Well-Read Life™

Why you should write in your books now

The sun is starting to set on the golden age of the printed book.

The number of book titles published may well continue its yearly increase, but the total number of printed copies of all those titles has already begun to diminish. Partly this is due to the dysfunctional Potlatch economics that book publishers and bookstores have been mired in since the Depression.

Excess copies of books are intentionally printed, so they can be stacked high in stores in the hopes of forcing publishing success. This is followed by an expensive retreat of millions of books to the pulp mill. Our present hard times are delivering punishing body blows to this untenable model. But the truly decisive factor in hastening the end of the era of printed books is electronic books.

Ripping the paper handcuffs…

The digitization of books, together with the proliferation of electronic-book readers, will be a boon for readers—much as digital photography has been a boon for photographers. Imagine combining what we love about books with what we love about computers. Books will finally be freed from the paper handcuffs they’ve been shackled with for a millennium.

In not too many years hence, electronic books will be utterly irresistible. We will sit around on porches (or the virtual equivalent), shaking our heads and saying, “Can you imagine when all our books had to be printed? Unbelievable...”

But as with nearly all progress, we will lose a few things along the way. We will lose the physical evidence that a particular book has been read by a particular person.

…but holding on to what’s real

For the most part, losing this physical evidence won’t matter. The best part of reading is what is left inside us. We absorb the books we read into our beliefs and memories and feelings. The accumulated result lingers, we hope, as some kind of wisdom. This is true whether we absorb the book in print form with our eyes, or listen to it as an audiobook, or read it on an electronic device.

Moreover, we now have entrancing digital representations of our personal libraries in which we can assemble and visit colorful images of our books, read our reviews and add to them, remind ourselves of our ratings and modify them, see what others say about the books on our virtual bookshelves, and have a dialog with those readers.

My own virtual library, existing somewhere in the cloud, is an aspect of 21st century reading I now jealously embrace and would not be without. As I write this in the year 2009, it still seems miraculous to me that a slim electronic device will soon contain all the books I have read in my lifetime, along with my quirky, annotated record of having read them.

But having been born during halftime of the 20th century (in the 1950s), I’m old enough to want to be surrounded by old fashioned books—real books, firm of spine and fluttery of pages.

Inside my paper books (which happen to surround me at this moment, since I’m writing in my home library) are my signatures, the dates I began and finished, where I was reading, a boarding pass or train ticket, a newspaper review, a clipped obituary on the author.

Pages are marked and passages underlined. Nestled inside my dust jackets are printouts of email exchanges with friends who recommended the book, and occasionally correspondence with the author.

This old library delivers delights to me. I pull a book from its shelf and feel again the ephemera and favorite passages I would have forgotten.

Footprints in the reading sands of time

A few years ago I asked Levenger customers whether they wrote, or didn’t write, in their books. We received over 2,000 responses to what we learned was a most provocative question.

Responses were about 60/40 in favor of those who write (whom I call Footprint Leavers) vs. those who refrain (Preservationists). Passions run high in both camps, and curiously, both groups justify their positions in the same way: their love of books.

Footprint Leavers want to show their love with love letters in the margin, while Preservationists show their love through abstinence, leaving their books pure as the driven snow.

I make no attempt to hide my own position on this topic. I am a card-carrying, foot-stomping Footprint Leaver. A few years ago I was tolerant in my view toward Preservationists, and even praised them for their contribution to the thriving used-book market, from which I have purchased hundreds of books myself.

But today, with the flood tide of electronic books soon upon us, I’ve changed my mind.

Now I think that if you have children or other loved ones who will someday inherit your books, you should write in them now. No matter how strongly you may lean on the side of the Preservationists, you need to know this: your handwriting inside your books may be their passport to preservation.

Life: affirming, in the margins

Marginalia has proved pivotally important in scholarship. Dr. Will Provine, professor of history of science at Cornell, has traced the history of evolution by reading the marginal notes of scientists in their journals and books. Owen Gingerich, professor of the history of science at Harvard, traced the surprising truth about Copernicus’s impact on astronomy through the handwriting in hundreds of copies of his De revolutionibus.

Historians of this century will likely rue the advent of electronic books, as historians of the 20th century rued the telephone and how it sucked into black oblivion human exchanges that were previously immortalized in letters.

Sometimes the accidental and ancillary end up being more important than what people assumed would be important. A photo of the Grand Canyon from the 1920s is of marginal interest today—unless there happens to be a vintage artifact in the frame.

Archeologists can often extract more information from an ancient civilization’s trash piles than from its monuments. The wine stains and incidental writing in the Sarajevo Haggadah are part of what makes it so valuable today.

Your writing is what will make your books cherished artifacts to your descendants. For you don’t have to be Copernicus or Darwin to be important. We are all famous to our descendants.

At a fundraising luncheon last week, I was sitting at a table with Nancy Hurd, something of a legend in our town due to her 40 years of running Delray’s care center for children of the working poor. She told me about the one thing she treasures most from her father. He served in the Philippines during World War II. When he arrived, the Army gave him and the other soldiers a black leatherbound Bible.

“My father was a man of faith. He kept the Bible with him throughout the war, then brought it home. When he passed away almost 60 years later, my mother asked me what I might want to have of his as a keepsake. I asked for his Bible,” Nancy said.

“He had only written his name in it, but I know it had given him comfort at a time when he was alone and probably scared. He had faithfully served his country, put his life on the line, and this holy book had been his companion. I treasure it to this day.”

Our bright future with books

In a flash, electronic books will be as commonplace as laptops and cell phones—and they will be wonderful. They will transform reading in ways hard for us to grasp today.

Today’s young people will think electronic books are normal, because they will be, and children will be curious about the old paper books, as we are curious when seeing Edison cylinders and stereoscopes.

And yet to this day, we still use another Edison invention called the light bulb. Paper books will continue to shine a bright light, but with a different focus.

I believe high-quality printed books will be produced for a very long time. It’s the common hardcover, which does nothing more in its physical state than show printed text, that might be improved upon by being a living, digital book. The new digital books will put pressure on paper books to be better than ever before and to lead with their strengths—luscious paper, imaginative fonts, luxuriously large pages, textures. (In our own line of Levenger Press books, we aim just for such high touch.)

Seize the day (and the paper)

So today, dear reader, when paper books are plentiful and pens abound and we still know how to write by hand, strut your stuff. Use your books as you would a journal.

Where it might be most important of all is with children’s paper books. My guess is that their large format and vivid color will take awhile for the machines to better. But in time they, too, will succumb to the advantages of electronics.

So when you read a children’s book to a loved one, have the child write his or her name and age, write yours (at least your name), write what you feel at that moment, what your young reader said about the book, the date and time and place. A generation or two from now, your little reading companion may cherish that printed book more than we might imagine.

It’s human nature to take good things for granted and not to value something until it is gone. Seize the paper book, seize your pen, seize your own ability to write with your own hand. As they say in Spain, Hay mas tiempo que vida—there is more time than life.

And now tell me, dear reader: What have you inherited in the margin? And what do you want to leave for younger eyes? 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 Are Entering the Golden Age of Books Don’t Stop Reading to Your Kids – Part 2 of 2

I wish I had known about the reading “gap years” when our boys were in them.  These are the ages from about 7 to 13 when kids can read by themselves but would benefit far more as readers if we parents continued to read to them. (Read Part 1 of this posting for some additional background.)

I so enjoyed our boys’ pajama-clad reading time when they were little and wish it had lasted longer. On the other hand, I also remember being dead tired myself at their bedtimes, and many a night struggling to stay awake in order to read to them.

I feel guilty admitting this, but I remember being a bit relieved when my sons took the books themselves. Am I alone?

The reading gap years for children happen during the mountain-climbing years for most parents. When children are between 7 and 13 years old, parents are often working their hardest and longest to advance in their careers, all the while rushing to soccer games, recitals, social obligations, and their own business obligations.

While most parents might understand and like the idea of continuing to read to their children, the good intentions may fall into the wish bucket with lots of other wishes.

Where, then, can parents turn for help?

Long-distance reading

Terry Flynn, a marketing professional I met at an industry conference, told me he records stories for his two young daughters to play when he’s out of town. “I started doing this a couple of years ago when I started traveling a bit more than I liked,” he said.

His CD is a lovely thing. It has Terry’s creditable narration of Score One for the Sloths by Helen Lester, and Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin. These were spaced with beautiful music tracks, including "Baby" by Bobby McFerrin.

Now that his girls are 8 and 9 (solidly in the gap years), he finds reading is more give-and-take. “They now enjoy reading to me and showing off their own reading styles,” Terry says. But they still ask him to read to them. “I always record the books in private so that the first time they hear the story on the CD, it's a surprise,” he adds.

Hit play, hear book

When my own two sons were in their gap years, it happened to be when I got hooked listening to audiobooks in my car. Since I regularly drove the boys to school, they ended up hearing my books in haphazard fragments.

(Okay, just so you don’t think I’m a total selfish reptile of a parent, I would always listen and talk if they wanted, but sometimes they were just in some other place and I figured, “Well, it won’t hurt them to hear this for awhile.” I’d give them a little background and then hit the play button.)

The other day I asked our younger son, 18-year-old Corey, if he remembered any of this. He thought about it awhile. 

Yes, he did remember a few things.  He remembered Churchill’s “joke to that lady about being sober in the morning but her still being ugly” (Manchester’s biographies), and that sometimes it’s not medicine but laughter than can get you better when you’re sick (Norman Cousins’ Anatomy of an Illness). And he remembered Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, about the iconoclastic physicist.

Our older son, 20-year-old Cal, who’s studying in China, responded by email. “I think the books on tape were a big part of growing up and got me into reading. I am listening to Tim Weiner’s book on the CIA now, and it reminds me of all the ones I heard in the car on road trips and on the way to school each day.”

He remembers some of the books his brother mentioned and also Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Travels with Charlie, as well as  “Stanley shooting some native crossing a bridge” (The Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley).

So I guess by some sort of audio osmosis, our sons took in some adult books during their gap years. In retrospect, had I been more savvy about the comprehension gap, I might have had them choose some books and played them only when we were riding together—a kind of rolling story hour.

Today there are far more audiobooks available for every age to choose from. Teens are the fastest-growing segment of listeners, according to the Audio Publishers Association, with just over 50% of them reporting that they have heard an audiobook, compared with just over 25% of adults.

The human touch of togetherness

I don’t want to suggest that audiobooks or even your own voice recordings are better than physically sitting together and reading, but audio recordings are marvelous tools getting better all the time. Still, if you’re lucky enough to have family and friends close by, these can be the best substitute for frazzled parents during the gap years.

Rose K. Goldsen, one of my professors in grad school, lived in a communal home called Long House in Ithaca, New York. Rose had no family of her own and was near retirement, so having her own apartment connected with other families of all ages was perfect for her.

I remember how much pleasure she gained from reading to the little children of Long House. She explained that it didn’t much matter what she read—the children just loved the togetherness and the physical part of sitting with a book and hearing the sounds connected to the words Rose pointed to.

Being a sociologist, one day Rose tried an experiment. She picked up the phone book and began reading the first name her finger landed on. Then she paused. Almost immediately, the little girl in her lap piped up. 

“You forgot to read the number.”

I’ll always remember Rose’s triumphant face as she told this story. “Even the phone book!” she said, with the wonder of a researcher in a new world of discovery.

Despite all the bells and whistles of our Gizmo’d Age, kids can still crave a good read. All we have to do is want the same thing—together.

What have been your experiences with keeping ‘tweens between the cover of books? I’d love to hear. 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 Are Entering the Golden Age of Books Don’t Stop Reading to Your Kids – Part 1 of 2

When I was on book tour with The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, an experience that may sound more impressive than it was, I thought my job was to give advice.

And advice I gave—on the myths and misconceptions about reading that can stand in the way of us leading our well-read lives. But I also received advice on this topic, and one piece of wisdom stood out for its simplicity and importance: Don’t stop reading to your kids once they begin reading for themselves.

The problem is, it feels so natural to stop.

Lap years to gap years

After the earliest years, when parents or other caregivers read to their young children, both the children and the adults delight in the baby steps of literacy—when sounding out letters magically creates whole words, and when children first string those words together.

Just as young children naturally delight in their increasing mobility, they take pride in first reading out loud and then reading silently to themselves. At this point, children may say they would prefer to read by themselves. Adults accept this with a certain justifiable if bittersweet pride.

Ironically, this is when the biggest opportunity may be lost. It’s a false finish line.

A long-time teacher of young children was the first to convey this concept to me. I’ve since asked more reading experts if they could verify this.

“Yes, parents should definitely continue to read to their kids,” says Patricia Hallion, an adjunct faculty member at the graduate program for reading teachers at Salem State College in Massachusetts. “Research has shown that until about eighth grade, kids are able to listen to books at a much higher level than they are able to read on their own.

“The gap is at least three reading levels, and sometimes more,” Patricia  says. “A lot of children have such depth of comprehension when listening, but their skill for sounding out words impedes them and stops the flow of comprehension when they are left on their own.”

When children begin to read by themselves, normally between the ages of 6 and 8, they enter their comprehension gap years that continue typically until they become teenagers. They should certainly read on their own, but for these five or six gap years, adults have an opportunity to bend the branch down and allow children to grasp literary fruit still out of their reach.

Three gifts

“I think that parents who stop reading aloud to their children when the children learn to read themselves are making a big mistake,” cautions librarian and famed book recommender Nancy Pearl (Book Lust, Book Crush). “To read aloud to your child is to give him or her three things: the gift of your uninterrupted time, the unspoken—but obvious—message that reading is important, and a shared experience of entering together into the world of a book.”

Nancy  and her husband both read plenty to their two daughters past the time the girls could read for themselves. “It’s a good way to begin a discussion of a difficult issue,” Nancy  adds, “but beyond that, it's a pure pleasure to watch a child respond to a book in his or her own particular way.”

From pictures to chapters

Lynda S. Hunter, the head of youth services at the Delray Beach Public Library, says a sense of place can help fill the gap. “I encourage parents to choose a comfortable area and designate it as the ‘Story Place.’ It can be the parents’ bed, or a large comfortable chair. Try to read together at the same time of day or evening. Encourage your child to share the reading but do not make it a condition.”

And parents can help children make the leap from picture books, which are usually read in one sitting, to chapter books, which are not. Start as early as age 4, Lynda advises.

“Begin to share short chapter books with some illustrations such as E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web or Stuart Little.  Read only one chapter each time,” Lynda says. “If your child wants to continue reading, place the chapter book aside and choose a picture book. This will acclimate the child to chapter books as well as create anticipation of what comes next. “

Staying with your kids in this phase helps many budding young readers of children’s books get comfortably rooted in reading grown-up books. “This  works,” Lynda says. 

The best picks are the kids’ picks

Emily D’Amour Pardo, marketing coordinator at the Books & Books bookstore in Miami, says it’s a good idea to let your children choose their own books.

“Parents often think their children are very advanced, and so will ask for books with content that might appeal to an adult reader, but might not hook a child,” Emily cautions. “They also don’t always appreciate that the things they read when they were children might not be as inviting to today’s ‘tween reader.  The best thing is to involve the child in the selection on his or her own book.”

‘My first book club’

Diane Barone, Foundation Professor of Literacy at the University of Nevada, Reno, recognizes that parents may feel uncomfortable reading to older children and suggests an alternative.

“They could each read the same book silently; then they might write something that was interesting, wonderful, weird, or so on about the book each time they read. Then the parent and child can find a time when they can chat about the book beginning with their written comments.” Through this process, says Diane, parents and children enjoy reading together in a process similar to a book club.

I know many of you have personal experiences with reading to children; what stories can you share? I’d love to hear.  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 Are Entering the Golden Age of Books—Ninth in a Series

e-bookshelves

Much attention is being paid to the digital books that may, in time, revolutionize how we read books. Of even more revolutionary importance right now are not so much the e-books as the e-bookshelves. These are the new social networking sites that make it possible for readers to create rich virtual representations of the books on their physical shelves. I am so captivated with the power of these sites, I simply must share the good news with the Well-Read Life community.

I’ll focus on Shelfari.com, since I’m most familiar with it, but others offer similar functionality, and I’ll link to some at the end of this post.

Let’s put the social capabilities of these sites aside until later in the post, and focus first on just what the software and you can do together to magnify the enjoyment you reap from your books.

Get rich quick

Here’s how it works: You type the titles of your favorite books into the search box and the software finds your books almost instantly. You can click on the edition you own (or on the one with the prettiest cover, as I often do), and up it pops onto your digital wooden bookshelf.

Then you can rate it, flag it as one of your all-time favorites (a heart appears on the book), and write a review (which you can edit as often as you like). And you can tag it, which means you can add any number of labels. You can use the tags the software suggests—such as biography, historical-fiction, women’s studies. You can also make up your own labels—for example, Orchids In Literature, Musician Memoirs, Irish Immigrant Experiences. (More on the surprising benefits of tagging in a moment.)

You’ll quickly see your e-bookcase fill up with your cherished books. You can display them in any number of ways—many on your screen at once, or fewer so you can read the subtitles and enjoy the cover art. You can sort them by author, title, date added, or by a custom way that you create. Mouse over any book to add to your review, change your ratings or add tags.

Let me say I’m not a techie. I’m more at home with fountain pens and paper than computers. But this is easy stuff.

On tag cloud nine

If you believe, as I do, that one of the most rewarding parts of leading your well-read life is living with the books you’ve read, this kind of software is the greatest thing since bookcases. Consider:

If you actually keep all the books you’ve read (which requires not only the money to buy rather than borrow them, but also the space to store them), you’re already in a minority of lucky readers. Further, if you then organize your library in some manner, you’re way ahead of most bibliophiles. Most of us intend to organize our library as we intend to organize our photos.

But even if you are in that enviable minority who actually keep and organize their books, you can only do so in one way—for instance, by author or by subject, but not both. With Shelfari, you can quickly sort your library as magically as Mary Poppins tidies up the nursery. And here’s where tags come in. Be liberal when tagging your books and see how the software automatically creates your tag cloud. Here’s what mine looks like:

While I knew I liked histories of big engineering projects, I was startled to discover just how prominent history of technology is for me, and also memoirs, even more than biographies. Standard tags such as literature loom large, but there are also peculiar tags I invented, like Sociology of Reading, Maybe Later (which I use for books I’ve stopped reading but may want to get back to) and, of course, Boovie, for those book/movie combos we’ve been discussing in this forum. Click on any of your tags and all those books are shown together.

Your tag cloud will lead to discoveries about your own bookography and make it easy to see what matters to you. In some ways, your tag cloud may be more revealing about yourself and your interests than a personal journal. It’s a kind of book DNA.

Sorting and sifting through your library with these tools may spur you to read more in a particular realm. Let’s say, for example, that some of your highest rated books are in poetry, yet you haven’t read that much poetry. Or perhaps an author of a book you adored has more recent books you’ll want to try—a few clicks and you can see what they are. Shelfari acts like a stethoscope, letting you hear your own book beat.

Go ahead and leave home without it

Your home library of physical books can be a source of great comfort and joy—when you’re home. But what about when you travel? Wouldn’t it be nice to have your cherished library come along? It can now. As long as you have a Web connection, which is almost anywhere you’re likely to travel, you can see and cultivate your garden of books.

Some readers have told me they keep a list of books they want to read, yet have been frustrated when they have found themselves in a bookstore without their list. With the Shelfari mobile phone link, your lists can go with you. I just tried this feature and quickly called up my “Plan-to-Read” books on my Blackberry. (Again, I am not a tech guy.)

Other readers I’ve interviewed tell me they enjoy re-reading their favorite books every so often, or even yearly. Shelfari has a new feature that makes it very easy—fun, actually—to key in each time you’ve read a book. I just clicked on my Old Man and the Sea and put my high school read date together with my second reading last year. Next I’ll write a short review of what that re-read a generation later was like.

Am I going to abandon my real library at home? Banish the thought! Besides dearly loving the feeling of my books around me, of huge value to me are my handwritten notes, underlining, and marginalia in my own copies. Even though the new batch of e-books offers annotation—complete with voice recording—my guess is that it will be a while before digital books can best what we do today so well with our human digits on old-fashioned paper.

Sharing the wealth: virtual book clubs on demand

Now, to the social-networking aspect of these sites. You can enjoy the benefits of sharing with other readers, passively or actively, just a little or a lot—it’s completely up to you.

When you add one of your books to your shelf, Shelfari shows you a number that indicates how many other people in the network have also put that particular book on their shelves. When I last checked, 487 readers had Dava Sobel’s Longitude on their shelves. You also see that 23 reviews have been written. You can read and respond to these reviews and join in the discussion of your favorite books, essentially having a book club discussion anytime you want on any of your books. Shelfari will let you know about recent discussions of books on your shelf.

Invite your friends and family to see what you’re reading and what you think about the books. When you look at their shelves, the books you share in common are marked with green bookmarks. This kind of sharing has gone on since before the Brontë sisters were reading, but Shelfari and other book social network sites make this communication disarmingly easy. Shelfari will even show you which other people share the most books with you.

Lynne Ittleman, an avid reader, moved from the metropolitan Miami area to a small town in Central Florida several years ago. She finds that Shelfari gives her a needed connection to other readers.

“When I read a good book, it’s difficult to find anyone with whom to discuss it. So I check some shelves and see what people are reading. It’s a sort of interactive book clubbing. I’m not a joiner, but this has filled a need.”

A virtual virtuous circle

Social networking is practiced by millions on Facebook, MySpace, and the photo sharing sites like Flickr. But focusing on books gets to the heart of our intellectual being.

Books, as Barbara Tuchman said, are the carriers of civilization—they are the currency of thought and perhaps our most important stimulus of thoughtful action. To be able to explore your own library with such digital tools can lead to greater self-knowledge, to greater sharing, to more effective action, and to more directed reading in that virtuous circle of a well-read life.

Shelfari is ad-supported, so you have to put up with a few banners, which at present aren’t bad. Amazon is an investor in the company, and Shelfari makes money as an Amazon affiliate if you click through and buy your books that way.

I joined Shelfari last fall and have seen new features coming live at a fast clip, so who knows what new goodies the Shelfari folks will add in coming months and years. But the revolutionary power is already free for the taking, and it feels like a killer app to me—like when spreadsheets from Lotus 1-2-3 revolutionized how we work with numbers.

Apparently, I’m not alone in my enthusiasm. According to Dave Hanley, vice president of marketing at Shelfari, membership in the last year has grown from 15,000 to 1.5 million.

Since Shelfari and the other social networking sites for books are so new, we don’t yet know where they will take us, but it seems to me they are another good reason why we are now entering the Golden Age of the Book.

Please let me know what you think, dear reader. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

And please accept my invitation to see my virtual library by clicking on this link: (You will have to register, but it’s easy and free.)

Other book social network sites you may want to explore:

Library Thing

Visual Bookshelf (on Facebook)

Good Reads

Open World Cat

When reading leads to doing (good)

Amidst the wastelands of bad news spotting our planet, there are also greenbelts of good news arising from intrepid individuals who demonstrate how we can make our world a better place rather quickly. There are John Wood and Greg Mortenson, who build far-flung libraries and schools where they are critically needed. And there is Paul Polak, who founded an organization now helping millions earn their own way out of poverty.

Twenty-five years ago you would have found Paul Polak a middle-aged psychiatrist in Denver. Already he was exhibiting some unusual methods, including paying house calls on the homeless. (One of his patients was living under a loading dock.) Polak sought to understand the situations of his patients in their worlds so he could be a better doctor in his clinic.

Besides being intensely curious, he was also confident in his abilities to imagine unusual solutions and to make things happen. It seems he gained his confidence from an early age, growing up as a Czech emigrant in Canada and being a resourceful young strawberry farmer.

Field notes from the tiniest farms

In his book Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail , we read how at midlife he began traveling widely to visit the world’s poorest people, in order to have face-to-face conversations. This took him to the far corners of Nepal, India, Zambia and Zimbabwe, and into the fields, since virtually all of the poorest people scrape their existence out of tiny one-acre farms.

It’s fair to say that Polak got carried away with interviewing these people. Had he been writing a Ph.D. dissertation, his advisors might well have been satisfied with 20 interviews, but Polak conducted hundreds—and ultimately thousands—over the course of 25 years. He also read about world poverty and subsistence farming, but it was his fieldwork that molded his ideas.

“I have learned more from talking with these poor farmers than from any other thing I have done in my life,” he writes. “Everything I have to say in this book depends almost totally on having interviewed three thousand poor farm families….”

To say Paul Polak has a certain understanding of the world’s tiny farms is to say Tiger Woods has a certain understanding of golf courses.

Cultivating the seeds of entrepreneurship

What Polak has concluded from his listening labors seems at once obvious and also profound: Most extremely poor people in the world don’t make enough money on their farms. They need to change the ways they farm, adopting such tactics as growing high- value, labor-intensive crops in the off season, which can be done with affordable irrigation technology, seeds and fertilizer.

Confronted with a jarring disconnect between what traditional aid efforts have attempted and what poor farmers say they actually need, Polak pitchforks the myth that it is possible to donate people out of poverty. What works is unleashing the poor farmers’ own entrepreneurial abilities, which they generally have in good supply. What works is selling them tools they can afford and helping them use these tools to earn their own wealth.

The idea that companies should earn money selling products to the world’s poor outrages some people in aid organizations, Polak admits. But if you view the poorest people as customers, your perspective changes. Good companies listen hard to what customers have to say. While these customers have little money to spend, they do have some, and there are hundreds of millions of such customers ready to buy things that make economic sense to them.

Listen hard to one-acre farmers and you’ll hear they need inexpensive water management. Polak’s organization has enabled the purchase of millions of cheap treadle pumps (that the farmers can pedal), crude but effective water storage systems, and shockingly cheap drip irrigation tubes that waste nary a drop while suckling plump vegetables.

Once the poorest start making some money, it’s interesting how they spend it. Polak shows how income earned by Nepalese farmers first was used to purchase food, then invested back into agricultural production, and then allocated to the education of their children. Education beat out clothing, festivals, home improvement and even medicine.

30 million on a dollar a day

Like John Wood’s Room to Read foundation, Polak’s International Development Enterprises focuses on quantifiable results. This has been instrumental in its winning its second major grant from the Gates Foundation earlier this year, for $27 million. IDE has a specific goal of ending the poverty of 30 million dollar-a-day families by 2020.

In 2007 the restless Polak launched a second organization, D-Rev, to focus on designing products for the ninety percent of the world’s population neglected by most businesses and, therefore, most designers.

Paul Polak has taken charge of his education as few have. At a point in life when his peers would typically spend more time with other well-heeled professionals on verdant golf courses, Polak spent his time in the company of poor farmers on parched soil, listening to them explain how they needed an inexpensive way to store monsoon water.

After reading his book and watching his interviews, I see a man wealthy in experience. A man with an inner glow and an impish grin who enjoys being a contrarian, fortified with the confidence of knowing he’s on the right path.

I’d very much like to hear your thoughts on this man who has traveled such an unusual journey. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

A Cycling Tour of Libraries of Spain

With both our sons occupied in their own summer programs, Lori and I were looking forward to a rare getaway—a wedding-anniversary trip, just the two of us, to Spain. I was relishing the idea of a cycling tour through the Rioja wine region and touring the libraries, big and small, we could find along the way. (And shopping, since we’re always on the lookout for new product ideas for Levenger.)

I was intrigued to see what Spain’s libraries offered its citizens since, according to the most recent comparative study of library funding (Libecon Data by David Fuegi and Martin Jennings), Spain is grouped among the Very Low Spenders. This group also includes Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania.

These nations spend between 1 and 5 euros per capita on their libraries. In comparison, the United States, at the equivalent of 22.8 euros per capita, is a High Spender, albeit at the bottom of the bracket. (Above this resides a rarified reading room of nations deemed Top Spenders. More on them later.)

A capital diversion and an uplifting prison

Our first library was Spain’s most prestigious—its national library in Madrid, which shares space with a museum. Outside it is majestic, with tall iron gates and soaring statues of Cervantes and other Spanish luminaries. Inside, we could get only so far. Unlike America’s Library of Congress, the Biblioteca Nacional does not allow just any turista to walk in and have a seat in the reading room. Instead, we were directed downstairs to a museum open to all. It held a fabulous exhibition on the history of language. We could absorb only so much since there were no English translations, but still, it was worth the visit.

Next we visited Segovia and discovered that the public library had taken up quarters in the city’s old prison. Located on a busy shopping street, the edifice was under repair. Inside, the rooms are a bit chopped up— perhaps not surprising, given the building’s original purpose. No spaces could be called inspiring, but there were uplifting quantities of books, computers, music and movies, and colorful reading areas for children.

Afterthoughts and appendages

Traveling next through the wine region, we saw few libraries. Finally, at one town hall I spotted a sign up on the second story in delicate script that read “Biblioteca Ciberteca.” Up a darkened staircase, we discovered a windowless room lined with bookcases and half a dozen computers. Like libraries I’ve visited the world over, the people inside were busy at the computers, hardly taking the time to look up at unlikely visitors in cycling gear.

Our final library visit was in the chic seaside city of San Sebastian. Here the public library is housed in an impressive civic building. Less impressive is the library’s actual space, which is half underground and reminiscent of a corridor connecting two airport terminals. It has the feeling of someone finally removing the boxes of old accounting files so those pesky librarians could have their space. When I asked if the darkened computer terminals were available for public Internet access, the kind librarian responded, “Yes, but the woman who must give you the password is out teaching a computer class now.”

While you can find public libraries in Spain if you look for them, what I didn’t see in our random wanderings were actual buildings devoted to libraries. Such single-purpose buildings have been common in the United States for a century and also in Egypt and Chile.

The running of the books

What we did find were book fairs. On the same week that bulls were chasing people in the streets of Pamplona, people were chasing books in the streets of San Sebastian and Segovia. The Segovia fair seemed especially popular with children, and many booths had steps to allow little people to peruse books alongside their elders. The Spanish bookstalls that Hemingway so lovingly described in For Whom the Bell Tolls seem to have survived into our present century.

The World Factbook reports the literacy rate of Spain at 98%, just a point below that of the United States. Libraries, admittedly, are only part of a nation’s learning and reading infrastructure. And the Spanish were reading.

When they weren’t cheering their soccer team on to win the Euro Cup, or their Rafael Nadal to take Wimbledon, many were turning pages of books—in parks and cafes and on the beach. The bookstores in Spanish cities reminded me of those in the U.S. a generation ago, small and un-chained.

Scandinavia’s higher latitudes

As for those nations in the Top Spenders group for libraries, they spend more than 39 euros per capita, or about twice what the U.S. spends. Who are they?

Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden.

I haven’t seen what libraries look and feel like in those countries. Have you? I’d love to hear your experiences in libraries in Scandinavia, and everywhere around our learning planet. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea

The Golden Age of Books
Reaching the Schoolhouse Summit

Should Greg Mortenson win the Nobel Peace Prize? Read his story in the bestselling Three Cups of Tea and you may agree he’s a strong candidate.

For the past 15 years, Mortenson has laid his life on the line building schools in the most remote and inhospitable parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He has been fighting terrorism, not with bombs but with books.

Mortenson has a very different background from John Wood, founder of the Room to Read Foundation.  Rather than a globe-trotting executive, Mortenson was a mountain climber and underemployed nurse, at one time living out of his car in Berkeley, California. Where Wood is all modern business principles applied to charitable work, Mortenson is blue-collar sweat in dangerous settings.

Yet both men demonstrate how extraordinary individuals can leverage the resources of the developed world to help children leapfrog to literacy.

Scaling a different summit

It was on the way down after his failed attempt to reach the summit of K2 in the Himalayas that Mortenson, broken and lost, stumbled into the tiny village of Korphe in Pakistan, where he was nursed back to health. Discovering that the local children had no school, he refocused his sights from scaling high and distant mountaintops to building one-story schoolhouses in some of the world’s most remote pockets.

He didn’t realize he had chosen a harder task. 

Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations…One School at a Time is co-authored by David Oliver Relin. It’s a cliffhanger of near-deadly experiences, anguished setbacks, and starry successes. Reading it will introduce you to good and courageous people in both hemispheres.

Mortenson’s foundation, the Central Asian Institute (www.ikat.org), got its name from its founding philanthropist, Jean Hoerni, himself a mountain climber as well as successful entrepreneur. With Hoerni’s help, Mortenson was introduced to people of means who could support his hazardous school-building initiative.

Building the school in Korphe turned out to take longer than Mortenson planned and required the building of many bridges—both figural and literal. Just as reaching one mountaintop allows one to see that there are many others, at this first school’s completion, Mortenson realized there were many more villages just as needy for schools as Korphe.

The same other-worldly terrain that attracts the world’s mountain-climbing elite also makes it difficult to build anything—including schools. The challenge is not only the natural obstacles of this region with its few roads (and most of those hardly deserving the name), but also the manmade dangers that are just as daunting. These are the war-torn regions that gave rise to the Taliban and still provide hiding for Al Qaeda. Such madrasses—or schools—that exist focus on male pupils. An unknown number of these tutor their young charges in extremist, anti-Western education.

Groundwork grounded in reading

In order for an American like Mortenson to have even a chance of success, he had to slowly and carefully build relationships of trust based upon his own good character and ability to learn the local Balti language. He also had  to reinforce his independence from western religious and governmental institutions.

Mortenson discovered many of the same principles that Wood had:

• Parents want education for their children. Along with the most basic needs for food, water, and health care, parents recognize that a better life for their children depends upon their children learning to read and write.
• Poor people need help with basic infrastructure, including schoolhouses.
• Given whatever educational opportunities do exist, girls have been shortchanged, yet they can deliver more return on their education in that they tend to stay local and take on the education of the young.
• As in so many activities in life, it’s about relationships. Mortenson’s ties with local power brokers, forged slowly and sometimes at his peril, were what made progress possible.
• Success depended upon the active involvement and co-investment of parents and other locals.

Like Wood, Mortenson combined his own experiences in the real world with reading. When he would return home to the United States, he would read intensely about the history and geography of the region, about development efforts, and about management principles to help him lead his foundation. He also learned during visits to the Philippines and Bangladesh how successful businesses can be run by the poor, and how focusing on educating girls can reap long-term rewards for a community.

Isn’t this reading at its finest? Read, do, read more, do more—repeat as intensely and as frequently as your energies allow. There is no substitute for  real-world experiences combined with the knowledge to be gained from books.

In my next post, I’ll report on how another remarkable person, Paul Polak, has invested his life in learning first-hand through interviews, and second- hand through reading, about the problems faced by the poorest people on the planet. Like Mortenson and Wood, Polak discovered the importance the poorest people place on education for their children.

And what do you observe, dear reader? Can you share examples of this interplay between reading and doing? I’d love to hear from you.

Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

The Golden Age of Books: Leapfrog to Literacy – Part 2 of 2

Leapfrog to Literacy – Part 2 of 2

Our discussion is on Room to Read, the nonprofit organization that former Microsoft executive John Wood founded to combat global illiteracy by building schools and libraries in the developing countries most in need. There’s more on Room to Read’s founding principles in Part 1 of this post.

Real-life reading

To assuage potential concerns about Western religious or political motivations, Room to Read emphasizes its nondenominational and nongovernmental status. In addition,
Room to Read staffers maintain a close connection to the children, parents and teachers the program reaches out to. Rather than imposing its ideas from afar, the organization develops its ideas “on the ground,” framing them within the cultural context of the communities it’s reaching out to.

As an example, Wood and his staff recognized that for economic and cultural reasons, girls are often held back from school, whereas boys—or at least older boys—can attend. Yet an educated girl can often deliver a higher return on investment, in that she is more likely to stay in the community and teach others.

“The agriculture sectors in most countries have become nearly entirely feminized because the men tend to migrate either to big cities or abroad in search of better opportunities,” says Nadereh Chamlou, Senior Advisor in the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa Region. “Entire communities have to depend on the decision-making, knowledge and ingenuity of the women. The welfare of the households depends directly on the level of education of the women who head them.”   

Happily, the cost for an average annual scholarship for a girl is quite affordable by American standards. For $250, a donor can pay for tuition, books and even a uniform. In return, a young girl who may someday be teaching her own children to read can become an educated woman.

Another example: while Web-connected computers can indeed offer great gains, so can old-fashioned printed books, which at present are easier to scale. In Cambodia, for example, Room to Read libraries combine computers in labs with books in laps.

The unprecedented volume of new books published in English is an opportunity for driving costs down and availability up. The Scholastic corporation has been a particularly generous supporter of Room to Read, donating hundreds of thousands of books. Of even greater importance, though, is that students learn from books in their native languages, so Room to Read has developed a local language publishing program. In less than six years, the program has published 2 million books.

The business of giving wisely

John Wood and Room to Read demonstrate what can be done, both quickly and effectively, to improve global literacy. Its success has required an understanding of history, including the proven power of enabling change versus just providing cash. It has also taken an understanding of sound business principles, and more specifically, of entrepreneurial techniques.

Recent business books such as Chris Zook’s Profit from the Core and Jim Collins’s Good to Great demonstrate that focus on a relatively narrow set of competencies leads to long-term success. Room to Read follows this wisdom by being clear about what it does—and does not do.

For example, Room to Read does not help coordinate volunteering in local countries; rather, its website suggests a few organizations that specialize in that worthy work. Nor does Room to Read handle book donations, despite Wood’s first experience doing just that. Instead it defers to Better World Books, which specializes in the logistics of collecting and transporting used books around the planet.

The magnitude of global illiteracy is daunting, and even Room to Read’s impressive accomplishments are still small. Yet its success shows how quickly improvements can be made when well-educated, highly motivated people get to work.

I’ll be reporting on other promising forces aiding global literacy and would like to hear from you. What do you see?

Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

The Golden Age of Books: Leapfrog to Literacy – Part 1 of 2

Leapfrog to Literacy – Part 1 of 2

Globally, 115 million school-age children do not attend school. An estimated 770 million people, roughly one-seventh of the world’s population, lack basic literacy. Two-thirds of these are women, which sets up a vicious cycle, since it is mainly women who teach young children.

These statistics could be reason enough for despair. Yet there are also new reasons for hope. Well-educated, highly motivated people are using the tools and capital of the developed world to help children in the developing world leapfrog to literacy. These people collaborate with equally talented and passionate people in the developing countries to create effective co-investment projects, linking the richest countries with the poorest.

One such person is former Microsoft marketing executive John Wood.

‘Come back with books’

Back in 1998, he took a vacation from his high-powered job to trek in Nepal. A product of an American upbringing, Wood was aghast at the lack of schools and scarcity of books in Nepal. Voicing his feelings to a local headmaster, Wood heard in reply a sentence that would change his life. “Perhaps, sir, you will someday come back with books.”

In his highly readable account, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur’s Odyssey to Educate the World’s Children, Wood tells the story of his transformation from globe-trotting software executive to charity founder. His nonprofit organization, Room to Read, is one of the most effective organizations for educating children in the developing world. And it is growing at the speed of a Wall Street darling.

Putting an education to work

Like many fortunate Americans, Wood had the advantages of growing up in a family that valued education. Positive school experiences were reinforced with trips to his local public library in Athens, Pennsylvania. His bookish cradle left a lasting impression. “This love of reading, learning, and exploring new worlds so predominates my memory of youth that I simply could not imagine a childhood without books,” Wood writes in his book.

His formal education included an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School, but by his account, Wood may have learned even more about business during his years at Microsoft—including the habit of focusing on business models that can be scaled up. Wood learned firsthand how a team of people with focused concentration, and quantitative measures ever in front of them, could achieve impressive growth.

He also read history and learned how business growth principles have been applied in charitable work. There was Andrew Carnegie, whom Wood describes as “my own personal hero,” because of the many libraries he built a century ago.

Closer to present times, Wood was inspired by former President Jimmy Carter’s campaign against guinea worm disease, which resulted in a decline from 900,000 cases worldwide in 1989, to fewer than 30,000 in 1995.

Further reading and interviews gave Wood an understanding of the magnitude of global illiteracy, and also of the pitfalls of some conventional charitable organizations. It wasn’t uncommon for a large portion of donations to be absorbed in administrative overhead, nor for tangible results to be at worst illusory, and at best hard to quantify.

Drawing on all these experiences—childhood memories, higher education, work, field observation and self-education—Wood started putting together a new model for getting results in literacy programs. The principles include:

• Simple to understand: Room to Read donations build schools, libraries and computer labs in countries that need them most, including Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka, India and, most recently, South Africa and Zambia.
• Co-investment model: Like Andrew Carnegie’s library model, funds are approved only when local communities contribute land, labor and the means for ongoing support.
• Inexpensive: Despite the current economy, U.S. dollars still go a long way in the developing world. For a few thousand dollars, individual donors can fund a whole library or school.
• Focus on quantifiable results: Room to Read has built more than 5,100 libraries since the organization began in 2000.
• Low overhead: Administrative overhead is limited to 10%.
• Accountability: You can read Room to Read annual reports and its Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) reports on the organization’s website: www.roomtoread.org.
• Clarity of goals—Room to Read defines not only what it does but what it does not do. (More on this in Part 2 of this posting.)

Building upon this solid business foundation, Room to Read makes effective use of Microsoft-era marketing techniques, including email networking and online donations.
Wood has rightly received much attention, as journalists and foundations recognize that Room to Read’s represents something good going on in the world.

In Part 2 of this post, we’ll look at how Room to Read applies some best business practices to doing good in a sustainable way. But first, I want to hear from you.

Do you agree that as a highly literate, developed nation, Americans should support global literacy? How about here in the U.S., and in your community—are there literacy programs you know of that are particularly effective?

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 Are Entering the Golden Age of Books - Seventh in a Series

The Legacy of Carnegie Libraries

Walk into just about any public library in America and you can find the names of local citizens who contributed to the library. Yet one name appears more than all others. It is not the name of a local citizen at all, but of a small, bearded, nineteenth-century immigrant who became America’s iconic steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie.

Beginning in 1883 and continuing for some 40 years, Carnegie’s foundation helped to construct over 1,600 libraries in American cities and towns. In 1919, the year of his death, Carnegie’s money had built nearly half of the libraries then open in America. He built another 700 or so in other countries. His unprecedented donations earned him the sobriquet “Patron Saint of Libraries.”

Carnegie’s foundation required that local communities come up with the land, the books and the operating budgets, but they could build the libraries in whatever style the local community approved.

The offer was irresistible to most municipalities in a country still rushing to settle itself, and nary a town that applied for a library was turned away. They used Carnegie funds to build fine, lasting buildings that have sheltered generations. Most Carnegie libraries, old enough to celebrate their century marks, are still in use today.

Why Carnegie wrote the checks

Carnegie was the quintessential American success story. As a boy, working long hours at his job, he was overwhelmed by the generosity of a retired merchant named Colonel Anderson, who lent his personal collection of some 400 books on Saturday afternoons to local boys. This was how Carnegie educated himself.

It was from this life-altering experience that Carnegie would conclude decades later that there was no better use of his money than to build libraries so that others could benefit in similar fashion.

He began in his native Scotland, where he provided the funds for a new library in the town of Dunfermline. The opening of the beautiful stone library, on 25 August 1883, so pleased Carnegie that he set out to repeat the process—again and again, and with a passion.

The Scottish historian Gerry Blaikie explains something of Carnegie’s complex motivations. “Carnegie and his family were totally indifferent to organized religion so there was no religious purpose in his philanthropy. Much more likely was a political agenda to help the underprivileged gain access to knowledge, something which the ruling classes on both side of the Atlantic would not have fully approved of.”

Photos of the original interiors of the Dunfermline library from Blaikie’s website show some scenes still familiar to today’s library patrons—racks for periodicals, reading tables and children’s rooms. Other aspects seem curiously quaint—such as separate reading rooms for women.

“Whether or not Andrew Carnegie is remembered as a Gilded Age robber baron or the father of business philanthropy probably depends upon which side of the economic tracks you hail from,” observes Les Standiford, the author of Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick & The Bitter Partnership That Transformed America. “But such debate aside, it is undeniable that Carnegie is as responsible as any modern individual for the very concept of the free public library.

“While he imposed no stipulations as to size or style of architecture, the Carnegie Library was often the most imposing structure in a given community,” Les adds. One structure in particular stays in Les’s memory.

“I remember haunting the stacks of the Cambridge, Ohio, Carnegie Library as a youth—the grandeur of the building seemed a testament to the treasure trove of volumes that it housed. The thought of writing a book that would take a place on those shelves seemed as monumental an ambition as seizing the Grail itself.” 

Carnegie spread most of his largess in his adopted America, but he funded libraries in all the English-speaking countries of his day, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

Keystones and key ideas

It’s not only his buildings that endure into our present century. Carnegie’s idea of co-investment with local communities is also being carried on in a significant way around the world today by the Room to Read Foundation. In less than ten years, this foundation has helped build some 5,000 libraries in developing countries. (Room to Read is the subject of my next Golden Age post.)

It’s ironic that cacophonous steel mills produced so many quiet reading rooms. How many millions of readers and writers over the years have enlightened themselves in those quiet sanctuaries? How many even today tap quietly at computer keyboards inside those same spaces?

Do you have an experience to share involving a Carnegie library? Please let me hear from you. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).