Well-Read Life™

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).

Being a Reader in Chile

A note to my readers—

When I mentioned to a  fellow book group member, Lawrence Steinberg, that I was going to Chile over spring break with my son Cal to do some cycling—and visit libraries—he said we simply must visit his daughter, Ashley, who was living in Santiago. A few years ahead of Cal, Ashley had just graduated from Penn and had taken it on herself to move to Chile to try her hand as a journalist and English teacher before going on to Stanford Law School. (Thus far, her work has appeared in The Nation, Newsweek.com and the Santiago Times.)

We couldn't have asked for a better guide to take us to the Biblioteca Nacional, as well as to give us an idea of what reading was like in Chile. As Ashley began to describe the many differences, including the subtle ones (in her experience, people rarely ask one another what they are reading), I realized that Levenger Well-Read Life readers would benefit from hearing directly from this talented young writer. I asked her to post a guest essay on the reading life in Chile from an American's perspective. Here is her report.

- Steve

Chileans call their country pais de poetas (“country of poets”). The South American nation has produced two Nobel Prize for Literature winners, Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, and an array of talented writers. To be a Chilean reader is to be immersed in literature inspired by a landscape of mountains, lakes, volcanoes, glaciers and deserts; to be entranced by a place where Isabel Allende’s magical realism mixes with Roberto Bolaño’s sense of adventure, where Alberto Fuguet’s passion meets Ariel Dorfman’s politics.

Any tourist arriving in Chile is made aware of the nation’s deep literary tradition. Taxi drivers point tourists to Neruda’s kooky houses in Santiago, Valparaíso and Isla Negra. Tourist maps highlight statues and museums devoted to other literary greats. This unusually shaped country of almost 17 million people considers its literary contributions to be an important part of its heritage.

When I first came to Chile in 2006 to write for the English-language newspaper the Santiago Times, I was unaware of the country’s literary legacy. But I soon learned how important it was to the Chilean people, and I began to familiarize myself with the country’s poets and writers.

What I began to notice, however, was that for a country whose literature is so spirited, books are exorbitantly, often prohibitively, expensive. A book that might cost $10 in the United States can cost the equivalent of $25 in Chile. Considering the lower median salary in Chile, the high prices are all the more shocking. 

The high price tag is a result of a tax placed on books as well as Chilean publishers’ desire for high profit margins on limited volume. The high price of books is especially peculiar considering Chile’s quest to become a developed commercial and financial world center. Literacy is one of the most effective tools governments can use to bring up their least privileged citizens out of poverty, but the book tax threatens to price literacy out of the reach of the very ones aspiring to it.

Luckily, efforts are being made to address the incongruity between the justifiable pride the Chileans have for their literature and the inflated price of new books. Governments at the national, regional and municipal levels have intensified their efforts to open new libraries and modernize old ones, and ensure that all neighborhoods have at least one public library. Libraries currently serve as especially important resources for university students, for whom paying 50,000 Chilean pesos (over $100) for a textbook is unthinkable. Unofficial estimates suggest that almost half of municipal library users are students.   

Residents of Santiago, Chile’s capital city, are treated to the BiblioMetro program, a series of small booths or storefronts in key metro stations that allow passengers to check out books for the small annual fee of 3000 Chilean pesos (just over $6). They can return the books to the giant book drops that are scattered throughout the metro system.

Additionally, a new national government program, Maletin Literario (“Literary Briefcase”), was created to give books by both Chilean and foreign authors to 400,000 families living in poverty. The government received criticism from right-wing politicians who believed that “delivering Kafka to families on welfare” was an inefficient use of funds, but program supporters fought back, arguing that the poor, just as much as the rich, had a right to literature.

Nonprofits have also stepped in to improve the situation. The Gates Foundation funded a program called BiblioRedes, a multi-million dollar initiative that installed free public Internet access in 378 libraries across the country, bringing hundreds of thousands of Chileans through the doors.

And there are other ways around the expense. A pedestrian walking down any street in downtown Santiago will undoubtedly encounter vendors hawking pirated books from sidewalk tables, flagrantly defying intellectual-property laws alongside their DVD- and CD-selling counterparts.

Less illicitly, Chileans can also take advantage of frequent ferias del libro, or book fairs, that offer some discounted books. Not every title is bound to be available, and finding exactly what you seek is not a quick or easy process, but for the book enthusiast, browsing at the ferias is a good option. There are also second-hand bookshops that carry old books for lower prices, though the latest bestselling hardcover would be difficult to find.

Yet despite the lack of ubiquitous Barnes & Noble stores and Amazon.com, Chileans have something in common with citizens of more developed countries. They, too, face information and media overload. With television, Internet, video games and movies competing for readers’ attention, the price of books creates an easy excuse to spend leisure time doing something that is instantly accessible.

“What is happening here is similar to the trend in the U.S.,” says Viviana Garcia, the Coordinator of the Municipal Library in Providencia. “Chileans don’t read as much as we should.”

Unlike in America, however, reading is not quite a social institution. Alma Rates, a film student in Santiago, says that “book clubs are not very common here, and I don’t usually hear people asking each other if they’ve read any good books lately.”

It is unclear whether this has anything to do with book prices. And ultimately, as Garcia from the Providencia library explains, “people who want to read will always find a way.”

As one friend tells me, the difficulty of acquiring books makes one appreciate reading more. A book cannot be an impulse buy. “It is something you save up for, something you think about, something you look forward to,” he says.

“And something you are grateful for when your fingers finally turn the first page.”

As always, I’d like to hear your thoughts. 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—Sixth in a Series

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

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

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

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

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

The word was vergüenza. The translation is shame.

Connecting in Chile

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

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

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

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

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

Aspiring in Egypt

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

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

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

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

If so, one country in need is Cambodia.

Hoping for Cambodia

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

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

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

“Yes, we have that,” he replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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—Fifth in a Series

America’s libraries bring community to communities

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

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

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

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

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

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

More book than burgers…

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

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

…but a small piece of the pie

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

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

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

Cradles of learning and liberty

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

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

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

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

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

Meantime, let me hear your thoughts on American libraries. What is your experience?
Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

For more on all that America’s libraries do, read the report of the American Public Library’s Public Programs Office.

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

Hard-to-Find No More

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

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

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

In a few weeks.

Maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Golden Age of Books: third in a series

Books as ideas that co-opt technology

We might readily presume that technology poses a threat to books and our idea of traditional reading. Movies, television, video games and the Web take us away from sitting comfortably with our nose in a book, breathing in literature. Our government takes this threat seriously enough to fund studies, as we fund studies of air quality and global warming.

Yet this presumption begs a few questions. What is a book exactly? What is literature? And is our idea of traditional reading worth special protection?

A book, before it takes physical form, is an idea—or rather, a collection of ideas that somehow form a coherent whole. Ideas drawn into a book create a unit of knowledge or experience, or a story, with a beginning and some type of end.

What we point to when we say book—that thing made of paper pages between covers—is but a currently popular technological form for books.

Our familiar hardcover book has evolved considerably since its debut some 1,500 years ago. And its form has always relied on technology and art. In the beginning the pages were artfully handwritten by scribes on animal skins, and only the rich could afford them. Eventually paper was invented and movable type, and then mass production that enabled an exploding readership. Growing readership in turn created a market for more books, more reading teachers, and yet more readers, all in a virtuous cycle.

Typographic and graphic design made books ever more pleasing to read. Compelling dust jackets and marketing helped books sell. Computerized typesetting, digital printing and computerized distribution have all enabled the surfeit of books we now enjoy. We are the lucky beneficiaries of these technological and artistic advances.

Today we love our physical books to the point of worship—for their content as well as their form. We grant prestigious awards to writers. Artists pay tribute by making sculptures of books in wood, bronze and stone.

But as wondrous as the current physical form of a book is, it is not the original or only form.

During the centuries of the famed Library of Alexandria, scrolls were the books of their day. Before that: engraved stone, painted walls and the original audiobooks—storytelling. All of these forms also depended on technology and art. Even storytelling combined the tools of language with the art of oratory and song. A Greek fellow named Homer was particularly good at this form of a book.

Since books are ideas before they are things, they seem to morph into whatever technology is available. Like life forms, they evolve to fill newly available habitats.

A hundred years ago, this morphing began to accelerate, most significantly into movies, then television, and, in the last quarter of the 20th century, into audiobooks. These new art forms may not be called books, but they contain the same kinds of ideas as books and can result in similar benefits. Then can teach and entertain and fill one with dread or inspiration. They, like traditional printed books, are art. And in some cases, the new art can eclipse our traditional printed form of a book.

Can you read the writing on the new wall?

That movies can sometimes be better art than the books that inspired them is a reality that comes through loudly in the hundreds of thoughtful comments I’ve received on boovies. Television has also hosted superb art inspired from books, including Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove series  and thousands of other moving productions. Audiobooks, too, can surpass their printed cousins, especially when richly accented dialog comes to life through the voice of a gifted narrator.

The acceleration of book alternatives continues today with graphic novels, with popular books being written—and read—on cell phones, and most significantly, with the latest hatch of electronic books sporting marvelous new screens that seem remarkably like paper, and boasting onboard dictionaries together with audio and annotation capabilities.

A growing number of folks today are preferring to read their morning news online where they can click through for more detail, watch a video, email the journalist—it’s easy to -see why this dynamic reading-and learning can be more compelling than shaking out the traditional newspaper over your bowl of corn flakes. Soon more readers will make a similar discovery about electronic books, which they can read with a dynamism hardly imagined just a few years ago.

“There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.”

Our image of someone sitting quietly with a book à la Emily Dickinson is truly beautiful. We know how transporting this kind of reading can be. But our present paper books are not our only frigates, and there are lands far from sight for us to explore.

If we are about to enter a Cambrian Explosion of new ways of creating and reading books (and I think we are), can we still cherish the physical books we grew up with?

I know how much I treasure my printed-books library and hope to lovingly expand it until the end of my days. After all, Levenger is a publisher of paper books, with an eye toward transforming these physical beings into objects of desire. Yet I’m also excited for books to become ever more liberated from their paper handcuffs.

Technological advance, rather than posing a threat, provides new habitats for books and literature to thrive in. I look forward to dwelling, at least some of the time, in these brave new worlds.

As part of this series on the Golden Age of Books, I’ll take us on a tour of some of the ways technology is helping books take us to ever more exciting lands away.

Coming up: Happy Eulogy for Hard-to-Find Books.

But first—

How about you? Are you partaking of books in other-than-book form? Is it an evolution for the better…or not? I’d like to hear your thoughts. 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: second in a series

Quality of Books at All-Time High

The first reason why I contend we are entering the Golden Age of Books is the unprecedented quantity of books available today. The second reason is that more and more great writers enter the literary canon every day. We live in an age of abundance when it comes to great writing.

Today’s readers are blessed with access to all the masters of the past plus the great writers of today. We have Pearl Buck and Toni Morrison, Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe, Upton Sinclair and Christopher Hitchens, Whitman and Neruda. Unlike athletes, writers keep playing after death. The field just gets bigger to contain more and more quality.

Sure, there are terrible books being published among the hundreds of thousands of new titles each year, but there always have been. Yet competition at traditional publishing houses today has never been keener. Even many well-established writers have to jostle for top-of-the-stack attention.

Add to this the blossoming of self-publishing and the many more writers whose voices are being heard as a result. (Periodically, a self-published book will catch on big with readers, and then major publishing houses will vie for the rights to bring it out under their imprint.)

While this competitive atmosphere is daunting for the countless other aspiring authors who want to become published, it’s a boon for readers.

Today, thousands of gifted writers shine their light in nearly any direction we readers care to look—and in directions we wouldn’t think to look, which can be the most important of all.

Our great fiction writers can help us understand the perils we face, and remind us not take for granted the positive attributes of human caring. I’m thinking of Cormac McCarthy, Ann Patchett, Ian McEwan, Marilynne Robinson, and so many others.

Our great historians and biographers write true tales as compelling to read as novels. Read David McCullough’s John Adams or 1776, or Stacy Schiff’s biography of Ben Franklin. Want deeper understanding into our last century? Try Walter Isaacson’s brilliant biography of Einstein, or Scott Berg’s amazing account of Lindbergh.

Taking on even more importance today than in the past are the writers who have a gift for explaining in clear, engaging prose, the rapid advances in science. We have new treasures clarifying some of the important advances in social psychology, physics, astronomy, evolution, personal health, world health, sustainability, and on and on. I’m thinking of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, Bill Bryson’s Short History of Practically Everything, Sherwin Nuland’s Art of Aging, Stewart Brand’s Clock of the Long Now, Thomas Lewis et al.’s General Theory of Love, Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, and Alan Weisman’s incandescent The World Without Us.

You, dear reader, can no doubt think of many other books even more deserving of praise. And that is my point. We enjoy a banquet of books of superb quality that distill the best in current thought as well as golden thoughts of the past.

Just when the citizens of this planet desperately need to sift through our accumulated knowledge and act with wisdom on what we learn, we have an enhanced ability to do so because of the quantity, diversity, and quality of books available today.

Now it’s your turn: Have we entered the Golden Age of Books? Do we live among an abundance of great writers, past and present?  What do you think? I’d like 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).

The Golden Age of Books: first in a series

  The Greenwich Book Exchange
  Photos Taken by Tom Allen

When people find out I’m the CEO of Levenger, they frequently ask if I’m worried that our business could dwindle as people turn away from books. When I respond that I believe books will be with us for a while longer, most people give me a silent half-nod. It seems they don’t want to disabuse me of my quaint view. I can’t really blame them for thinking I’m out of touch.

Today there is plenty of hand-wringing about how a barrage of new media are stealing time away from reading. Government studies reinforce with statistics what we see by looking around: young people find 3D video games and Facebook more interesting than Jane Eyre.   

Since our business is tied to such social changes, I continuously query people about their reading habits. Yet what I’m finding makes me feel encouraged rather than discouraged about reading, especially the reading of books.

In fact, from all the good news I see, I’m going to suggest that we may be entering a magnificent new era in reading that is already far better than anything we had in those good old days, whenever they might have been.

I’ll here begin a series of postings on why, in my opinion, we are now entering the Golden Age of Books.

Why We’re Entering the Golden Age of Books:
Reason No. 1: Our Historic High Tides of Books

We are swimming in books. In both the number of titles, and the sheer quantities of books printed, the world has never seen anything like what we have today. In 2004, the last year statistics are available, the global production of books in English amounted to a mind-boggling 450,000 titles.

The U.S. production alone increased 15% between 2002 and 2006, surging from about 250,000 titles to 300,000 per year. The only genres of books to show declines over these years were juvenile and computer books. Yet more than making up for those declines are significant increases in poetry, drama, religion, philosophy, fiction and biography.

In 2006, Americans  spent an estimated $24.2 billion buying books, a figure that has been increasing about 3% per year since 2003.  Many, if not most, of the books we purchased at a discount—a discount we have come to expect, although it was rare just a generation ago.

These figures don’t include the millions of books that readers purchase and then giveaway, some of which end up being sold for a dollar or two at thrift shops and libraries.

Libraries get so many donations, in fact, that it’s become a burden for them to process. Few books actually make it into library circulation. Most are sold for a buck or a few quarters (even for nice hardcovers). Uncounted numbers of paperbacks are heaped onto shelves and squeezed into bins marked “FREE.”

Like puppies at the animal shelter, more free books vie for our attention at town halls, company lunchrooms, clubs, hotel lobbies—even waste stations.

The Greenwich Book Exchange is one example. This popular outpost at the Greenwich, Connecticut, waste transfer station started about 25 years ago when two senior citizens who were volunteering there became bothered by the hundreds of books being thrown out. They decided to put some of the books on a table so people could see them. Many then disappeared as Greenwich townspeople dropped off garbage and picked up Gibbon.

The number of boxes grew and grew, soon spilling out of the container being used to store them.

“I finally conned the head of public works into a building—a shed 8 by 16 feet where books are arranged by size and alphabetically,” says Doug Francefort, one of the founders, and the person in charge of the operation today.

You can find P.D. James and Plutarch, Stephen King and Shakespeare, all shelved in proper order. “I’m a retired assistant controller from Pitney Bowes,” said Doug, “and that accountant in me likes things neat and tidy.”

A sign says there is a limit of 10 books per day per family. “I look the other way sometimes,” said Doug. “There’s a woman who comes all the time and collects kids’ books for the center she volunteers for.”

What’s remarkable is that The Greenwich Book Exchange, while being a fine example, is not unusual, but representative of our enormous book wealth. Of the tons of books people won’t take for free, and libraries and thrift shops can’t sell, some are shipped overseas by charitable organizations, while tons and tons more are simply pulped.

Is it wasteful that we print so many books, and have done so for so many decades? Yes, but of all the things we can be wasteful in, this is one of the best. The result is that our ability to enjoy literature and to learn is not limited by our ability to own books. (And I haven’t yet mentioned using libraries, which will be the subject of a future post.) 

Our streets are paved with literary gold. Yet it seems we don’t realize it. Is one of the conditions of living in El Dorado that we must be unaware of it?

Let me know what you think. Do you agree we’re entering the Golden Age of Books? I’d love to hear your reason(s) why or why not.