Pop-up king sprung books to life

Waldo Hunt, shown in 2002, holds up a copy of a pop-up book he produced, 'The Haunted House' by Jan Pienkowski.

Remembrances
November 24, 2009

Waldo Hunt: 1920-2009
The 'King of the Pop-Ups' Made Books Spring to Life

By Stephen Miller

An impresario of printed extravaganzas, Waldo Hunt led a renaissance of pop-up books.

Mr. Hunt, who died Nov. 7 at age 88, was a one-time advertising executive who developed a specialty in creating pop-up magazine inserts. But what started as eye-catching marketing for Wrigley's gum and Dodge pickup trucks grew into a literary subgenre.

Fascinated by what had become a lost art in the U.S. by the 1960s, Mr. Hunt built on his experience developing pop-up marketing materials into a focus on books. While not an artist himself, Mr. Hunt was adept at coordinating the complex process of assembling the books, from design to production and assembly. Leading publishing houses including Random House hired him to package pop-up titles for adults and children.

The companies he founded, Graphics International and Intervisual Books, produced hundreds of books, including some that were translated into more than a dozen languages. "King of the pop-ups" became Mr. Hunt's moniker in professional circles.

Mr. Hunt produced dozens of books for Walt Disney; a series based on Babar; and popular titles including "Haunted House" and "The Human Body." A 1967 pop-up published by Random House, "Andy Warhol's Index," came about at the suggestion of the artist. It combined celebrity photos with pop-up versions of signature Warhol touches like a cardboard can of tomato paste.

Babar. I read Babar to my kids.

"He single-handedly kept the torch of pop-up books alive from the 1960s through the 1990s," says Robert Sabuda, the best-selling creator of elaborate children's pop-up books. "Those of us who are in the newer generation of pop-up books would have no career without Wally Hunt."

Though pop-ups had flourished in Germany and Britain in the 19th century, and gained a following in the U.S. in the 1930s, they were little known in the post-World War II era.

"No one was doing pop-ups in this country," Mr. Hunt told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. "No one could afford to make them here."

Pop-up books allowed Mr. Hunt to combine his love of exuberant design with his overseas production contacts cultivated from his work in advertising. To save on labor costs, he had his early books assembled in Japan; production later moved to Singapore and to Latin America. Design was handled by a coterie of independent artists whom Mr. Hunt called "paper engineers" for their skill at unfurling three-dimensional figures from flat paper.

The son of a Unitarian minister and a music teacher, Mr. Hunt grew up in Salt Lake City and southern California, and served in the infantry during World War II.

After the war, he opened an advertising agency in Los Angeles, specializing in high-quality printed materials. He sold his first agency in 1956, and founded Graphics International Inc., to serve as a broker between Japanese printers and U.S. clients.

Mr. Hunt described his infatuation with pop-up books as a bolt from the blue. One day in the early 1960s while walking down New York's Fifth Avenue, he spotted a pop-up book in a shop window.

"I could look at that children's book from Czechoslovakia and see in it my answer," Mr. Hunt told the Los Angeles Times. "I knew I'd found the magic key."

After his bid to import a large number books by the book's Czech artist, Vojtech Kubasta, was thwarted by Communist authorities, Mr. Hunt turned to producing them himself. The first was a promotional volume produced in conjunction with Random House for Maxwell House Coffee, "Bennett Cerf's Pop-Up Riddle Book," which customers could receive by sending in two can labels and $1.

Bennett Cerf, Random House's top editor, put his son Christopher in charge of the project.

"You'd pull a tab and something funny would happen, and the answer to the riddle would be revealed," Christopher Cerf recalled in an interview. The younger Mr. Cerf and Mr. Hunt went on to produce about 30 more children's pop-up books for Random House, including volumes featuring Sesame Street characters. In his memoir "At Random," Bennett Cerf described the pop-up books as big money makers.

Mr. Hunt "was a joyful man," says Christopher Cerf. "Sometimes to his own detriment, he took on huge, crazy projects. Nothing was impossible."

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Business Apps Offer Social Tools

Microsoft, Salesforce.com Take Networking-Site Cues
By Nick Wingfield And Ben Worthen (WSJ)

An unlikely software sector wants to get in on the social-networking act: business applications.

On Wednesday, Microsoft Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc. became two of the most high-profile companies yet to retool business-oriented offerings to emulate Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn—Web services that help consumers track each other using posted photos, information feeds, status updates and other features.

Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., said the next version of its Outlook e-mail program will automatically display personal information from social-networking sites for people in Outlook’s address book.

Meanwhile, Salesforce.com, a San Francisco-based company known for software it offers as a Web service, announced a set of enhancements called Chatter that mimic some of the functions of sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Smaller start-ups like Xobni Corp. also have found significant audiences by forming connections between social sites and business applications. The moves are the latest sign of how consumer-oriented technologies—from instant messaging to Apple Inc.’s iPhone—are invading the workplace and forcing companies to adapt to advances that boost productivity.

For example, social-networking sites help users track the identities and activities of others, which can come in handy in a big company. A lot of businesses have started to ask, “Why is it easier to follow strangers on Facebook than employees in my own company?” said Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s chief executive.

Salesforce.com says Chatter will allow employees to create profiles similar to the ones found on Facebook, albeit with an emphasis on connecting colleagues with relevant skills or projects. It is also designed to let users receive updates about data stored in the system. Mr. Benioff said Chatter, which should be available in early 2010, will be available for free to all Salesforce.com customers.

Microsoft says the next version of its e-mail software, Outlook 2010, will allow someone who receives an e-mail to quickly view a dossier of sorts on the sender by seeing a photo they have posted of themselves on social-networking sites and short messages about what they’re doing on Twitter and Facebook. The information will appear in a window within Outlook 2010, which went into public testing this week and will be released in final form during the first half of next year.

“It gives you a really nice, holistic view of things that you have in common with people on e-mail,” said Chris Capossela, a Microsoft senior vice president. “It gets you out of the e-mail-only silo and gives you a much more 360-degree view.”

Ellen Levy, vice president of corporate development and strategy at LinkedIn, said blending information from its service—such as employment and education history—with Outlook could help people form stronger professional bonds with people they’re communicating with through e-mail.

Yet there’s also the potential for complicating business relationships too. People who express overtly political opinions on Facebook or Twitter or share stories of personal traumas might find those details coloring their dealings with business associates.

Charlene Li, an analyst at Altimeter Group who follows social media, doesn’t believe that there’s a privacy dilemma created by business applications tapping into social-networking sites since, in most cases, people have already made a calculation about what information—and with whom—they’re comfortable sharing online.

e-Wired

Article in today's Journal

Condé Preparing E-Reader Version of Wired
by Russell Adams

Condé Nast Publications Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc. are building a digital version of Condé Nast’s Wired magazine for electronic reading devices.

Makes logical sense that people reading the magazine would like it to be electronic.

The Wired e-reader application will be available by the middle of next year and will kick off similar efforts across Condé Nast’s magazines, which include Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Condé Nast declined to say how much money it was spending on the effort.

Publishers have struggled to render magazines on mobile devices. That is partly because most existing e-readers don’t allow for color or many of the design elements deemed necessary to sell ads and incorporate key features of the magazine-reading experience. Condé Nast executives said they expect that by the time the Wired product is ready, e-readers will have access to a new generation of hardware capable of supporting it.

Magazine reading experience. I always thought it was simply reading.

As with many existing Web and mobile editions of magazines, the Wired application will let readers “flip” through the pages of the magazine as it appears in print. Readers will be able to zoom and pan on images, launch videos and link to the Web, as well as sync the application to their smart phones.

Unlike with existing products, Wired editor Chris Anderson said, the next wave of e-readers and platforms like Adobe’s will incorporate the rich design and “lean-back elements” that are among magazines’ chief strengths.

Condé Nast, a unit of Advance Publications Inc., has moved more slowly than some of its peers in pushing its magazines beyond print. Now it is putting a heavy emphasis on its digital business at a time when its print business has come under great strain. The publisher this year has laid off hundreds of employees and closed a handful of magazines.

Apps challenge rise of E-Readers

Travis Bryant, with his daughter, Ivey, reading “The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril” on his iPhone at their home in Alabama.




With Amazon’s Kindle, readers can squeeze hundreds of books into a device that is smaller than most hardcovers. For some, that’s not small enough.

Many people who want to read electronic books are discovering that they can do so on the smartphones that are already in their pockets — bringing a whole new meaning to “phone book.” And they like that they can save the $250 to $350 that they would otherwise spend on yet another gadget.

“These e-readers that cost a lot of money only do one thing,” said Keishon Tutt, a 37-year-old pharmacist in Texas who buys 10 to 12 books a month to read on her iPhone, from Apple. “I like to have a multifunctional device. I watch movies and listen to my songs.”

True enough. It just seems rather small for watching or reading; but, that's just me.

Does the future of book reading lie in dedicated devices like the Kindle, or in more versatile gadgets like mobile phones? So far, e-book software for phones does not appear to have cut into demand for single-function e-readers.

A Library’s Century

The Seward Park branch library was refurbished in 2004.



November 18, 2009, 11:56 am
A Library’s Century of ‘Hungering Imagination’
By SEWELL CHAN

The Seward Park branch of the New York Public Library opened 100 years ago this month, on Nov. 11, 1909, and the library will mark the centennial with a program of public events starting at 2 p.m. Thursday. Perhaps what is most remarkable about the branch, which was most recently renovated in 2004, is the continuity of the immigrant aspirations — then largely Jewish, now mostly Asian and Hispanic — it embodies.

“East Side Leads in Book Reading,” proclaimed the headline of a March 9, 1913, article in The New York Times Magazine. The article found that the Seward Park branch library, on East Broadway, reported a circulation of 425,571 — the highest of any branch — in the New York Public Library’s most recent report. The Times described the yearning in a rather dramatic fashion:

Centuries of famine and dearth of knowledge, and of cringing subservience to those who have had it, have taught the east side immigrant two important things about books: that what they contain can feed a starving mind and a hungering imagination with such royal richness as their lives could never afford them; and that their contents can lead him, step by step, along the journey to success and power and dominance. It is not far-fetched to say that many of the statesmen of the future are now in the making at Seward Park library.

The article proceeded to describe a typical day in the life of the library. The day started slow, with only a few patrons. “Now and again a lean and scholarly rabbi will pass up the white stone steps, bent upon inspecting the Talmudic treasures of the Jacob Schiff collection,” the article noted. “A few of the younger men and women trip in more briskly to pursue the necessary studies for civil service examinations.”

Immigrants pored over books in Russian, German, Yiddish and elementary English. But it was after 3 p.m., when school let out, that the library burst into life with the voices and cries of pupils.

The fortunate ones who come first file up the stairs and cluster around the circulating desks. Those who are returning books form in one line; those who are applying for cards in another. As fast as the librarians — and there are eight assistants required for this afternoon rush — can receive and record the returned books the youngsters surge to the “open shelves” and begin the search for their next selection.

And even when the children were sent home, at 6 p.m., the library remained in life, its downstairs reference room filling up into the early evening.

The article ended its account this way:

It is extraordinary, all things considered, how deeply the east side respects the trust the library imposes in it. It is no wonder they grasp after the benefactions of the library. Nothing could be more natural. But it deserves a special commendation that every east side reader brings his book back clean and intact, in spite of the fact, well known to the librarian, that many of them use their bathtubs and their ice chests as library shelves.

Getty Images / Lonely Planet - Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania














University of Pennsylvania





























* The Wall Street Journal

* MASTERPIECE
* NOVEMBER 14, 2009

This Library Speaks Volumes
Frank Furness treated reading as an active enterprise
By MICHAEL J. LEWIS

The cornerstones of two great American libraries were laid just a month apart in the fall of 1888, one in Philadelphia and one in Boston. The buildings could not be more dissimilar. The Boston Public Library was the first of its kind, a decorous marble palazzo of the highest quality, and its classical-revival descendants can be found in most large American cities. The library of the University of Pennsylvania, however, would be the last of its kind, a Victorian leviathan of red brick and riveted iron beams, looking from one end like a French cathedral and from the other like an elaborate greenhouse. If the Boston library was a lesson in good manners, the Philadelphia structure seemed a cheeky act of architectural impertinence.

Today the University of Pennsylvania building, now known as the Fisher Fine Arts Library, is widely acknowledged as one of the great creations of 19th-century American culture, and the principal work of its architect, Frank Furness (1839-1912). And at a moment when both the practice and technology of reading are radically changing, its lessons seem more urgent than ever.

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Getty Images / Lonely Planet

Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania
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It is hard to imagine an architect of libraries (of which he designed half a dozen) less bookish than Furness. His entire life seems a sustained effort to evade books altogether, no easy feat in his extraordinarily literary family. His father was the Rev. William Henry Furness, Philadelphia's celebrated Unitarian minister, who wrote a score of books and seemed unable to go from breakfast to dinner without writing at least a small pamphlet. Frank's brother Horace Howard Furness spent his life producing the mighty Shakespeare Variorum, a guide to every variant edition of Shakespeare's plays. Even his sister Annis translated German poetry into English, evidently for relaxation.

But young Frank shunned reading for more physical pursuits, earning the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Civil War for his battlefield exploits. When he began to practice architecture after the war, he had no patience for designers who took their inspiration from books. An awestruck Louis Sullivan, who began his own career as a draftsman for Furness, noted how he made his buildings "out of his head." Another draftsman observed that the only book Furness ever praised was Viollet-le-Duc's richly illustrated Dictionnaire Raisonné de l'Architecture. (With characteristic perversity, Furness—who had no French—cited the one book he was unable to read.)

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Because books were such a familiar and natural component of Furness's upbringing, he did not sentimentalize them. When his contemporaries set about designing libraries, they tended to treat them reverently, as if they were a shrine for sacred objects. But Furness knew that books were active, useful, even incendiary things—the antebellum abolitionist tracts that his father wrote had brought repeated death threats.

Frank Furness's building, then, was perhaps the only library to treat the act of reading as an active and dynamic enterprise. The building is an engine of active thought, divided into four separate volumes, each serving a different function and assuming a different shape. Most dominant is the stairhall, rising to 95 feet and isolated from the library proper so that the sound of footsteps would not penetrate the main reading room (a problem that classical libraries, with their central stair, never quite resolve).

Behind the stair tower Furness placed the main reading room with its circulation desk. Instead of creating a serene repose similar to that of the Boston library, he surrounded the room with low-slung arches that look as if they might have been filched from a Roman aqueduct, carrying walls of vivid red brick and yellow terra cotta. These rise four stories to a massive skylighted roof, and one sits beneath it to read as if at the bottom of a vast and brilliantly lighted well.

Beyond beckons the second reading room, which terminates in a sweeping semicircle given over to a series of private study rooms, the library counterpart to the radiating corona of chapels in a French Gothic cathedral. But while a cathedral is oriented to the east and the rising sun, Furness turned his reading room north to ensure steady, even light. Lest the space seem too sacral, he capped it with a mighty array of iron beams, each of which comes to rest on a delicate terra cotta leaf, a kind of whimsical architectural fig leaf to cover the groin where metal limb meets masonry body.

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Weirdest of all were the stacks, placed to the south at the opposite end of the building. Designed in consultation with Melvil Dewey (the library was one of the first to use the Dewey decimal system), these were of translucent glass and iron, three stories in height, so that sunlight would filter through them. Not only did they have the character of an industrial plant, but they could be extended as a piece of machinery: Furness mounted the rear wall on jackscrews so that, as he told his clients, "the book stack admits of infinite extension." Here was perhaps the only library in the world that solved the problem of new acquisitions—and which treated the book as a component in an industrial process, rather than a ornament to be encased in a jewel box.

The stacks, alas, were replaced with concrete floors for reasons of fire safety during the 1980s, in the course of a superlative restoration by Robert Venturi. Oddly enough, Venturi first met his wife and partner Denise Scott Brown nearly 50 years ago—at a meeting of professors to protest the planned demolition of the library.

Except for our dwellings, there are few buildings we come to know intimately. A college library is one exception, a building we tend to inhabit fully, day and night. And even if critics did not respect Furness's brooding building, its users have always loved it, as much for its tactile richness as for its generous light and space.

Furness was born 170 years ago this week, on Nov. 12, 1839. He lived to see many of his finest works demolished or mutilated, and even his library at Penn became cluttered with extensions. Yet it remains unbowed, still greeting one from afar with the upraised head of the stair tower, capped with a colossal arch whose components are so deeply scored that it suggests a mighty brow furrowed in concentration. In a country whose libraries have been temples, palaces or warehouses, here is one dedicated to the mystery of active thought.

—Mr. Lewis is Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor at Williams College. His books include "Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind" (W. W. Norton).

Some Choice Book Blogs

Dear Book Lover - WSJ: November 13, 2009

Would you share your thoughts on the best blogs/bloggers who focus on books? Favorites? Ones you respect? Popular ones? —P.G., Berkeley, Calif.

Book bloggers, of whom there seem to be thousands, are strictly a matter of taste. My taste runs to blogs focused on fiction, updated frequently, charitable or spiteful as appropriate, generous with links and bright and clean in appearance. I also insist the writers know the difference between it's and its. Five blogs I like:

A Commonplace Blog: I first read D.G. Myers, an English professor at Texas A&M University, in his blistering critique of the "self-conscious, writerly prose" of "serious fiction" in Atlantic magazine (available online and highly recommended even if you disagree). He's every bit as indifferent to political correctness on his blog, where he recently took a cudgel to Toni Morrison's "Beloved" ("the most overrated novel ever").

Bookdwarf: Megan Sullivan, a buyer at the Harvard Book Store, is a thoughtful reviewer of new fiction. I bookmarked her site even before I saw her praise for a recent and not well-known book I admired, "Blame" by Michelle Huneven. Maybe I only find Ms. Sullivan smart and generous because we agree about so much.

Bookninja: George Murray, a Canadian writer, may be too profane for the faint of heart, but I found his cussing about the publishing industry a bracing antidote to a lot of goody-goodyness in literary blogdom. His headline on a link to a story about the current book-industry price wars: "Today in the most depressing thing to ever hit a depressing industry full of depressing drunks."

Bookslut: Jessa Crispin doesn't think of herself as a critic: "I feel free to ignore the wider culture at large, rather than suffer through a William Vollmann book just because his books contribute to the larger cultural conversation. I, and this Web site, exist outside of all of that, and happily so." Fine by me. I have no problem with a reader who, when her computer goes rogue, consoles herself with Mavis Gallant short stories and a bottle of vodka.

So Many Books: Stefanie (she doesn't give her last name) lives in Minneapolis and works at a university law library. She's been blogging for six years, which makes her a grizzled veteran. The lists of books she has read in the past three years are impressively eclectic—this year from Niccolo Machiavelli to Christopher Moore. And she loves libraries, as I do.

Close encounters

Two interesting incidents, while working in Reference:

* a man walks down the steps talking loudly, his cellphone ringing loudly; I notice he is wearing a white labcoat. He comes over to the Reference Desk, begins to ask a question, and his cellphone rings again. I ask him to turn it down, he turns it off. He asked for material on the history of anatomy, but went on so long and loud that I lost track of everything he said. It was not for him, he assured me, insisting he was a surgeon, but for his son. He had consulted Wikipedia, and had found the article well written, but his son could not use Wiki as a source for his assignment. I showed him electronic databases, using Galenet, but he had trouble using the mouse (I can perform reconstructive surgery, but can't use a computer, he declared). I turned to books, and found several reference sources that were useful: Dictionary of Scientific Biography, The drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Milestones in health and medicine, Companion encyclopedia of the history of medicine, and Milestones in Health and Medicine. He did his work at a table, and left, all the materials, including pieces of scratch paper I had given him, left at the table.

Among the names he mentioned, aside from Leonardo, were Vesalius, and Galen.

* a bi later a woman approached the Reference Desk and asked for help, saying she was working at a PC and was having "printer issues". Turned out she was printing coupons from J.C. Penney, and they were coming out very small. I showed her how to use the printer properties to change the size of the printouts.

Reward

A young man I recognized came out of a study room in the Reference area on the lower level, and asked for his library card back. I knew his face; he's probably been coming to the Library for at least a couple of years that I've been here.

He told me that I'd helped him with research for his Science Fair project.

"How'd you do?" I wondered.

"Reached the national semi-finals." He beamed, then thanked me.

That is the reward of being a librarian.

Amid price war, rationing

Boulder Book Store had hoped to buy discounted bestsellers from Walmart, Target and Amazon.




Two weeks after an online book price war broke out among giant retailers, the three stores involved—Walmart, Amazon and Target—are limiting the number of copies their customers can buy.

The limits will stop other booksellers from scooping up cheap copies in large quantities and reselling them.


Arsen Kashkashian, head buyer at the Boulder Book Store, in Boulder, Colo., said he had intended to buy as many as 70 copies of Barbara Kingsolver's "The Lacuna" from Walmart.com, Target.com or Amazon, because their prices are "more than $5 cheaper than what we can get it for from the publisher, Harper.

Mr. Kashkashian said he was surprised to see that the three retailers were limiting the quantities sold. "We're a big store, and if a customer wanted to order 100 copies of anything, we'd sell it to them," he said.

Well, nice argument, but that would have the big three subsidizing the smaller stores; whatever the merits or demerits, those three are not likely to provide such subsidies.

Raul Vazquez, CEO of Walmart.com, said in an interview this week that the company's book promotion had resulted in brisk sales of the coming titles, and had also boosted sales of other products. He declined to reveal any figures.

Joel Bines of consultancy AlixPartners LLP said retailers commonly ration loss-leader promotions to stop competitors from buying up the merchandise. In the book promotion, Mr. Bines noted, some independent booksellers surely would purchase Wal-Mart's books in bulk if possible at their below-wholesale price. He said some of the books would also probably end up on eBay, offered by speculators.

"It's to prevent a run on the bank, so to speak," Mr. Bines said of the limits. "They are losing money on every item they sell at this price, so they want to make sure the items actually go to customers, who might then buy something else."


Consider the alternative: in Europe, book price discounting is not allowed, by law.



In Europe, the price war raging among America's biggest book retailers has offered new validation to an age-old approach to the business: price fixing.

In much of Europe, the discount-pricing battle that has erupted among Wal-Mart Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Target Corp. could never happen because most major publishing markets, with the exception of the U.K., are bolstered by laws requiring all bookstores, online retailers included, to sell books at prices set in stone by their publishers.

Nowhere is the fixed-price tradition as deeply rooted as in Germany, a nation with a book-rich culture that stretches back to Gutenberg in the 15th century.

Many in German attribute the country's thriving literary and publishing scene to a system that outlaws the discounting of virtually all new books for 18 months. The system protects independent booksellers and smaller publishers from giant rivals that could discount their way to more market share. Along with some 7,000 bookshops, nearly 14,000 German publishers remain in business. Many are of modest size, like Munich-based Carl Hanser Verlag, which publishes the work of this year's Nobel laureate, German-Romanian writer Herta Mueller.

Lawyerese goes Galactic, Contracts try to master Universe

Decked out in sequined black and gold dresses, Anne Harrison and the other women in her Bulgarian folk-singing group were lined up to try out for NBC's "America's Got Talent" TV show when they noticed peculiar wording in the release papers they were asked to sign.

Any of their actions that day last February, the contract said, could be "edited, in all media, throughout the universe, in perpetuity."

She and the other singers, many of whom are librarians in the Washington, D.C., area, briefly contemplated whether they should give away the rights to hurtling their images and voices across the galaxies forever. Then, like thousands of other contestants, they signed their names.

Anne Harrison










These are the librarians in question.

Roth on Roth

This caught my eye; question and answer from an interview conducted by the Wall Street Journal with Philip Roth:

Q. Are you online, and if so, what sites do you visit?

A. Yes, but I don't use it except to buy groceries and books. I buy from FreshDirect. I also use Amazon, and I buy a lot of used books from AbeBooks and Alibris. It's wonderful when you want to find something obscure and there it is for $3.98. It's the greatest book bazaar that has ever existed.

Stephen King E-Book delayed

Stephen King's publisher is keeping the e-book edition of his novel "Under the Dome" under wraps until the day before Christmas, as tensions mount between book publishers and retailers over the crucial issue of pricing industry blockbusters.

Aiming to preserve the value of the hardcover edition, Scribner, an imprint of CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster publishing arm, is delaying the electronic-book publication of the King thriller until Dec. 24, or six weeks after the $35 hardcover hits the bookstores on Nov. 10.

In an interview, Mr. King said that he wanted to delay the e-book edition in hopes of helping independent bookstores and the national bookstore chains sell the hardcover edition.

"I never thought we'd see people preordering a copy for $8.98," he said. "My thinking was to give bookstores a chance to make some money."

Mr. King, who described himself as a happy owner of Amazon's e-book reader Kindle, noted that the discounting by the three major retailers means that he will likely sell more copies of "Under the Dome."

However, he expressed concern for the impact the sharp discounting may have on other writers--established authors as well as up-and-comers--saying, "Who is going to buy a book for $25 when you can preorder a best seller for $9?" He noted that at $9, a new hardcover will be cheaper than the later fancy paperback edition.

"All the guys in ties want to talk about is whether a new delivery system is going to work," he added. "Nobody seems to care about the book."

Barnes & Noble Plans E-Book Reader

Barnes & Noble Inc. said it is releasing a $259 electronic-book reader, which it will begin shipping in late November. The device, called the Nook, will compete directly with Amazon.com Inc.'s $259 Kindle and a host of digital reading devices from Sony Corp. and others.

Competition is growing between providers; this market should grow, delivering new products to consumers, though it remains to be seen how many people will gravitate toward e-books. One market segment with great potential wopuld appear to be new readers, youngsters for whom computing is a part of growing up, always present, and not a new development.


Barnes & Noble's new e-book reader, the Nook


The Nook, which runs on Google Inc.'s Android operating system, boasts a 6-inch e-paper display from E-Ink Corp. for reading and a smaller color-touch screen for control and typing. It features 3G cellphone and Wi-Fi wireless connections to download books from the retailer's online bookstore.

Barnes & Noble unveiled the Nook in Manhattan at an event well attended by CEOs of many of the industry's biggest publishing houses. Those connections helped the nation's largest bookstore chain win a concession: the ability for buyers of some e-books to lend their purchases to friends for as many as 14 days at a time. The shared books can be read on other Nooks, cellphones or computers, but a single copy of a book can only be read on one device at a time and can only be lent one time. Most other commercial e-book stores, including Amazon's Kindle store, don't allow sharing e-books.

In due time the restrictions will fade away, as they have on other media.

Several publishers, who asked not to be identified, said that they haven't yet decided on whether to allow Barnes & Noble to lend their e-books.

However, W. Drake McFeely, president of W.W. Norton & Co., said, "You can lend a physical book, so as long as it's sequential, I'm fine with it."

Precisely.

Digits

• Live From the Nook Launch (Don't Call It a Kindle)
• A Sneak Peek at Barnes & Noble's Nook

Barnes & Noble said it would also offer subscriptions to more than 20 newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times—and eventually expects to offer, in digital form, subscriptions to every major U.S. daily.

The Nook also features integration with Barnes & Noble's retail stores. Users who bring the device into the store will find that special offers, content and discounts pop up on the Nook's screen. Eventually, the company says, customers will be able to read entire e-books for free inside the physical store.

As one can with the physical book.

video: First Look at Barnes & Noble Nook E-Book Reader

Mitchell Klipper, chief operating officer of Barnes & Noble, said that he expects the Nook to help build traffic in the stores after it goes on sale. "What other device can you road test in a store?" he asked. "This could be our biggest traffic builder for the holidays."

Barnes & Noble also announced that it was shifting its e-book copyright-protection system to software from Adobe Systems Inc. That could usher in a day when protected e-books can be read more easily across many different devices. The e-book store used by Sony also uses Adobe's copyright-protection software, but Amazon still uses a proprietary format for Kindle books.

The e-equivalent to PDFs.

Target Joins Book Price War

A third discounter joins the fray.

Media & Marketing - WSJ
October 20, 2009

Target Joins Book Price War

By ANN ZIMMERMAN

Target Corp. joined the online book price wars, disclosing Monday it is slashing the prices of seven highly anticipated hardcover books available for pre-order on its Web site.

The Minneapolis-based retailer is charging $8.99 for the books, matching the price that Walmart.com has set for 10 expected best sellers. Walmart countered Monday evening by lowering the price of several of the books on its Web site by a penny to $8.98.

In the next few days, Target will expand its list of discounted books to the same 10, adding Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue"; Jim Butcher's "First Lord's Fury" and Barbara Kingsolver's "The Lacuna." The retailer said it needs the added time to add these books and their prices to its Web site.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. fired the first salvo in the price war last week when it first cut the prices on 10 books to $10, saying it plans to be the low-price leader in electronic commerce. Amazon.com Inc. quickly matched the $10 price on the same list of books. Walmart then chopped the price to $9, which Amazon again matched.

The recent penny-at-a-time moves suggest no further cuts. "It remains to be seen if we will go lower if the competition slashes prices further," said Target spokeswoman Kelly Basgen. "At the moment we are only matching what others are doing, but we're watching closely. We want to remain competitive."

The publishing industry is also watching warily to see if the price war will have lasting impact on book pricing and the contracts that publisher sign with authors. What is still unclear is whether this is a short-term promotion on Walmart's part, or whether Walmart.com intends to use cheap books to challenge Amazon as the Web's leading retailer

Questions

A phone call early this morning was about language usage and grammar. Usage of nor versus or. How is traumatic spelled? Should it be modified with very? And the patron being Mrs. Connolly, the telephone number of Staples in Lawrence?

Transgender

First reference question I've ever had about transgender. Sitting at the Reference Desk in late afternoon, I was asked for books on transgender. The patron spoke softly. For a moment I was unsure I'd heard her question, or perhaps was nonplussed, but, momentarily, my librarian self engaged.

I searched for the term transgender itself, but the only result was an art book:
Mirror images : women, surrealism, and self-representation [Q 704.042 M]. It includes this entry: Whitney Chadwick -- "Vous pour moi?" : Marcel Duchamp and transgender coupling, but that was not what she was looking for; rather, she wanted biographical works. I found two that worked:

Colapinto, John. (2000). As nature made him : the boy who was raised as a girl. New York: HarperCollins.

Scholinski, Daphne. (1997). The last time I wore a dress. New York: Riverhead Books.

Wal-Mart Strafes Amazon in Book War

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. launched a brash price war against Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday, saying it would sell 10 hotly anticipated new books for just $10 apiece through its online site, Walmart.com.

That was just the beginning.
Hours later, Amazon matched the $10 price, squaring off in a battle for low-price and e-commerce leadership heading into the crucial holiday shopping season. Wal-Mart soon fired back with a promise to drop its prices to $9 by Friday morning -- and made good on that vow by early evening Thursday.

Wal-Mart said the splashy move to discount pre-orders of popular books such as Stephen King's "Under the Dome" and Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" was part of a larger strategy to establish Walmart.com as the biggest and cheapest online retailer.

Going rouge cheap.

"If there is going to be a 'Wal-Mart of the Web,' it is going to be Walmart.com," said Walmart.com CEO Raul Vazquez in an interview. "Our goal is to be the biggest and most visited retail Web site."

Walmart has such a strong capital base that its website will do the same to e-commerce as it did to commerce.

Wal-Mart's $10 promotion applies to the top 10 books coming out in November but the company is also selling 200 best-sellers for 50% of their list price.

Who eats that 50% discount? Consumers get lower prices, someone doesn't get that revenue (or profit).

The price war sent shivers through the publishing world. Wal-Mart's move, and similarly low prices for electronic books, may ultimately condition consumers to expect new titles to cost $10, a price that would force the publishing industry to re-scale its entire business, including the advances paid to writers.

"The endgame is rather scary for authors," said one book executive.

Publishing is the latest industry to be forced to change, rather than to decide how to change.

Some big authors, however, are looking on the bright side. Dean Koontz, whose soon-to-be released novel "Breathless" is being discounted to $10 from $28, said that he thinks the discounting may prove a good thing for the authors involved.

"Any time people are fighting over your work it's a good thing, especially when you've worked all those years hoping it would be fought over," he said. "I don't think this is going to be a long-term thing. Rather, it sounds like a promotional strategy designed to call attention to Wal-Mart's decision to enter the digital marketplace more heartily than in the past."

Perhaps. But expecting discounting becomes an ingrained shopping expectation.

Mr. Koontz said that Crown Books Corp., a now-defunct book chain that grew to 170 stores in only seven years after launching in 1977, paved the way for book discounting. "They're no longer with us, and perhaps that tells us something, but after they started to discount books hardcover sales simply exploded."

Fascinating point, and logical: lower prices stimulate shopping.

Mr. Koontz said he's more worried about the independent bookstores. Although most limit their stock of best-sellers, a price war on the most popular books may hurt.

James Patterson, whose coming novel, "I, Alex Cross," is being discounted from $27.99 to $10, said he was happy to be in Wal-Mart's top 10. However, he warned any industry that sets low price points may later have a difficult time re-establishing those prices. "Obviously e-books have gotten this thing going," said Mr. Patterson. "E-books are terrific and here to stay. But I think that people need to think through the repercussions....But I'm not taking sides....I'm not the endangered species here."

No, Patterson is not endangered. His new book has 516 holds on first copy returned of 1 copy (ISBN 9780316018784, 179 on order), and 145 holds on first copy returned of 1 copy (ISBN 9780316043731, 14 on order) in the Nassau County OPAC (excluding Great Neck, which has 48 holds on 1 copy, and 14 copies on order, and Syosset, which has 86 holds on 1 copy, and 10 on order: these two libraries have independent OPACs).

Wal-Mart said it wasn't trying to match the price of electronic books. Still, the $10 price tag coincides with the $9.99 that Amazon.com charges for its Kindle e-reader best-sellers.

Coincidence?

Wal-Mart declined to discuss whether it was losing money on the $10 book promotion, which includes free shipping. But the answer is almost certainly yes. Retailers traditionally pay half the list price for a hardcover book. Assuming that's the case with Wal-Mart, its $10 sale price on "Under the Dome" represents a 71% discount of the $35 cover price, which suggests the discounter will lose $7 to $7.50 on every copy it sells.

Loss leader to establish its e-commerce site.

Ten dollars for a hardcover book is a slashing of margins to the bone," said Richard Curtis, a New York literary agent and e-book publisher.

And into the bone, as it were.

Diana Abbott, manager of the Bookworm, an independent bookstore in Omaha, Neb., said that some independents will likely lose some business on the titles involved. "We've been fighting deep discounting for a long time, although $10 is obviously an extreme," said Ms. Abbott. "But there is a strong element of loyalty to independents....We'll survive this."

There is loyalty, but, will it be sufficient?

Wal-Mart is far and away the planet's largest mass merchant with annual sales topping $400 billion. It doesn't release its on-line sales, but analysts say they trail those of Amazon, which notched $19.2 billion in sales last fiscal year, a 29% increase.

Well put: the planet's largest.

So You Want to Borrow an E-Book

Borrowing a library book is now possible without ever visiting a physical branch.

According to OverDrive, the largest supplier of e-books to public libraries, about 9,000 libraries offer digital audio books and about 5,400 of them offer e-books as well. E-book selection is still small compared to print collections, but they are growing. Other companies that distribute books to libraries include Ebrary and NetLibrary.

For the most part, library e-books are not yet compatible on Amazon’s Kindles. Amazon could shift course and embrace ePub, but an Amazon spokesman said the company would not comment on future moves in that direction.

Although there are some collections that are available in subscriptions that permit unlimited access to books by multiple users, most e-books are treated like printed ones: only one user can access it at a time. That means there can be waits for digital books just like there are for print books. On the other hand, since so few people know about the library e-book collections or want to use them, the waits for e-books are often much shorter than for printed editions.

For now.

Since borrowing an e-book does not require a trip to a physical library, readers can download at any time of day or night.

Open virtually all the time.

Below are some links to the digital e-book and audio book collections of various libraries around the country.

New York Public Library
E-book titles: 18,300

Brooklyn Public Library
E-book titles: 4,083

Boston Public Library
E-book titles: 3,636

Las Vegas Clark County Library
E-book titles: 5,000

Lee County Library, Florida
E-book titles: 7,000

Indianapolis-Marion County Library:
E-book titles: 1,300

BookFlix (available in 500 public library systems, including the New York Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library, the Dallas Public Library and the District of Columbia Public Library)

A collection of children’s books and complimentary videos from Scholastic. These are subscription based, so multiple readers can access the collection at the same time.

Libraries and Readers Wade Into Digital Lending

Kate Lambert, 19, a student at Pasco-Hernando Community College in New Port Richey, Fla., is an avid user of e-books offered for loan by her county library system.


October 15, 2009
Libraries and Readers Wade Into Digital Lending
By MOTOKO RICH

Kate Lambert recalls using her library card just once or twice throughout her childhood. Now, she uses it several times a month.

The lure? Electronic books she can download to her laptop. Beginning earlier this year, Ms. Lambert, a 19-year-old community college student in New Port Richey, Fla., borrowed volumes in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series, “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold and a vampire novel by Laurell K. Hamilton, without ever visiting an actual branch.

“I can just go online and type my library card number in and look through all the books that they have,” said Ms. Lambert, who usually downloads from the comfort of her bedroom. And, she added, “It’s all for free.”

Eager to attract digitally savvy patrons and capitalize on the growing popularity of electronic readers, public libraries across the country are expanding collections of books that reside on servers rather than shelves.

The idea is to capture borrowers who might not otherwise use the library, as well as to give existing customers the opportunity to try new formats.

“People still think of libraries as old dusty books on shelves, and it’s a perception we’re always trying to fight,” said Michael Colford, director of information technology at the Boston Public Library. “If we don’t provide this material for them, they are just going to stop using the library altogether.”

About 5,400 public libraries now offer e-books, as well as digitally downloadable audio books. The collections are still tiny compared with print troves. The New York Public Library, for example, has about 18,300 e-book titles, compared with 860,500 in circulating print titles, and purchases of digital books represent less than 1 percent of the library’s overall acquisition budget.

But circulation is expanding quickly. The number of checkouts has grown to more than 1 million so far this year from 607,275 in all of 2007, according to OverDrive, a large provider of e-books to public libraries. NetLibrary, another provider of e-books to about 5,000 public libraries and a division of OCLC, a nonprofit library service organization, has seen circulation of e-books and digital audio books rise 21 percent over the past year.

Together with the Google books settlement — which the parties are modifying to satisfy the objections of the Department of Justice and others — the expansion of e-books into libraries heralds a future in which more reading will be done digitally.

“As young people become used to reading virtually everything online,” said Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, “that is going to propel a change in terms of readership of e-books rather than readership of physical books.”

For now, the expansion will be slowed partly because, with few exceptions, e-books in libraries cannot be read on Amazon’s Kindle, the best-selling electronic reader, or on Apple’s iPhone, which has rapidly become a popular device for reading e-books. Most library editions are compatible with the Sony Reader, computers and a handful of other mobile devices.

Most digital books in libraries are treated like printed ones: only one borrower can check out an e-book at a time, and for popular titles, patrons must wait in line just as they do for physical books. After two to three weeks, the e-book automatically expires from a reader’s account.

But some publishers worry that the convenience of borrowing books electronically could ultimately cut into sales of print editions.

“I don’t have to get in my car, go to the library, look at the book, check it out,” said John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, which publishes authors like Janet Evanovich, Augusten Burroughs and Jeffrey Eugenides. “Instead, I’m sitting in the comfort of my living room and can say, ‘Oh, that looks interesting’ and download it.”

As digital collections grow, Mr. Sargent said he feared a world in which “pretty soon you’re not paying for anything.” Partly because of such concerns, Macmillan does not allow its e-books to be offered in public libraries.

Simon & Schuster, whose authors include Stephen King and Bob Woodward, has also refrained from distributing its e-books to public libraries. “We have not found a business model that works for us and our authors,” said Adam Rothberg, a spokesman.

For now, the advent of e-book borrowing has not threatened physical libraries by siphoning away visitors because the recession has driven so many new users seeking free resources through library doors. And in some cases, few library patrons seem to know that e-book collections even exist.

In the Brooklyn Public Library system recently, eight people were waiting for three digital copies of “The Lost Symbol,” Dan Brown’s follow-up to “The Da Vinci Code,” while 715 people were waiting for 526 print copies.

Some librarians suggest that because digital books never wear out, take up no shelf space and could, in theory, be read by multiple people at the same time, the purchasing model for e-books should be different than it is for print.

Pam Sandlian Smith, library director of the Rangeview Library District, which serves a suburban community north of Denver, said that instead of purchasing a set number of digital copies of a book, she would prefer to buy one copy and pay a nominal licensing fee each time a patron downloaded it.

Publishers, inevitably, are nervous about allowing too much of their intellectual property to be offered free. Brian Murray, the chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, said Ms. Smith’s proposal was “not a sustainable model for publishers or authors.”

Some librarians object to the current pricing model because they often pay more for e-books than do consumers who buy them on Amazon or in Sony’s online store. Publishers generally charge the same price for e-books as they do for print editions, but online retailers subsidize the sale price of best sellers by marking them down to $9.99.

“ ‘The Lost Symbol’ is $9.99 on the Sony Reader book page, and I just paid $29.99 for that for the library,” said Robin Bradford, the collection development librarian at the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library. Ms. Bradford said she would consider buying additional digital copies if the price were lower. But “to buy nonphysical copies at the same price,” she said, “I just won’t do it.”

Academic publishers have been more willing to experiment with subscription models, inviting libraries to pay an annual fee for unlimited access to certain books. Scholastic Inc., the children’s book publisher, also offers library subscriptions to BookFlix, a collection of picture books that children can read online.

Steve Potash, the chief executive of OverDrive, said publishers should regard library e-books as a form of marketing. Many people who browse a library’s online catalog end up buying the books, he said, although he could provide no evidence of that.

Some publishers agree that library e-books, like print versions, can attract new customers. “We’ve always strongly believed that there is a conversion point where they do start to buy their own,” said Malle Vallik, the director of digital content at Harlequin Enterprises, the romance publisher.

In libraries, readers are attracted to free material. Nancy Gobel, a dental hygienist who already downloads digital audio books from her library in Indianapolis, said she currently buys print books. But she is considering purchasing an electronic reader so she can borrow them for free. “I would still continue to buy, but I would download as much as I can,” she said. In many cases, she said, buying “doesn’t make sense.”

Can Kindle compete with iPhone?

Starting out a skeptic, this writer bought a Kindle, and it has become his "indispensable companion."

And yet ...

So why am I so eager to see what Apple comes up with?

As much as I have come to depend on the Kindle, using it is also a maddening experience. For something that bills itself as a reading device, it's shockingly difficult to read. The background or "page" color, far from the creamy white of most paper books, is a murky gray. The type seems just a few shades darker. There's a glare on the surface that constantly forces me to maneuver the device to avoid reflections. Reading in direct sunlight is nearly impossible; lamplight is too dim.

Why bother buying one?

There are a growing number of competing devices either already on the market or soon to be launched: the Sony Reader, the Samsung SNE-50K and the Fujitsu FLEPia, which boasts a color screen, to name a few. So far none have dented the Kindle's dominance, at least in terms of brand recognition. But speculation about a new competing product from Apple is intense.

SNE-50K? FLEPia? On names alone, those are loser to the iBook (or whatever Apple names its tablet).

the implications already seem evident. Given the manifest weaknesses of the Kindle, this new device has the potential to dominate the category even more than the iPhone does cellphones. While I wouldn't buy either Apple or Amazon stock on the basis of one product, this would be a boost for Apple, a disappointment for Amazon.

I own shares in both companies and like them both. But Amazon isn't really a hardware company, and the weaknesses of the Kindle shows it.

If Apple comes up with the product many are hoping for, Amazon should focus on selling the books, and let Apple sell the devices. If not, an iBookstore could become the iTunes of reading. And that would be a blow to Amazon.

Popular books

The Help, by Katheryn Stockett: 910 holds on first copy returned of 435 copies

The lost symbol by Dan Brown: 1082 holds on first copy returned of 530 copies.

A Life, Interrupted

Searching for an answer to a crossword puzzle clue (18 down: "Jason Bourne’s Affliction"), found this article. I remember the story, but not what happened after. Fascinating

M.I.T. Taking Student Blogs to Nth Degree

Ms. Kim said she read the M.I.T. blogs in high school. “They painted a picture of what life would be like here.”

At M.I.T., from left, Paul Baranay, Jess Kim and Chris Mills write blogs for its admissions site.


October 2, 2009
M.I.T. Taking Student Blogs to Nth Degree
By TAMAR LEWIN

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Cristen Chinea, a senior at M.I.T., made a confession in her blog on the college Web site.

“There’ve been several times when I felt like I didn’t really fit in at M.I.T.,” she wrote. “I nearly fell asleep during a Star Wars marathon. It wasn’t a result of sleep deprivation. I was bored out of my mind.”

Still, in other ways, Ms. Chinea feels right at home at the institute — she loves the anime club, and that her hall has its own wiki Web site and an Internet Relay for real-time messaging. As she wrote on her blog, a hallmate once told her that “M.I.T. is the closest you can get to living in the Internet,” and Ms. Chinea reported, “IT IS SO TRUE. Love. It. So. Much.”

Dozens of colleges — including Amherst, Bates, Carleton, Colby, Vassar, Wellesley and Yale — are embracing student blogs on their Web sites, seeing them as a powerful marketing tool for high school students, who these days are less interested in official messages and statistics than in first-hand narratives and direct interaction with current students.

But so far, none of the blogs match the interactivity and creativity of those of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they are posted prominently on the admissions homepage, along with hundreds of responses from prospective applicants — all unedited.

Not every admissions office has been so ready to welcome uncensored student writing.

“A lot of people in admissions have not been eager for bloggers, mostly based on fears that we can’t control what people are saying,” said Jess Lord, dean of admissions at Haverford College, which posted student bloggers’ accounts of their summer activities this year, and plans to add bloggers this spring to help admitted students hear about campus life. “We’re learning, slowly, that this is how the world works, especially for high school students.”

M.I.T.’s bloggers, who are paid $10 an hour for up to four hours a week, offer thoughts on anything that might interest a prospective student. Some offer advice on the application process and the institute’s intense workload; others write about quirkier topics, like warm apple pie topped with bacon and hot caramel sauce, falling down the stairs or trying to set a world record in the game of Mattress Dominos.

Posting untouched student writing — and comments reacting to that writing — does carry some risks. Boring, sloppily written posts do nothing to burnish an institutional image, college admissions officials say, and there is always the possibility of an inflammatory or wildly negative posting.

Pomona has considered having student bloggers, but so far has felt that the risks outweigh the benefits, said Art Rodriguez, senior associate dean of admissions.

“Blogs can certainly help humanize the process,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “The flip side is that a few anxious high school students may think and worry too much about what someone wrote on their blog, and present themselves in a slightly different way than who they really are. And there’s always the concern about the political ramifications, that bloggers may open up an issue or topic that starts something negative.”

But Mr. Lord of Haverford said prospective students’ interest in the summer bloggers calmed his worries.

“High school students read the blogs, and they come in and say ‘I can’t believe Haverford students get to do such interesting things with their summers,’ ” he said. “There’s no better way for students to learn about a college than from other students.”

Many high school seniors avidly follow student blogs at the colleges they are interested in, and post comments. Luka, one of dozens responding to Ms. Chinea, for example, wrote: “I didn’t know about the anime club. I would have never guessed that people at M.I.T. are interested in anime. Oh well ... +1 on my ‘Why should I go to M.I.T.’ list.”

M.I.T.’s student bloggers said they had read the blogs when they were applying, posted comments and connected with other applicants.

“I was blogging myself, almost every day, when I was in high school, and I read the M.I.T. blogs all the time,” said Jess Kim, a senior blogger. “For me they painted a picture of what life would be like here, and that was part of why I wanted to come.”

Ben Jones, the former director of communications at M.I.T.’s admissions office, began with a single blog by a student five years ago, at the dawn of the Facebook era, and noticed high school students responding right away. “We saw very quickly that prospective students were engaging with each other and building their own community,” said Mr. Jones, who now works at Oberlin College, where he has added blogs to the Web site.

The M.I.T. student bloggers have different majors, ethnicities, residence halls and, particularly, writing styles. Some post weekly or more; others disappear for months. The bloggers are sought out as celebrities during the annual “Meet the Bloggers” session at Campus Preview Weekend.

M.I.T. chooses its bloggers through a contest, in which applicants submit samples of their writing. “The annual blogger selection is like the admissions office’s own running of the bulls,” said Dave McOwen, Mr. Jones’s successor in the admissions office, in his message inviting applications.

This year, 25 freshmen applied for four new spots, and, Mr. McOwen said, it was hard to choose.

“You want people who can communicate and who are going to be involved in different parts of campus life,” he said. “You want them to be positive, but it’s not mandatory.”

And not all posts are positive. Ms. Kim once wrote about how the resident advising system was making it impossible for her to move out of her housing — expressing enough irritation that the housing office requested that the admissions office take her post down. Officials refused, instead having the housing office post a rebuttal of her accusations; eventually, the system was changed.

But most of the blogs are exuberant, lyrical expressions of the joys of M.I.T. life, like last month’s post on returning as a sophomore:

“Something’s changed,” wrote Chris Mills. “Now you know what you’re in for, you know the sleepless nights and frustrations are never far away, but this knowledge can’t seem to remove the exhilarating smile on your face. And it’s in that masochistic moment that you realize who you are. That this is what you’re made for.”

Firms Get a Hand With Twitter, Facebook

Sylvester Chisom, front, and Arthur Shivers pay a consultant to market their auto-detailing business on Facebook and Twitter








Sylvester Chisom began paying a consultant last summer to blog on Twitter, post status updates on Facebook and run marketing campaigns on both sites for his auto-detailing business.

He thinks the service, which costs $450 a month, is worth it. "It's just better having somebody else dedicated to thinking of stuff to put up," says Mr. Chisom, co-owner of Showroom Shine Express Detailing LLC in St. Louis.

Showroom Shine's Mr. Chisom says he's received several inquiries from potential customers who said they learned about his company through a recent promotion on Facebook. Revenue and traffic to his company's Web site are up slightly from this time last month, he adds.

But Jonathan Zadok, co-owner of the Coffee Groundz LLC in Houston, says he wouldn't pay another firm to blog on behalf of the four-year-old café. "The idea with Twitter is that you get close to an immediate response," he says. With an in-house person handling it, "there's no middle man that has to go check with the company," he says.

Mr. Zadok says last fall Coffee Groundz's general manager, J.R. Cohen, set up profiles for the café on Twitter and Facebook. Customers started tweeting orders and special requests such as booth reservations, and in-store events promoted on the sites drew crowds three times as large as those previously advertised through signs and other traditional means.

The Coffee Groundz prefers to use its general manager, J.R. Cohen, to promote the café.



Mr. Cohen, 31 years old, says he simultaneously posts blog entries on Twitter, Facebook and his employer's Web site three times a day, often from his BlackBerry. He receives text-message and email alerts whenever messages are posted to Coffee Groundz's feed so he can respond, if necessary, in a timely manner.

I'm fascinated by the idea of libraries using these social media.

Internet Usage Becomes More Global

The U.S. government said Wednesday it had ended its 11-year contract with the nonprofit body that oversees key aspects of the Internet's architecture, after demands from other countries for more say in how the Web works. The move addresses mounting criticism in recent years that no one country should have sole control over important underpinnings of the Internet, such as determining domain name suffixes like ".com."

The criticism has intensified as Internet usage has soared around the world and become critical to economies and governments. Some countries, including China, have suggested they would build their own version of the Internet if the matter wasn't resolved.

Icann, which is based in Marina del Rey, Calif., was established in 1998 by the Clinton administration as a way to ensure that important Internet governance decisions, primarily addressing, were coordinated by a single body. The plan was for the Commerce Department to oversee the body, with veto power over important decisions, until Icann became strong enough to operate on its own as a private-sector organization.

It was considered essential that one body make such decisions to ensure that all users of the Internet were operating with the same address book, known as the domain-name system. The power of the Internet lies in part in this universality. Typing in www.ibm.com allows a user, whether in Paris or Pittsburgh, to reach the same Web site.

While the Internet was started in the U.S., today just 15% of the world's estimated 1.7 billion Internet users reside in North America, according to internetworldstats.com.

Icann is also planning to open up by next year domain suffixes to a wide variety of words, such as dot-airport and dot-food. The process has prompted concerns from some that the change could infringe on owners of well-known brands, potentially delaying the process.

Censorship?

Whatever the merits of the case made, this image is offensive and absurd. As a male librarian with very little hair, I take great offense at this stereotypical depiction of the shushing librarian.






Mr. Muncy is chief operating officer of the Institute for American Values. From 1996 to 2008, he was editor in chief of Spence Publishing.

I am exceedingly wary of anyone or anything proclaiming values. And, just what the heck are American values? (Presuming, of course that this individual and this institution mean U.S. values.)

Book Fair's dissident guests roil China

A dispute between China and organizers of the famed Frankfurt Book Fair threatens to overshadow the world's premier publishing event and become a diplomatic headache for German Chancellor Angela Merkel ahead of elections later this month.

The rift broke open last weekend at a symposium to herald next month's Frankfurt Book Fair, whose guest country of honor this year is China. Just as the 2008 Olympics ushered China's economic and sporting accomplishments onto the world stage, the fair is intended to do the same for its literary achievements. Some 2,000 Chinese publishers, artists and writers are expected to attend, and the first of hundreds of exhibits, readings and author tours already began this spring.

The fair's official Chinese organizing committee, though, took issue with the invitations of two dissidents to the symposium, titled "China and the world -- perception and reality."

After the Chinese delegation threatened to boycott the event, book fair organizers withdrew invitations to journalist and environmental activist Dai Qing and poet Bei Ling -- only to have them come as the guests of the German PEN club of independent writers.

Perception and reality is quite an apt title, it seems.

The German government could face a tricky balancing act if it wades in to the dispute. China is a critical trading partner and helped jump-start Germany's export-heavy economy's climb out of its recession in recent months.

But Ms. Merkel has made defending human rights a cornerstone of her foreign policy. Two years ago, she defied Chinese pressure and criticism by becoming the first German chancellor to receive the Dalai Lama.

Book Lover - September 18, 2009

In Search of Banned Children's Books
by Cynthia Crossen

I recently learned that the wonderful children’s book “Karlsson-on-the-Roof” by the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren is largely unknown in U.S. According to Wikipedia, the book was banned in some libraries and schools in North America. Is that true?

—Pavel Gurov, Nottingham, Md.

There doesn't seem to be a single verifiable record of banned books, but "Karlsson-on-the-Roof" by Ms. Lindgren, author of more than 70 children's books and creator of Pippi Longstocking, appears to have met with some protests in the U.S. One list of challenged books says Karlsson was suspected of inculcating "subversive views on babysitters." It probably didn't help that when it was published in 1955, it became was a huge best seller in the U.S.S.R. I have just read it, and I'm mystified by the controversy.

The Puritans brought censorship to America, and it has thrived ever since. Boston was the epicenter of censorship in the early 20th century; in 1927, Boston banned novels "The Hard-Boiled Virgin" and "The Marriage Bed," both of which sound like pretty wholesome messages. Over the years, Boston censors also turned away Sinclair Lewis's "Elmer Gantry"; Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy"; and Erskine Caldwell's "God's Little Acre." But the publisher Alfred Harcourt of Harcourt, Brace & Co. said in 1926, censorship efforts "certainly do not have any marked effect in curtailing receipts."

Looking at lists of books that have been challenged or banned (many protests against books are unsuccessful) around the world, I was surprised to find a children's book I remember fondly, "Ferdinand the Bull" by Munro Leaf. The bull who just wanted to smell the flowers was apparently going to seduce children into being Communists or pacifists. William Steig's "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble" has been challenged because the police are imagined as pigs—but then Sylvester is a donkey.

Among adult books, a few of my favorites that have provoked the censors somewhere are "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes; "Beloved" by Toni Morrison; "Sophie's Choice" by William Styron; "This Boy's Life" by Tobias Wolff; "Ordinary People" by Judith Guest; and "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque.

My opinion of censorship was neatly expressed by Clare Boothe Luce: "Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there." And why blame books rather than the behavior they reflect? Artists, said Edward Albee, should be "holding a mirror up to people and saying, 'This is the way you behave, and if you don't like it, you should change.' "