Posts Tagged ‘Books’
Encyclopaedia Britannica Ends Its Famous Print Edition
After 244 years reference book firm Encyclopaedia Britannica has decided to stop publishing its famous and weighty 32-volume print edition.
It will now focus on digital expansion amid rising competition from websites such as Wikipedia.
The firm, which used to sell its encyclopaedias door-to-door, now generates almost 85% its revenue from online sales.
It recently launched a digital version of its encyclopaedias for tablet PCs.
“The sales of printed encyclopaedias have been negligible for several years,” said Jorge Cauz president of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
“We knew this was going to come.”
‘A lot faster’
Companies across the globe have been trying to boost their online presence in a bid to cash in on the fast-growing market.
Various newspapers, magazines and even book publishers have been coming up with online versions of their products as an increasing number of readers access information on high-tech gadgets such as tablet PCs and smartphones.
Britannica said while its decision to focus on online editions was influenced by the shift in consumer pattern, the ability to update content at a short notice also played a big role.
“A printed encyclopaedia is obsolete the minute that you print it,” Mr Cauz said.
“Whereas our online edition is updated continuously.”
At the same time, frequent users of the encyclopaedia said they preferred using the online version more than the print one.
“We have to answer thousands of questions each month through chat, through telephone, through email and we have to do that as quickly as humanly possible,” Richard Reyes-Gavilan of Brooklyn Public Library told the BBC.
“In many instances doing a keyword search in an online resource is simply a lot faster then standing up looking at the index of the Britannica and then finding the appropriate volume.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica, the company, has largely moved away from its encyclopedia work focusing most of its energies in recent years on educational software.
~Source: BBC News
Allaying Grief Through Books
Photo: Antonio Mantero/Flickr
FOR three years after the death of her adored eldest sister, Anne-Marie, Nina Sankovitch mourned by staying relentlessly busy. She felt a guilt-strafed survivor’s obligation to live life enough for two.
The mother of four sons, she signed up for PTA committees, coached soccer and a Lego robotics team, taught art appreciation classes to elementary school students, took Pilates classes and parenting classes, joined a book group and a tennis group, began kayaking, started a theater group for children in her basement and a Web site for trading books, gardened ferociously and wrote a novel (unpublished).
But in her increasingly frantic efforts to taste joy for herself and her sister, she tasted only ashes. She would still wake in the night, sobbing.
Finally, she jettisoned almost all her commitments in favor of the one pursuit that had always given her special pleasure. She committed herself to reading a book a day for an entire year.
“After years of chasing after joy, I finally sat down and let it come to me,” Ms. Sankovitch, 48, a tall, tennis-vibrant woman, said over coffee at her kitchen table in Westport, Conn. A photo triptych of Anne-Marie in thick reading glasses, posing in merry solidarity with Ms. Sankovitch’s son Peter, wearing his first pair, gleams from a rosewood frame nearby.
On Oct. 28, 2008, her 46th birthday, Ms. Sankovitch began the project, dedicating it to Anne-Marie, who died four months after receiving a diagnosis of bile-duct cancer, a week shy of turning 47. That last day, driving home from an encouraging visit with her sister in the hospital, Ms. Sankovitch got the phone call, pulled her car to the side of the road and screamed.
In the resulting memoir, “Tolstoy and the Purple Chair” (Harper Collins), whose title alludes to her reading armchair of cat-clawed, faded purple brocade, Ms. Sankovitch writes about that redemptive year of contemplation. The book is also an account of her family traumas: not only the death of Anne-Marie but also the World War II murders of three of her father’s siblings. It is a meditation on grief and healing, on values held sacred by her family and the life well lived. It is, of course, a paean to reading.
“I was looking to books for more than just escape and pleasure,” said Ms. Sankovitch, an accomplished environmental lawyer who gradually gave up practicing after she had children. Now she was seeking answers about “how to live with sorrow and how to find my place in the world.”
While the mechanics of the project could occasionally be daunting, Ms. Sankovitch found the solace she yearned for. Books like “The Laws of Evening,” the short story collection by Mary Yukari Waters, taught her about addressing loss. “The characters were past the denial stage, past anger,” she said. “They were figuring out how to go on living with loss. Everyone’s solution was different, but many used memory to cope, as proof that good things will come again.”
Diana Athill reinforced that lesson. “Somewhere Towards the End” is a memoir she published at 91. “Every day is still a new day for her,” Ms. Sankovitch said.
Sitting in Ms. Sankovitch’s sunny kitchen, as her sons, ages 10 through 17, tromp in and out of the house, and talking books with her can be just plain fun. As she trades ideas about characters, her blue eyes sparkle. She opens a worn notepad to jot down unfamiliar titles.
“I do read a Kindle on the exercise bike, but I love a real book, especially from the library or a used one,” she said. “I like knowing that other people have held it. I like reading what others have scribbled in the margins. I’ve even seen people make little grammar-correcting marks.”
Seeking safe haven in reading was natural for a woman who grew up in a family of book worshippers. Her middle sister, Natasha, had been a comparative literature professor (later a lawyer); her Belgian mother, Tilde, taught French literature at Northwestern. The year her Belarusian father, Anatole, now a retired surgeon, spent in a sanatorium for tuberculosis, he and another patient read novels aloud to each other. The books Ms. Sankovitch read to her young sons, all passionate readers, include volumes of poetry she had written for them.
Reading was a means of communication for her close-knit family, with its European formality. “My parents are private people,” Ms. Sankovitch said. “Americans are raised to ask personal questions. But I feel that if something isn’t my business, I won’t pry. Books are a shield and a way to get closer to those questions, so you can talk about taboo subjects. You can have those intimate conversations without prying.”
Anne-Marie was an art historian who loved the written word, and the sisters, unlike in many ways, often found common ground through books. “She was smarter than me and more beautiful,” Ms. Sankovitch said sadly, recalling her sister. “But I was more fearless and socially adept. She didn’t suffer fools. I’d been at dinner parties where she would up and leave if she was bored. But she was a saint to me.”
In “Tolstoy and the Purple Chair,” she describes how she and other family members would bring books to Anne-Marie’s sickbed. The visits often included book chats. After her death, the family dedicated a bench in her memory in the Conservatory Garden in Central Park, where passers-by can sit, contemplate the surrounding blooming beauty and read.
During her reading year, Ms. Sankovitch received recommendations for books from readers of a blog she had started (readallday.org), where she posted short reviews of each book. She also drew inspiration from the deep, eclectic collection in the Westport Public Library.
“My year would have been different with a different library, in a different town,” she said. She discovered new stacks, exploring genres outside her comfort zone of novels: essays, plays, science fiction, travel.
Typically reading 70 pages an hour, she’d try to finish each book in about four hours. She still did the laundry and carpooling, reading while the boys were in school, percolating at night, posting in the morning.
She described her reviews as “a public diary.”
“They’re not intellectual dismemberment,” she continued, “but more of my emotional response to the book.”
About “Little Bee,” the devastating novel by Chris Cleave, she wrote: “We connect to those we can see and touch; we protect the ones we can. But even then, a sister can die, and you won’t even know it until you get the phone call driving home over the Henry Hudson Bridge after what you thought was a very good day.”
The quixotic intensity of the project did not surprise those who know Ms. Sankovitch: she seems hard-wired for the full-bore experience. When tennis elbow threatened to forfeit her daily match with her husband, Jack Menz, a Manhattan lawyer (their home sits on two acres, including a clay court), she switched to her left hand, playing poorly but gamely. As a young associate at a Manhattan firm, a position demanding 16-hour days, she was focused and efficient, largely because other priorities called, including books. She would skip lunch and close her door to read for pleasure.
Once, while biking, recalled Stephanie Young, a friend from Harvard Law School, Ms. Sankovitch mentioned that her father advised “everything in moderation.”
At that, Ms. Young laughed. “Nina doesn’t do anything in moderation,” she said. “While she was telling us this, she was eating her sixth FrozFruit bar.”
As Ms. Sankovitch began to emerge from grief during her year of reading, her husband said the impact on the entire family was salutary.
“Nina had such a serenity,” Mr. Menz said. “And part of it was that the pace of her life was just slower than everyone else’s. We had fun dinners, because you’d not only hear about what our guys did during the day, but Nina would talk about the new characters she had just read. I’d watch Giants games with our son Michael, and she’d be there, but reading. We just gave her that space.”
Now, Ms. Sankovitch’s own readers have written her, saying that her memoir has become their handbook about how to read through grief.
“I am so happy that what I found in books, someone else might have found in mine,” Ms. Sankovitch said. “It’s all back to Anne-Marie, what a tribute to her.” She is thinking of writing a new book, based on letters from the late 19th century that she found in the family’s former Upper West Side brownstone.
And she is still reading. Last November, she proposed that she and her husband tackle “War and Peace” together. He somehow set it aside.
Naturally, Ms. Sankovitch finished. But not until January.
Some books are just not meant to be read in a day.
~Jan Hoffman
A Brief Guide To Life
Photo: Andy Roberts/Flickr
‘A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.’ ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life can be ridiculously complicated, if you let it. I suggest we simplify.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s quote… is the shortest guide to life you’ll ever need:
“Smile, breath, and go slowly.”
If you live your life by those five words, you’ll do pretty well. For those who need a little more guidance, I’ve distilled the lessons I’ve learned (so far) into a few guidelines, or reminders, really.
And as always, these rules are meant to be broken. Life wouldn’t be any fun if they weren’t.
the brief guide
less TV, more reading
less shopping, more outdoors
less clutter, more space
less rush, more slowness
less consuming, more creating
less junk, more real food
less busywork, more impact
less driving, more walking
less noise, more solitude
less focus on the future, more on the present
less work, more play
less worry, more smiles
breathe
~ Leo Babauta
The Story Behind J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series
Joanne “Joe” Rowling was born near Bristol, England, in 1965. She
attended local schools and “Hermione is loosely based on me—at age
11,” she has said. She earned a B.A. in English and Classics at the
University of Exeter and in 1990, while on a delayed train trip, jotted
down notes about a young boy attending a school of wizardry. In 1994
she moved to Edinborough, Scotland, to be near her sister. Divorced,
unemployed, and living on state benefits, she completed her first
novel, writing in local cafés because she would take her daughter
Jessica out for walks and, when she fell asleep, would duck into the
nearest café and continue the story.
She completed Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1995 and
found an agent who submitted the manuscript to twelve publishers,
all of whom rejected it. The thirteenth, a small publisher in
Bloomsbury, accepted it because the eight-year-old daughter of the
chairman read the first chapter and “demanded the next.” Rowling
received an advance of 1,500 pounds, about the same number of
dollars at that time.
The book was published in 1997 with a first printing of one thousand
copies, five hundred of which were distributed free to libraries.
Such copies now sell for between $25,000 and $35,000. Rowling
received a grant from the Scottish Arts Council of 8,000 pounds to
allow her to go on writing, and in fact that first book was named
British Children’s Book of the Year. It was published in the United
States in 1998 by Scholastic after they had won an auction. Over the
author’s protests, Scholastic changed the name of the book to Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
The seventh and last of the Harry Potter series was published on
July 21, 2007, and sold more than 250,000 copies in the first 24 hours.
More than eight million copies have been sold all told, and J.K.
Rowling is now the wealthiest woman writer in history, with a net
worth for the books alone estimated at more than eight billion
dollars. Well, in my humble opinion “Joe” Rowling deserves every
penny of it. The books have gotten better and better as time has gone
on, and the last—I truly hope it is the last—is the best of all. I read
it through in the first four days and then joined John and Sally and
our two grandchildren, Sam and Charlie, while they read the last
hundred pages out loud to one another. We were aware that many
thousands of people were doing the same thing at the same time.
Maybe half of them were youngsters, but the other half were grownups,
even oldsters like me. It has turned out to be hard for some
grownups to admit this, but all I can say is I’m sorry for them.
Why has this extraordinary success come to Rowling? Does she
have a secret? If so, what is it?
I don’t think there is a secret. In a way, she does what all authors
of novels, and especially series of novels, do: She imagines a situation
and invents characters and events. She creates a world, peoples it,
describes it, makes us care about it. She tells good stories, being sure
to build suspense. She leaves us hungry for more, which is what the
best series do.
Rowling’s tale opens in a special school where students are taught
about magic—what it is and how to do it. It isn’t easy to get to this
school, because you have to know a secret place where you can board
a special train. When you arrive at the school you find that it too is
special, secret. Not just anyone can go there. That’s exciting. It’s a
good start.
The characters are also interesting, but not unique. There is a girl
and two boys; they start as children and grow up as seven years pass.
There are families and one of the boys finally falls in love with the
sister of the other boy. That is good but not unique, either.
There is something very special about the first boy, though. He
has a tragic past; his parents were killed when he was a child, his
mother, when she was trying to protect him: giving up her life to save
him. This is fine; it adds a tragic note even if the characters are just
children and then teenagers.
The circumstances surrounding the death of the boy’s parents are
mysterious, which is good. Some kind of evil was involved; only very
slowly do we begin to understand that the evil is represented by a single
individual who grows more powerful as the series proceeds. In the last
book he has become all-powerful, and there is no hope left for the world.
Or so it seems, even to Harry, the boy-hero. But his courage, which
has always been remarkable, permits him to face the prospect of certain
death if he does not yield to the evil lord. Even so, he does not yield.
His courage, in the last analysis, is greater than that of his foe.
It is Harry’s beautiful courage, I think, that makes this series
unique. We accept it, we believe in it. We are frightened for him at
the end of the series; we can’t see any way out. But Harry Potter can.
~ Charles Van Doren
Words of Comfort
Photo: Hunter Yeary/Flickr
My father was never a religious man in the churchgoing sense, but in his last years he returned every day to Psalm 46 in the King James Bible, which begins:
“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.”
It was the passage my brother read and reread to him as he lay dying, as his earth was being “removed.” By this time, his Bible was so worn that it had to be held together by rubber bands. As the minister said at his memorial service, “Here is a book that has seen some use.”
~ Thomas Newkirk
A Passion For Books
In February 1998 Sotheby’s in New York held a series of auctions of a rather unique collection of books. The collection, some three thousand volumes, had belonged to the late duke of Windsor-the former King Edward VIII of England-who had collected them since childhood and had taken the collection with him when he abdicated the throne in 1936. After the duke died in 1972, the books, along with the rest of his possessions, had remained in the hands of his duchess-the former Wallis Warfield Simpson-the woman for whom he had forsaken his family, his country, and his crown.
On the duchess’s death in 1986, their mansion near the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, and its contents, were purchased by Mohamed al-Fayed, the Egyptian businessman perhaps best known as the father of the man who died in an automobile accident with Diana, the princess of Wales, the estranged wife of the duke’s grandnephew Prince Charles. Some ten years later, Mr. al-Fayed decided to sell the duke and duchess’s possessions, and thus they found their way to Sotheby’s.
There were three things that made these auctions of particular interest to bibliophiles. First, many of the books were inscribed by famous and/or wealthy individuals. They included, for example, a copy of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, inscribed “To the Duke and Duchess of Windsor with the highest respects,” as well as a Book of Common Prayer inscribed “For My Darling little David [Edward] on his 7th birthday, when he went to Church for the first time, from his loving old Granny,” by Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII.
Second, these auctions represented the first time in history that books from a British royal library had ever been offered for sale. Although the royal family, as would be expected, made no comment about the auctions, one doubts that they were happy about these books being placed on the market, the sale of such items being, at the very least, unseemly.
But the third-and perhaps most remarkable-aspect of the auctions was that they were proof that although the duke of Windsor had been willing to give up his throne “for the woman I love,” he had not been willing to give up his books. Such is the mark of a bibliophile.
- Harold Rabinowitz & Rob Kaplan
Paradise
I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Books…
The mark of a good book is it changes every time you read it.
- Anderson Cooper
The Bookstore
Stopping by a small bookshop recently I came upon different books with interesting titles like Eurotopia: An Index of European Communities, Diggers and Dreamers or Communities Directory. Each of them held thousands of addresses of community projects. My heart skipped a beat: with all these addresses is must be possible for me to find a place to start the life of my dreams?
The salesman behind the counter looked at me through his nickel-rimmed glasses, his eyes half sympathetic, half amused, and said: “Good books for people looking for community! Yes, I searched for community once myself… and when I found one at last, I lost it again. But I recently rediscovered something I’d lost.”
After this somewhat nebulous introduction, he began to relate his odyssey across the globe from one community to the next. He was nothing if notcritical: no one could satisfy him on his quest for the perfect community…
My bookseller was just getting into high gear when suddenly a wistful, almost mystical smile appeared on his lips: “But after so many years of searching I finally found it: my community! They were just a handful of people, but somehow they had managed to integrate all aspects of life in perfect proportion.”
“Right, so why didn’t you stay there?” I asked him.
“They didn’t want me,” he replied. “I wanted the perfect community,and they wanted the perfect human being!”
A short time later, after many more questions, I stepped onto the street, the book under my arm. I felt strange. A blend of pain and joy, spiced with a pinch of fear, had settled onto my heart – which in turn was beating like a drum. Is this what the poets call ‘yearning’?
“Only sunny eyes can see the sun,” my bookseller called after me, laughing.
And what about the butterflies in my stomach? I wondered.
So, I stepped into the adventure called life … looking for myself andlooking for community.
- Dieter Halbach
