low, with only 83% of males and 59% of females over the age of 15 deemed to be literate, compared with Chile’s 96% literacy rate for both genders.

On our trip to Egypt this past winter, there were encouraging signs on the library front, not only in the stunning world-class facility at Alexandria, but in the spreading Mubarak Libraries, which for the last dozen years have sprinkled modern facilities with Internet access around the country.

In the Mubarak Library in Luxor we visited one weekday evening, after paying a nominal entrance fee we found inviting stacks open for browsing, and were gratified to see young women surfing the Net. Computer terminals can be far less expensive than thousands of books, to say nothing of the large buildings customarily used in the developed world to house such books.

Can new models for libraries open the world to hundreds of millions of people in the developing world?

If so, one country in need is Cambodia.

Hoping for Cambodia

In 2004 our family had the good fortune to be able to visit Siem Reap, Cambodia. We went, as so many tourists do, to see the temples of Ankor Wat. I asked our tour guide, who spoke remarkably good English, if there were a library in town. He didn’t know the word library so I tried bibliotheca, which he did know.

“No, we have no bibliotheca in Siem Reap,” he said. “I think there is one in Phnom Penh…”

“Is there a bookstore in Siem Reap?” I asked.

“Yes, we have that,” he replied.

He took us to a busy thoroughfare with open markets and brought us to something akin to an American convenience store. Crammed between shelves of snacks and soft drinks were a few shelves of books—mostly in English about the temples, and a few in Khmer. This would have to suffice as book inspiration for the 750,000 citizens of Siem Reap, about the same number of people who reside in San Francisco.

Cambodia is a country in need of almost everything. Fortunately, people from many nations are building hospitals and hotels and preserving its priceless temples. Cambodia faces daunting literacy statistics akin to Egypt, with estimated literacy rates of 85% for men and 64% for women, and a median age of a mere 21.

There was actually one old biblioteca in Siem Reap—or what might have been one—among Ankor Wat’s temple ruins, which date back to the 12th century. Yet I can imagine a new structure alongside the road, perhaps next to the one-room school shown in this photo, modest but clean and networked to the world so that a fifteen-year-old Cambodian girl in Siem Reap can look up international literacy rates as easily as I have done here in my comfortable seat in Delray Beach, Florida.

In future posts, we’ll look into some of the technological efforts under way to open the world to the young millions worldwide who are growing up far from the sheltering libraries of the developed world.

Until then, please send me your experiences with libraries in the United States and around the world. What have you seen?

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Why We Are Entering the Golden Age of Books—Fifth in a Series

America’s libraries bring community to communities

When I was on the board of our local public library in Delray Beach, Florida, we had to justify our campaign for a new library to potential donors who wondered whether libraries were relevant anymore. With the Web available to most people in their homes, was our old model of public libraries obsolete?

We would point out that easy Web access from home was not yet universal. All 15 Internet computers in our 50-year old library were nearly always in use and often had a queue of people waiting. At the same time, circulation of books, especially current fiction, continued to slowly climb. Plus, the library provided a safe, (relatively) quiet refuge staffed with helpful librarians.

Fortunately we won out, and due to the generosity of many private donors as well as the enlightened support of several governmental groups, Delray Beach now has a magnificent new public library. It boasts 55 public-access computers and a computer lab where free computer classes are held. The circulation of books and DVDs is up some 15%, while the number of library visits has more than doubled. The seats in front of all the new, flat-screen computers are nearly always occupied.

Happily, Delray Beach is not unusual but typical of thousands of American towns that enjoy wonderful public libraries. In neighboring Boca Raton, a new library was just finished, which you might well be amazed by. I certainly was.

I had similar “wow” experiences when I visited the libraries in Memphis, Tennessee, and Evanston, Illinois; in Wellesley and Newton, Massachusetts, and  Greenwich, Connecticut; and in California’s wine country. At the St. Helena Public Library in the Napa Valley, Lori and I perused rows upon rows of handsome binders containing wine labels—important reference books for wine makers designing new labels.

And I’m not even counting the deservedly famous metropolitan libraries in Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle.

More book than burgers…

Our country has thousands of small, humble libraries, too. Many of these are included in our national total of 16,543 (which, as the American Library Association likes to remind us, is more than the 13,727 McDonald’s). Nearly two-thirds of American adults have library cards. As a nation, we check out an average of more than 7 items per year for every citizen, totaling some 2 billion items.

For these benefits, we pay an average of $31 in taxes per year.

…but a small piece of the pie

When I travel, I make it a point to drop in at libraries, often to the exasperation of my family. But I find libraries superior to visitor centers. When it comes to information on their town, you can’t find a better source than the local librarians. In the scores of libraries I’ve visited, from Alaska to Arizona, I’ve also found free Internet access in every one, open stacks for browsing, and inviting places to sit and read.

The one limitation I notice most often is that all these benefits might be for naught, because the library is closed.

Most municipalities struggle to fund the operating budgets for their libraries.When cutbacks occur, hours of operation are what suffer first—evenings go, then Sundays. Librarians and their friends have to struggle heroically every year for their slice of the public pie.

Cradles of learning and liberty

In the early days of our country, private libraries vied with the public model. We still have a few of the private ones, including The Library Company of Philadelphia and the Boston Athenaeum, but the tax-supported free model won out. The role of the library in helping new Americans—young people, old people, entrepreneurs and dreamers—continues to this day. Thousands of authors have testified how encountering their local public library was a pivotal event in their lives, and countless books have been written under the protective canopy of library ceilings.

Public libraries are where tens of thousands of Americans go weekly to engage in book discussions groups, to see screenings of classic films, and to hear authors and scholars lead discussions of literature and ideas. Many libraries host museum-quality traveling exhibitions.

One of the best things about American libraries are the librarians who work there. They are trained to help in an efficient, nonjudgmental way—both with difficult research questions and odd “reader’s advisory” questions, such as “What should my little brother read next?”

Moreover, librarians view themselves as professional protectors of our First Amendment. They throw themselves in the path of would-be book burners, and also in the path of government policies that impinge on the privacy of citizens to read what they want without anyone keeping track.

Since we can’t help but take all good things for granted, only by going outside of the United States can we begin to understand that we live in Library El Dorado. That is the subject of my next post, where we’ll take a quirky trip around the world, stopping at a few libraries.

Meantime, let me hear your thoughts on American libraries. What is your experience?
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For more on all that America’s libraries do, read the report of the American Public Library’s Public Programs Office.

Charming Boovie preserves the old world of hard-to-find books

With the rapid pace of technological change, the old way of struggling to find out-of-print books is a fading memory. Fortunately, the old way has been marvelously preserved in a delightful boovie that also happens to be a true story.

The book is 84 Charing Cross Road. Set in the years immediately following World War II, it chronicles the transatlantic correspondence between Helene Hanff, a New York City booklover, and Frank Doel, a straight-laced British bookseller. The uncertainty and serendipity of the old ways come through with humor, pathos, and love. Published in 1970, the book was made into an equally heart-tugging movie in 1986, starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins.

Tight finances and her busy writing life kept Hanff from visiting England. In the end, when she finally does, Doel has passed away and the shop is empty. And so an inefficient yet sweet chapter in the evolution of reading has passed into history as well.

What’s a boovie, you may ask? It’s simply a movie adapted from a book. The conventional practice is to read the book first and then see the movie, but there may be equal (perhaps even greater) merit in seeing the movie first and then reading the book—a reverse boovie.

Now it’s my turn to ask. What are your thoughts about boovies, and those boovies that give one last toast to a way of life that is no longer?  Let me know what you discover while pursuing your viewing and reading. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Why We’re Entering the Golden Age of Books: Reason No. 4

Hard-to-Find No More

Most of us have a hard time remembering what life was like before cell phones—not to mention before air conditioning and the polio vaccine. And thus we will likely soon forget a feature of life that was once as common as LPs, ashtrays and payphones. It was referred to as “hard-to-find books.”

Allow me to take you back in time to, say, misty 1990. In that tender year, if you suddenly became aware of a marvelous book that, though out of print, you had to have, that moment of beckoning sunrise was immediately followed by a cold, overcast sky: how on earth to get it?

You might try your library, where, if your book wasn’t that old, the librarian could likely find record of a copy in some sister library. Your library could put in a request through inter-library loan, and if the book wasn’t checked out, you might be able to pick it up.

In a few weeks.

Maybe.

If you wanted to own a copy, you would stop by your local used-books dealer. It would be unlikely that he’d have it, but if he were a bona fide bookseller, he’d try to track down a copy. He might ask you for a deposit first. Then he’d call a few places he knew.

If that didn’t work, he could place a small want ad in AB Bookman’s Weekly, a hefty trade publication printed on newsprint and mailed to antiquarian book dealers across the land. There, in their back offices, bespectacled booksellers would play a quiet game of concentration, comparing the tiny want ad for your book with their memory of what they had on their shelves. A match would elicit a postcard, which could lead to a phone call or letter to you, quoting condition and price.

Then, assuming you still remembered that you had asked for this book in the first place, and still had the yen for it, you’d write a check and wait a while longer. The process could make watching grass grow seem fast.

Flash forward to today. Upon learning of an out-of-print book, no matter how old, you type a few words into your computer and there, appearing as if by magic, will be a color image of the book—actually, several copies. They will likely be cheap, too, and the one you select can be on your doorstep tomorrow.

The difference between then and now is not merely quantitative but qualitative. It makes possible a different kind of well-read life. Today, an inquiring reader can benefit from fast feedback loops—virtuous cycles of seeking, finding, reading, and seeking more.

Developed a sudden interest in Gabriela Mistral? Or how about antebellum apiculture? Is it coelacanths and their influence on modern evolutionary theory? In days you can collect a library on these and millions more topics that formerly may have taken years—but more likely than not, simply didn’t happen.

This air-conditioning for the mind was made possible by a uniform method of listing books in databases, and then linking those databases to the Web. It’s another reason why we’re entering the Golden Age of Books.

Robert Hittel is a rare-books dealer and appraiser here in South Florida. For many years he also ran a well-known and much-loved bookstore devoted to used books. He remembers what it was like before computers, and how quickly the World Wide Web changed the book world.

“Before the Web, if there were 10 copies across the country of a book you wanted, you could spend years finding one,” said Rob. “Today, you see all 10 books on your computer in a matter of seconds.”

“The mystery and serendipity are gone,” Rob said. “In the old days, when people browsing in my store discovered a used book that they were even moderately interested in, they knew they had better buy it, since it might be gone on their next visit and they might never come across another copy. Today, there’s no such urgency. You can always find it later online if you want.

“It’s definitely better for readers because there’s more available and it’s cheaper,” Rob said. “It’s pretty much the end of hard-to-find books.”

Marty Manley helped erase the expression “hard-to-find” from books. Together with antiquarian bookman Richard Weatherford, he founded a major online source for out-of-print books called Alibris. 

“Before we started, book dealers set prices since they had a scarce commodity,” Marty said. “But as books went online, the market became efficient and true supply-and-demand took over. At one point, book prices were falling by twenty-five percent per quarter.”

Marty, who sold Alibris in 2006 and left the company last year, recalls life prior to large- scale online selling. “A used-books dealer might get $10 for a copy of Bridges of Madison County in a store, but once more and more seller inventories came online, it was obvious that there were far too many copies. Today you can find Bridges free in book bins across the country.”

Although some books were more in demand than in supply, “in the main, the supply of out-of-print books exceeded demand, which really hurt used-book stores but was good news for customers,” Marty said

“When we began Alibris in 1998, we used the tagline, ‘Books you thought you’d never find.’ It worked back then. Soon, however, it was obsolete.”

Visiting the home page of www.Alibris.com in 2008 shows a different tagline. It reads: “You’ll find it at Alibris! Over 60 million used, new, and out-of-print books!”

If books are medicine, we all used to live in remote mountain villages; whereas today, we all live next door to the well-stocked drugstore.

Does this boon for readers mean that bricks-and-mortar stores that sell used books will go away?

“The Web is not great for browsing,” Marty pointed out. He and his wife will make a date night of browsing new and used bookstores near their home in San Francisco. “Even to this day, I prefer browsing in a store versus online.”

In Florida, you can still find Robert Hittel Used Books on Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale (it helps that Rob owns the building). But Rob has expanded his appraisal work beyond rare books to include antiques and estate items. Customers still come in to browse the bookshelves, just not as many.

For the time being at least, we still have the best of both worlds in the Golden Age: bricks-and-mortar destinations for browsing used books, and online destinations that make every book easy to find.

Do you agree? I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether we’re entering the Golden Age of Books. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).