Google's Book Search is a Disaster for ScholarsAccording to Geoffrey Nunberg at the Chronicle of Higher Education "Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google's five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry.
Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50 or 100 years from now control of the collection may pass from Google to somebody elseElsevier, Unesco, Wal-Mart. But it's safe to assume that the digitized books that scholars will be working with then will be the very same ones that are sitting on Google's servers today, augmented by the millions of titles published in the interim. That realization lends a particular urgency to the concerns that people have voiced about the settlement about pricing, access, and privacy, among other things. But for scholars, it raises another, equally basic question: What assurances do we have that Google will do this right? " More from Geoffrey Nunberg at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Can you beat these Gaiman shelves, bibliophiles?
"Shelfari has always been a place where people come together to talk about their books. A place where you can show off your virtual bookshelf and where communities form around your favorite books and authors. It’s no surprise to us that you can learn a lot about someone by seeing what’s on his or her bookshelf.
Which is why we thought it would be fun to take a look at what’s on the bookshelves of some of our favorite authors. What books do they love, or consider to have been particularly enlightening, informative or just plain fun? What books do they keep?So we asked one of our all-time favorites, Neil Gaiman, if he’d be willing to give us a peek into his personal library, and he graciously agreed.
Gaiman first gained wide acclaim with his complex and literate 75-issue comic series The Sandman, and has since broadened his scope to write award-winning and bestselling novels (American Gods, Anansi Boys), screenplays (“Beowulf”) and yes, he still continues to write comics. His books Stardust and Coraline were both adapted for the screen and his most recent novel The Graveyard Book was awarded the Newbury Medal and, just last month, a Hugo Award for Best Novel. (See the Shelfari author page for Neil Gaiman for many more details.)
Naturally we’d assumed that someone whose work is filled with references ranging from literary to mythological would have a fairly extensive library but even so, we were a bit unprepared for the scope of what he sent us. In the basement of his house of secrets we find a room that’s wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling with books (along with a scattering of awards, gargoyles and felines)". See the photos here.
LITERARY REVIEW NEWSLETTER for September is now out
Click here to see the below online articles.
Collective Breakdown
Dominic Sandbrook looks nervously over his shoulder as he investigates whether the defining feature of the Seventies really was, as Francis Wheen’s new book has it, paranoia.
The Frozen Deep
Paul Johnson hails a definitive new biography of Charles Dickens, which shows how he configured his turbulent family life into a ‘huge, tragic and unwritten novel’.
The Past Imprisoned
Russia’s growing authoritarianism has disrupted historians trying to discover the truth about the Soviet Union. Donald Rayfield bemoans the closing of the archives.
‘The One Wanted Most’
Judas Iscariot has always had a bad reputation but he plays an indispensable role in Christ’s story. Frederic Raphael explores the various roles the notorious disciple has been called upon to perform.
Dollar Sign on His Heart
Frank Mclynn considers Joe Kennedy ‘one of the most disgusting apologies for a human being’. In his years as a Hollywood mogul, Kennedy destroyed careers for pleasure, left his mistress Gloria Swanson saddled with debts, and lacked any taste in films.
Object Lessons
Henry Wellcome was a megalomaniacal collector of anthropological curiosities from around the globe. Richard Fortey curates a life of artefacts.
1984: It's coming
Tom Palaima in the UK Times Higher Education Supplement fears that "in the 25 years since the iconic film adaptation of George Orwell's dystopia, US society has crept ever closer to its bleak vision of paranoia, surveillance, perpetual war and unthinkingness.What if George Orwell or his publisher Frederic Warburg had chosen the other title that Orwell was considering for what would be his final book, Nineteen Eighty-Four? Would a novel called The Last Man in Europe have grabbed the public imagination as much as the abbreviated title it now usually goes by, 1984?
The change from a number written out as words to Arabic numerals in itself mimics the terrifying reduction of words and thoughts in the world Orwell creates. The ideogram 1984 transmits Orwell's vision of a totalitarian state directly to our brains. The title phrase The Last Man in Europe might not have led to the word "Orwellian" becoming the universal adjective to describe any society in which the values that make human lives human have been perverted into their opposites by those in power so that they can retain their power.
A book with the title The Last Man in Europe also might not have offered the incentive to produce and release, in December 1984, Michael Radford's superb film adaptation with John Hurt as Winston Smith and Richard Burton as O'Brien. I still remember seeing it soon after its release and walking out into nighttime Manhattan near Lincoln Center, feeling drained of emotion and any small belief I then had left in the inherent goodness of human nature or my own significance as a human being. How easy it is to be removed from the stream of history, or never to be part of it in the first place.
It has been 25 years since that movie renewed the power of Orwell's story for readers and viewers. It was easy then in the US, looking, as we Americans always do, at our own society and our place in it, to be smug about how our realised future was not at all like Orwell's "boot stamping on a human face". More here
M ad Max fan moves from Yorkshire to the Outback
The UK Times reports on what many might see as a strange move -"a British man’s 27-year obsession with the post-apocalyptic biker movie Mad Max has led to him moving his family from Yorkshire to a tiny town in the middle of the Australian Outback. Adrian Bennett first saw the iconic Australian film Mad Max and its sequel The Road Warrior, which starred Mel Gibson as a revengeful drifter who wanders the Outback with his police ‘Interceptor’ car and his devoted dog, as a double bill at the cinema when he was a teenager in England in 1982.
Now 45, Mr Bennett has decided to fulfill his dream of living in the same town where the first two movies were made and has moved his wife Linda and two of his sons from their home in Bradford, Yorkshire, to Silverton near Broken Hill on the border of New South Wales and South Australia. He says he moved to the tiny and remote Outback town, which is located over 800 miles west of Sydney and has a population of just 51 (including the Bennetts), so he can set up a Mad Max museum in his backyard where he can park his custom-made made replica black Interceptor........We have taken a really big risk but I’ve followed my dream, so for me it’s all fallen into place,” said Mr Bennett, adding that his family have been captivated by the arid landscape and local wildlife.
“The other day I woke up and there were a dozen emus passing the back fence ... you wouldn’t get that in Yorkshire,” he said. “It’s just such a big and beautiful place. It doesn’t matter what direction you look in, you still feel like you’re on a film set.” More here
T he Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) 2009 has ended and has reported record ticket sales in excess of $581,000 and over 50,000 people attending over 350 events over the 10-day festival, which ran from 21 to 30 August. The top five bestsellers in Readings bookshop during the festival were:
Things We Didn't See Coming (Steven Amsterdam, Sleepers)
A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy (Thomas Buergenthal, Profile Books)
The Bee Hut (Dorothy Porter, Black Inc.)
Swimming (Enza Gandolfo, Vanark)
Guilt About the Past (Bernhard Schlink, UQP)
Institute of the Future of the Book
Kate Eltham, CEO of the Queensland Writers Centre, announced last week during the Melbourne Writers Festival digital publishing program that "Australia is to have its own Institute of the Future of the Book, or ‘if:book Australia'. if:book Australia is only the third centre of its kind for digital literature established in the world, after the New York and London institutes, and will be based in Brisbane. The institute will promote and explore digital publishing and new ways of communication between writer and reader.A national seminar series called Writers and Digital Markets, supported and funded by the literature Board of the Australia Council, will be the first project for if:book in 2010.The Queensland Writers Centre is seeking partners from across the publishing, education and media sectors who are interested in collaborative programs and research".
For information and contacts, see the QWC website.
It was perhaps ironic to hear that the keynote American speaker on the Future of the Book at the Melbourne Writers Festival found the powerpoint technology failed completely,reducing his presentation simply to the oral.
Faber publishers are celebrating their 80th birthday with a number of great items on the birthday website.
There’s a page for the Faber Archive including a timeline explorer; jacket and illustration database; electronic versions of old Faber catalogues; an audio tour of the Faber Archive and a unique publishing archive featuring many of the greatest literary and artistic figures of the twentieth century. All here
PMs Awards Shortlist coming soon
Minister for the Arts Peter Garrett will announce the Fiction and Non-Fiction shortlists for the 2009 Prime Minister's Literary Awards on Friday 18 September 2009 in Melbourne.The Fiction judging panel, comprising Professor Peter Pierce (chair), Professor John Hay AC and Dr Lyn Gallacher, have reviewed 93 fiction entries to develop a shortlist of recommended fiction titles. The Non-Fiction judging panel, comprising Phillip Adams AO (chair), Peter Rose and Professor Joan Beaumont, have reviewed 161 non-fiction entries to determine their shortlist.
Odd Book Title of the Week
The Flat Footed Flies of Europe. Peter J. Chandler. Brill. 2001. Libraries Australia report copies a href= "http://tinyurl.com/kv3gan" target=new>here.