booktwo.org

I’ve been spending the day listen to friends twitter from NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference at the South Bank, and an Arts Council England summit on the future of literature just round the corner. NESTA was established by the government in 1998 with an endowment of £250 million. Just last week, ACE announced £16.5 million of Lottery funding for the Southbank Centre, the same week I discovered that my full-price membership of that institution no longer lets me take in a friend for free.

Meanwhile, the slash and burn of the literature sector continues (others too: film, theatre, visual arts, but lit’s what I know). Since launching London Lit Plus 2008 last week I’ve been hearing the same story from all over: we don’t have any money. They cut us off. It’s depressing, and frustrating. I’ve long been an exponent of using the internet and related technologies to bypass the need for huge investment, but real-world activities still need real-world money.

A tale of two literary magazines illustrates the point: The London Magazine, one of the longest-established literary journals in the world, has seen its budget drastically reduced, but they say “we are determined to continue, and to reach out to a wider audience.” Pen Pusher is a fantastic little magazine, only two years old, “publishing the best and most inspirational new fiction, poetry and features”. In that time they’ve proved that there is an audience for what they do, yet they were refused ACE funding on the basis of ‘insufficient priority’ (you can help by responding to their Sponsor-a-Page campaign).

I believe these audiences are better served by helping small organisations reach people directly rather than funding big-org beanfeasts so Gordon Brown can tell some of the countries wealthiest people that “innovation is the most important thing for Britain’s future”, not least because small companies use what they’re given better - they have to. I hope this year’s LL+ will be a show of defiance in the face of the bureaucrats who trade on our culture while contributing nothing to its economy.

There’s been a bit of media attention in the UK lately around some children’s books which have been appearing as part of a new initiative to increase tolerance and reduce homophobic bullying in schools. Books such as And Tango Makes Three, the story of two male penguins in a committed relationship in Central Park zoo, and King & King, a new twist on the old Prince-and-Princess fairytale, introduce the concepts of same-sex love and relationships to young children.

There has been the predictable response from religious groups who view such books as ‘forcing’ alternative sexualities on children, or somehow tempting them into homosexuality themselves (see this Guardian article). The alternative case is so frequently mis-represented that it bears stating here: homosexuality, not being a choice, is a reality in the lives of many children and young adults, either by being the offspring or ward of same-sex couples, or, later, being their own experience. Homophobic bullying is so widespread that increased tolerance not only helps kids who are actually gay, but those whose lives are made miserable by homophobic taunts even if they themselves are not gay.

As Elizabeth Atkinson, director of the No Outsiders project which is promoting the books, puts it so well: “What books do not say is as important as what they do.” To deliberately leave images of gay relationships out of children’s books is to censor social reality.

This controversy - over the same books - cropped up a while back in the States, and I wrote about it then for STML, my literary blog (link contains images some consider NSFW). Look there to see the historical background to this debate.

What’s the booktwo angle on this post? Well, there’s not much of one, except to say that technology, it is hoped, can help educators and students circumvent the strictures of religious or state-sanctioned intolerance to free up debate around controversial issues. Organisations such as the ALA use the internet to raise awareness with projects such as Banned Book Week, to keep records of most challenged books, and to advise librarians on how to deal with such challenges. Libraries such as that at UPenn create online repositories of censored works, accessible to all (worth noting that that the current Swotter text, James Joyce’s Ulysses, is on that list). Think Tanks such as the Free Expression Policy Project place book censorship alongside restrictive DRM and aggressive internet filtering on their issue list. The debates will continue, but the new can stand alongside the old in our continuing quest for personal and intellectual freedom and tolerance.

Lots of recent activity in the British press concerning future books: last weekend’s Sunday Times contained not one but two pieces on the subject.

The first piece, Google plots e-books coup, reports on the Google Unbound conference we mentioned last week. Unfortunately, it’s all fairly techless, reporting that “the internet search giant is working on a system that would allow readers to download entire books to their computers in a format that they could read on screen or on mobile devices such as a Blackberry” (er, Gutenberg?) and “commuters in Japan were already reading entire novels on their mobile phones” - something some of us have been doing for a while in this country too (see iCUE).

It does, however, contain a nice quote from if:book’s Ben Vershbow: “Google seems to be simultaneously petting the industry and saying everything is going to be all right if they just let everything go, but at the same time telling them: ‘We have you guys up against the wall’.”

Serial crank Bryan Appleyard then takes up the story in Could this be the final chapter in the life of the book? Despite some cogent analysis of the Google/Publisher fight - with special mention going to Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, for his work highlighting the inherent cultural and corporate bias of Google, which makes it far less neutral an information dealer than it would like to present itself as - Appleyard can’t help the hyperbole: “We are, it seems, about to lose physical contact with books, the primary experience and foundation of civilisation for the last 500 years.”

Coming off the back of several paras about academic textbooks, this is unfortunate. Most of the debate about book digitisation is framed in terms of poor authors, starving in garrets, unable to make a penny because of evil copyright-infringers. But the vast, vast majority of digitised content is academic and/or technical; it’s being put out there to help people learn more, better, and more easily; to improve the world. Such works are pure information - their format is simply not important. The heft of a good novel may be pleasing to the bibliophile, but few would go so far as to say they must have the latest X-thousand-page volume of the International Journal of Electrical Engineering in hardback.

Appleyard draws the distinction, with John Sutherland, between the algorithmic search engine and the wisdom of the human-made index. But in the end he totally misunderstands the nature of information, arguing that it is a separate quality to ‘knowledge’, instead of its central, essential building block:

[…] David Worlock of Electronic Publishing Services said, “Ultimately it’s not up to Google or the publishers to decide how books will be read.

“It’s the readers who will have the final say.”

No, it is the teachers who will have the final say. They will determine whether people will read for information, knowledge or, ultimately, wisdom. If they fail and their pupils read only for information, then we are in deep trouble. For the net doesn’t educate and the mind must be primed to deal with its informational deluge. On that priming depends the future of civilisation. How we handle the digitising of the libraries will determine who we are to become.

“The net doesn’t educate”? If Appleyard means by the above that teachers must do more to help pupils learn to navigate the new digital libraries, to harness the flow of information themselves and to make their own judgements about the quality of information, then he is correct. But they’ve been doing that for centuries too, and as resources like Moodle (and Sloodle), the Million Book Project and the now entirely digital Open University show, they are embracing the new mediums with much more enthusiasm than doomsaying journalists.

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[Update 23/01/07] More evidence of naysaying, or just lazy journalism: Contrary to Appleyard’s assertion that Google Unbound was “an invitation-only conference”, registration was open to all, and rapidly filled up.