Subjects Matter!

Better World Books is offering 75K in grants to library communities.

What’re you waiting for? Libraries have up until March 25th to submit their “Game Changing” ideas. Winners will be announced on May 16th and the winning projects implemented between 5/16/11 and 12/31/11.

Don’t be frightened away by the close deadline and short time frame, these grants are for compelling projects that will make a dramatic impact literacy in your community.

Successful applicants will use the funds to advance a compelling literacy project that Better World Books will follow and share with you.

If you work at a library, know of anyone that works at a library, love your library or have ever been touched by the power of a book, check out www.betterworldbooks.com/librarygrants. There you’ll find out more about the Better World Books library grant program and how to participate.

Ask about their weeding solutions too -betterworldbooks.com can take your weeded books and find them a new home. You’ll share a percent of the income from the sale of those books, and so will Better World Books’ literacy partners. Your library or Library Friends’ group can use this no cost program to help manage your discarded and donated books. Betterworld Books will help you make the most of your weeded books by selling them on 23 online-marketplaces and sharing the proceeds with you and one of their nonprofit literacy programs.

Stony Stratford Library -photo credit Karen Parker

This is BRILLIANT!

People in a Buckinghamshire town have borrowed every single book from their local library to block plans to close it down.

Even here across the pond the New Yorker reports how ” more than a thousand Stony Stratford residents made their way to the red-brick building, scoured the shelves for their allotment of fifteen titles, swiped their library cards, and left the building completely bare of books.”

They’ve named their effort the “WOT NO BOOKS CAMPAIGN TO SAVE OUR LIBRARY”

The library calculated that books had been checked out at a rate of around 378 per hour.

“A local resident mentioned the idea, maybe as a bit of a joke, but we thought it was a great idea so we put it to FOSSL[The Friends of Stony Stratford Library],” siad Emily Malleson.

“I put it on Facebook and emailed everyone I could think of and it’s just gone absolutely mad.”

Photo Credit Karen Parker

And the best news of all? The Library’s got a year’s reprieve and other local libraries are learning from their example how to keep their libraries open.

Save, Saving, Saved! Photo Credit Karen Parker

Ponies by Kij Johnson

This Nebula award nominated short story pushes some readers’ buttons and they light up. Not mine. Maybe your’s?

It will be interesting to see how tween readers and guys respond to this contemporary dark fairy tale. I will try it out on some and let you know how it goes. The saving grace: It is short and to-the-point, though not sweet.

my rating

The initial tween avg rating of three 10 yo girls

Want to weigh in on this one? Take my gendered reading poll on goodreads.

Can’t get enough of this? Give me a generational response too!

View all my goodreads.com reviews

Julia Yu’s Goodnight Dune is an inspired illustrated parody of the omni-present Goodnight Moon that accompanies seemingly every American gift giving occasion for babies, toddlers, and new parents.

This alternative illustrated verse will reward your love or fascination with Frank Herbert‘s Dune!

Who knows, it may even encourage a love for Sci-Fi in very young readers?

Here’s an excerpt for the curious among you:

Excerpt From Julia Yu's Goodnight Dune copyright Julia Yu, 2011. All Rights Reserved

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

View all my goodreads reviews

How long should an ebook license last?  The rights for a  hardcopy book allow libraries to circulate it indefinitely -basically til it wears out.  Harper Collins has determined that an e-book should only circulate 26 times before the license needs to be renewed (aka til the library has to shell out more money).

In a CSM article about the controversy Rebekahh Denn presents the example of Andy Woodworth, an irritated blogging librarian who summed  up the situation in a post on his blog  as “The Publisher of Tolkien Has Taken A Business Lesson From Sauron”.

There’s an organized effort among concerned librarians to boycott Harper Collins  and Library Journal has published an open lettter from HarperCollins and their distributor, Overdrive, responding to the controversy the policy has created.

What’s fair? What’s not? Who loses if this policy becomes the defacto norm?

Here’s a blog post from Karen Healy of her Personal List of Feminist Young Adult and Middle Grade Novels. It is an interesting list. Take a look!

Also worth following is Karen’s discussion of Bitch Magazine’s 100 Young Adult Books for the Feminist Reader published Jan 28, 2011 and their subsequent decision to remove these three books from the list:

Tender Morsels

Living Dead Girl

Sisters Red

Author Phillip Pullman on the wrongheadedness of library branch closures and why volunteers and energetic advocacy shouldn’t be all that stand between a library branch being open or closed.

In a way it’s an abdication of responsibility. We elect people to decide things, and they don’t really want to decide, so they set up this bidding nonsense and then they aren’t really responsible for the outcome. “Well, if the community really wanted it, they would have put in a better bid [or volunteered more] … Nothing I can do about it … My hands are tied …”

Pullman asks us to Imagine two communities that have been told their local library is going to be closed.

One of them is full of people with generous pension arrangements, plenty of time on their hands, lots of experience of negotiating planning applications and that sort of thing, broadband connections to every household, two cars in every drive, neighbourhood watch schemes in every road, all organised and ready to go. . . . They do have certain advantages that the other community, the second one I’m talking about, does not.

In the second community, There people are out of work, there are a lot of single parent households, young mothers struggling to look after their toddlers, and as for broadband and two cars, they might have a slow old computer if they’re lucky and a beaten-up old van . . . and the bus isn’t free, either – you can imagine it. Which of those two communities will get a bid organised to fund their local library?

Who are these people whose lives are so empty, whose time spreads out in front of them like the limitless steppes of central Asia, who have no families to look after, no jobs to do, no responsibilities of any sort, and yet are so wealthy that they can commit hours of their time every week to working for nothing?

Who indeed? Think about this the next time you listen to anyone trying to tell you that you can run a local library on nothing but volunteers and goodwill, or that branch users can just go to another branch or the main library.
Read Pullman’s full speech Leave the libraries alone. You don’t understand their value from a meeting of 20 January 2011, when he was called to defend Oxfordshire libraries.

Philip Pullman is the author of the popular His Dark Materials series that begins with the award winning book, The Golden Compass.

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It’s no secret that I am a goodreads addict. I can’t get enough of the site.

But, the goodreads iphone app is becoming so useful that it rivals the typical desktop pc experience of the gr web app.

With the release of a barcode scanning feature, the gr app allows the user to stand in a bookstore, scan a book’s barcode and see the gr ratings, reviews, and even put the title on their own “to-read” shelf.

On the flip side of the coin users in their own personal libraries can scan in their own books, making it really easy to list the books you’ve read for other goodreads users to see and ask you about.

The app follows a book full circle from retail, to home library, and back out into a community of fellow readers who are all interested in what people have to say about books!

In Beyond the flat world Alan McCluskey – writes about how:

Goodreads has an App for the iPhone that enables you to read the barcode of a book with your iPhone without any additional equipment and in so doing, immediately provides the information available about the book. No more need to even type in the name of the book to find it in the extensive database and add it to your reading list. The first time I tried it, it was like magic. In that moment my iPhone created a tangible link between the mass of books on the shelf in front of me and the reading community of which I am a part. In comparison, the Internet as a web seemed flat and exterior, like the screen it is displayed on. Somewhere in there, behind the joy of my gut reaction to the Goodread’s App, is the explanation why there is so much excitement about using apps to go beyond a flat online world to one that interacts more fully with the offline world. And in that relationship between the online and offline worlds mediated by simple-to-use technologies and our skill at combining and using them lies an exciting future.

Vida Web has released their 2010 ratios of male:female reviewers & male:female authors. Slate wrote a piece on the unequal distribution too.

The news remains depressing . . . with so many women reading, why aren’t more making money as reviewers? As writers?

Here are the top three reasons that come to mind:

1. Maybe a post-feminist assumption that such concerns are passé has allowed the numbers to remain out of balance?
2. We are conditioned as men and women to prefer or elevate men’s writing simply because of the topics they choose to write on?
3. The good old boys network is still strong, while women gossip in the park next to strollers or have coffee meetings during work days men are out there making money and the relationships that allow them to make more?
4. all of the above?

Let me know what YOU think! Got another idea to add to the list?

 Author Holly Robinson made a post on her blog titled Our Muses, Ourselves: Why Women Like Me Run Away From Home
that provides an interesting point of view on the sujbect!

Here’s my recent experience with situation number two . I recently read Wyrd Wravings, an anthology of humorous speculative fiction. Except the majority of the stories weren’t funny, ironically for me, none of them were laugh out loud funny. And, the majority of the authors were women. What a disappointment! And the awful thing was that while I was reading it I kept thinking these women writers are writing amateurish stories with domestic settings. And wondering, why?

The author bios built the back story. The majority of the writers were amateurs (they mostly had other occupations beside writer to pay the bills). A couple of the women wrote on work related themes, a woman police officer and a woman high-tech worker. The rest wrote on largely domestic/fantasy related themes that were familiar territory for women writers. They wrote characters who were concerned about their kids, their friends, men, their clothes, etc.

The men’s stories WERE noticeably different from the women’s and featured characters seemingly more focused on the major conflicts in the plot of their stories than what they were wearing or what their kids were doing. As a reader I responded to that and was pleased with that formulaic fulfillment in the same way I was irritated/distracted by the minutia of the women characters’ lives presented in some of the female authors stories.

Do I need to re-learn how to read? Do women need to write more like men to be read and appreciated by any reader who has cut their teeth reading men’s books? How long will it take us to move toward a menu that includes and promotes male and female authored work in all its variety ?

After interviewing Newbery and Caldecott award winning authors for the past 11 years, the Today Show ran an interview with Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi instead! her book is titled: A Shore Thing.

Let’s read Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool .

Moon Over Manifest

Sick Day for Amos McGee cover

And A Sick Day for Amos McGee written by Philip Christian Stead, illustrated by Erin Stead - A sick day indeed!

Alice Pope’s SCBWI Children’s Market Blog describes the decision and includes the full text of a letter Lin Oliver, Executive Director & Stephen Mooser, President of SCBWI sent to The Today Show’s executive producers Jim Bell and Noah Kotch. What were these guys thinking?