Book Showers for New Babies

This is one new trend that I have to like. According to Springfield's News-Leader, the latest thing in baby showers is one in which everyone brings their favorite children's books as gifts.

A new shower trend, the book shower, aims to stock the new baby's bookcase. The theme is catching on with modern moms, many of whom receive several showers and get plenty of the nuts and bolts of babydom.

...

Susie Richardson of Urbandale, Iowa, hadn't heard of a book shower until her sister suggested throwing one for Richardson's son, Max, now 18 months old.

"When she first mentioned it, I thought, 'How weird,'" she says. "But it turned out to be wonderful. We have so many books, things I never would have thought to purchase on my own."

...

The best thing about the shower was the emotion and thought her friends and family invested in the gifts. Inside the front covers, many of the givers scribed short messages for the new baby. Mom and baby have discovered the notes as they've read the books.

What a great idea! I hope this catches on and helps to create a whole new generation of readers. We've always kept a special bookshelf at home for our three grandchildren and, almost from the beginning, they have loved dipping into the books to choose some of their favorites for us to read to them. Now that they are a little older, they sometimes even ask us to read them a bedtime story over the telephone when their day is done. Starting life surrounded by books is a good thing.

Longtime Book Collector Finally Learns to Read

I spotted this touching story in the Houston Chronicle this morning concerning a 79-year old woman who has collected books for years even though she could not read any of them. It's a beautiful story about how she expected that one day all those books would come in handy and how learning to read has given her a whole second life.

Picture: Ruth Mims, front, and her tutor, Emily Hopkins, meet twice a week at Tye Preston Memorial Library in Canyon Lake.

Taken by: Delcia Lopez: San Antonio Express-News

Mims was first exposed to the world of books through her friendship with the little girl whose parents owned the farm on which Mims' parents worked. The girl would read storybooks to her when Mims was 5 or 6 years old; that experience sparked in her a lasting desire to read.

"I said, 'I'd like to learn to read that myself,' and she said, 'You have to go to school. You can't learn by listening to me read, that's not how it's done,' " Mims said. "And I said, 'OK, one day I'll find out how it's done.'

It would take her seven decades to learn the secret. In the meantime, life got in the way."

...

She began working with Emily Hopkins, a volunteer with 38 years of experience teaching preschoolers through eighth-graders. They began with the first volume of the "Laubach Way to Reading" series, which starts with phonics.

"I sat down and started with that very, very basic curriculum and realized she had some skills," said Hopkins, 70. "People at her age have learned to cope, so Ruth had quite a few coping skills."

...

"I'm going as far as my education will take me, darling. I have no intention of giving up," she said.

And of course, she plans to go through all the books in her house.

"When I had money, I bought all the things I wanted, and it was books and more books and more books. I have a full set of encyclopedias. I bought them in 1994," she said. "I knew one day I was going to learn to read them. I got enough books here to read the rest of my life and I have every intention of reading them."

To get a real feel for this lady, the life she's lived raising several successful children, and the spirit that inspires her to keep going full-speed ahead, read the whole article. It's a great way to start off the weekend.

Pat Conroy Interviews His Wife, Cassandra King

I posted here, almost exactly one year ago, that Pat Conroy's new novel was almost finished. Well, twelve months later I'm still anxiously waiting to see it show up in my local bookstore or to read something else about Pat's plans for that elusive next book.

The search term "Pat Conroy" is consistently one of the major drivers of internet traffic to this site, so I know there are countless others out there who can't wait to get their hands on the next Pat Conroy book, too. I'm sorry to say that I don't have any new information regarding the book, but I did find this great YouTube video this afternoon in which Pat interviews his wife, Cassandra King, about her own latest book, Queen of Broken Hearts.


Don't you love those accents? Or am I just showing my positive bias toward everything about the Deep South?

The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970)

Written in 1970, this pessimistic time travel novel, a Hugo Award finalist, begins in 1978 when Brain Cheney is more or less drafted into a mysterious government project. Chaney is a Biblical scholar of sorts whose book debunking certain ancient scrolls has irritated many Christians around the country but he is also a professional demographer and has already produced one report for the government predicting how current trends will impact the near future. The government believes him to be perfect for this new project. Who better to send into the future in the new time machine invented by the Bureau of Weights and Measures than a man experienced in predicting that very future?

Interestingly, Brian Cheney and the two military officers drafted into the project with him travel only as far as twenty years into the future, to the turn of the new century, because government officials are so concerned with what they see as a dark future for the United States that they hope to learn enough from the time travel to change that future. Today’s readers, of course, have lived beyond the years visited by these time travelers so their adventurous trip into the future has become our past. As a result, The Year of the Quiet Sun reads as much like an alternate history novel at times as it does as a story of time travel.

Cheney, the only civilian time-traveler of the team, has little regard for politicians and resents the way that the President and his staff order that the first trip into the future be only to 1980 so that the President can determine whether or not he will be re-elected. The three travelers, who can go into the future only one-at-a-time due to the limitations of their vehicle, get that information for him but they also return to 1978 with news of the tremendous unrest and violence that is already impacting the future of America’s major cities, especially Chicago. It is when they are sent forward to 2000, and just beyond, to learn the effectiveness of the President’s attempt to save the country that the novel really takes off.

The second half of the book centers itself around realistic military skirmishes between government troops and the rebels who are intent on overthrowing the government with help from the Chinese, but it also details the evolving relationships of the three time- travelers and the head of their project, the beautiful Katherine with whom two of the men have become particularly smitten. Readers who may have found the pace of the book’s first half to be a bit slow in its set-up of the second half action will find themselves well-rewarded for staying with the book to the end. Tucker’s vision of the horrible future that could have resulted from the radicalism of the 1960s and early 1970s is a horrifying one.

Tucker even saves a nice little surprise for his readers until near the end, one that more astute readers than me may figure out earlier, but one that made me laugh out loud at its cleverness.

Rated at: 4.0

Big Changes from HarperCollins

HarperCollins Publishers is forming a new entity that is set to make some big changes in the traditional relationship between publishers, authors and booksellers. According to the New York Times, it will work this way:

Author advances and bookseller returns are two issues that have long troubled the publishing industry. Best-selling authors can command advances that are so high that publishers often come away with slim profits, even for books that are major successes. Publishers also offer high advances to untested authors in the hopes of creating best sellers, but often those risks do not pan out.

Ms. Friedman said the new group, which will start by publishing 25 titles a year, will offer “low or no advances.” Mr. Miller said he hoped to offer a profit-sharing plan in which both publisher and author would split the net profits.

Under current standard practices, booksellers can return any books they do not sell, saddling publishers with the high costs of shipping and pulping copies. Mr. Miller said that by eliminating returns, the publishers could share any savings with authors.

It will be interesting to see how this works out for this new segment of HarperCollins. I gather from the article that the group will only publish a certain type of book for what is called the "low end of the market." The examples given do not particularly appeal to me as a reader but I'm intrigued by the possibility that e-book and audio copies of the books might be included at no extra charge with purchase of the hardcover version of the books.

The publishing industry is searching for a new business model, one that works for everyone involved in the process, including customers. I imagine that other companies will be watching this one closely.

Special Welfare Programs for Authors?

I was going to mention Times of London article yesterday but my enthusiasm for the new baseball season got the best of me and I spent most of the evening watching baseball from several cities around the country. Direct TV has a free MLB preview this week and I have access to every game being played in the country during this preview. Luckily, I can't afford to the price to have this kind of access for the whole season, so my evening activity will soon return to normal.

The gist of the Times article is that pirated books on the internet, available for free download, are going to cause writers to put down their pens and keyboards forever, that they will prefer silence to poverty wages. Of course, writers will never do that, despite what Tracy Chevalier, author and chairperson for the U.K.'s Society of Authors wants us to believe. According to the article:

Book piracy on the internet will ultimately drive authors to stop writing unless radical methods are devised to compensate them for lost sales.

This is the bleak forecast of the Society of Authors, which represents more than 8,500 professional writers in the UK and believes that the havoc caused to the music business by illegal downloading is beginning to envelop the book trade.

There is so much wrong with this article that it's hard to know where to begin. True, the music industry is in somewhat of a chaotic state at the moment. But what would one expect when an industry blames its problems on its customers and begins to sue them for illegal downloads instead of using the new technology to push more product to those very customers. The general quality of today's record albums is worse than in decades past. The albums are often nothing but two hit songs surrounded by eight or ten "fillers" so that consumers can be forced to buy an entire album rather than the two songs they really want. The music industry no longer produces singles, preferring to push inferior albums instead. So consumers jumped on the new technology to find the songs they wanted, and only the songs they wanted. Who can blame them, really? When the labels didn't want to make the songs available legally, their customers found a way to get them any way they could. Finally, the labels have decided to sell single songs over the internet at reasonable prices and their customers are starting to come back to them...at least the ones who haven't been sued yet.

But three-minute recordings are not books.

So why does Chevalier want to see book publishers take a hard line approach similar to the one that almost killed off all the major record labels? Perhaps it's because she's a better writer than she is a businesswoman. Some authors are already beginning to embrace a new business model built around a willingness to give away free electronic copies of their books in the knowledge that the name recognition gained from doing so will ultimately result in the sale of more printed copies of their work than would have otherwise been the case. Books, after all, are entertainment and writers are part of the entertainment industry. Name recognition converts an author's name into a brand. Well known brands have the edge; they sell more than generic brands that no one recognizes or trusts for quality.

Chevalier, who sounds a lot like "Chicken Little" has come up with what I believe is a ludicrous solution to the problem, one that she recommends be put into place before all the writers disappear forever:

In the 19th century and before, other models of paying writers existed, including lump-sum agreements and profit-sharing. She sees no reason why the book industry should not be equally innovative. She suggested four possible sources of income at an industry discussion on copyright law last week: the Government, business, rich patrons and the public. Government funding could take the form of an “academy” of salaried writers.

Just what we need, work programs for writers similar to those used in the U.S. during the Great Depression and other sources of income that sound similarly close to being public welfare programs for authors.

Why not let the market figure this out for itself? Printed books are not going to be replaced by electronic copies. The hardware to comfortably read a whole book is just not there and it doesn't seem likely that such hardware will exist anytime soon, if ever.

Lighten up, Ms. Chevalier. The sky isn't really falling. I promise.