The Liminal Librarian

Go figure! Amazon just dropped their pre-order price on Point, Click, and Save: Mashup Mom’s Guide to Saving and Making Money Online down to $13.46! (Not that I’m obsessively looking at my pretty book cover on Amazon or anything…) I wasn’t going to mention it again already, but thought I’d note the price drop. I’m not sure if I should be pleased that maybe more people might buy it, or sad for the lost royalties.

And now, for something completely different! If you’re reading this, you probably know that I tend to write stuff. For librarians. Well, now I’ve written something for everyone! So I hope you’ll pardon the brief detour into self-promotion, especially those of you who are public librarians, because… your patrons need this book. ;

So what’s it about?

Point, Click, and Save: Mashup Mom’s guide to saving and making money online addresses the best way to ride out today’s turbulent economic times. It talks about everything from finding and using coupons to their best effect, to playing the grocery and drugstore games, to sorting out legitimate online work-at-home opportunities; it explains how to mash up your money-saving and money-making strategies to find the balance that works for you and your family. The book honors the reality that taking the time in to strategize, coupon, and plan is in itself a job, and the fact that many “stay-at-home moms” also bring in an income through side work. It recognizes that the internet provides our best resource for connecting with each other and finding up-to-date information, coupons, and deals. Lastly, Point, Click, and Save focuses on realistic ways to save and change our spending habits, rather than highlighting exceptional shopping trips staged for tv cameras.

I’m so excited to have the opportunity to share these strategies with others! If you’ve been following the Mashup Mom blog, Point, Click, and Save will be a good wrap-up and reference — and if you’re new, or if there are others you want to get into couponing and saving, it can help you get a good start!

Options, we like options.

Preorder Point, Click, and Save

• Direct from the publisher for a special pre-publication discount price of $15.00 — that’s 25% off the cover price!
• From Amazon.com for $19.95.
• From Baker & Taylor or the other usual suspects.

Check it out! Or… order it for your library so others can check it out.

/end shameless self promotion

I always get a kick out of reading about authors’ overreactions to negative reviews, but it’s been a while since I’ve read some great ones. (See all the fun from last April for more along these lines!)

So, I was pleased to see some new rantiness appear. Here is just part of a mind-boggling example:

In last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Caleb Crain reviewed Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. While regular NYTBR watchers like Levi Asher welcomed the spirited dust-up, even Asher remained suspicious about Crain’s doubtful assertions and dense prose.

But on Sunday, de Botton left numerous comments at Crain’s blog, writing, “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”

You don’t see a lot of schadenfreude in blog comments these days! Maybe it’s all moved to Facebook and twitter, too. Oh wait — something has! Check this out — Alice Hoffman (although she later apologized and deleted) got mad enough to post the private email address and phone number of one of her negative reviewers to her twitter feed. Hmm. Maybe I should finally get myself a twitter account after all, apparently I’m missing all the fun…

Ever wonder where the best book donations to your public library come from? Wonder no more:

I should give many of the books I own to public libraries. Some libraries no longer want surplus books; they’re inundated. So what I will do is drive over at maybe 2:30 a.m. and sneakily drop off a box of books.

Now THAT’S thoughtful. (She says, sitting back, whistling, and waiting for the Consumer Reports “Money” blog to be inundated with comments from angry librarians…)

I blog, I blog again, then more articles cross my radar — while book publishing may be having its troubles, people aren’t running out of things to say any time soon. So, briefly noted, some recent publishing- and book buying-related squibs:

• One thought on helping the industry recover would be: stop buying fake memoirs, people.
• The Motley Fool thinks the publishing business will survive.
• Used-book-buyer types might enjoy “Bargain Hunting for Books, and feeling sheepish about it” over at the NYT.

And, on a semi-related note and taking an interesting approach, the post “Academic Evolution: The Book” over at Academic Evolution notes:

This blog is intended to become Academic Evolution, the book. My model is Chris Anderson, whose Long Tail blog helped bring about his seminal book of the same name. Similarly, I am beta testing my ideas, developing them in keeping with the principle of transparency and with the goal of inviting public review and collaboration. I’m smart enough to know others are often much smarter, and I firmly believe that publishing one’s thinking process improves it.

If I’m remembering right, The Long Tail grew out of the Wired article, with the blog collecting data along the way and post-publication, but I like the acknowledgement here of the inherently collaborative process involved in creating a book, and look forward to seeing how the project develops.

For more on the books make great gifts theme, check out “A Bookstore Stimulus Package?” over at the Freakonomics blog (NYT.com), which contains a lovely letter from Roy Blount.

We don’t want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods. So let’s mount a book-buying splurge. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. Buy the rest of your Christmas presents, but that’s just for starters. Clear out the mysteries, wrap up the histories, beam up the science fiction! Round up the westerns, go crazy for self-help, say yes to the university press books! Get a load of those coffee-table books, fatten up on slim volumes of verse, and take a chance on romance!

If you prefer your book buying bailout nudges more on the visual side, though, enjoy “Mimi Finishes her Christmas Shopping” over at Will Write for Chocolate (best.blog.title.ever!). And, if you prefer your publishing crisis stories on the auditory side, give a listen to “Book Industry Enters Shaky Chapter” (really, NPR? was that necessary?) over at npr.org. I was somewhat amused by the hopeful thought in there of books being recession proof because they’re “cheap.” A) not so much, and, B) odd as it may seem, for most people books don’t fall under the category of “necessities.”

When we focus on the recent feel-good stories about people turning to libraries in tough economic times, I’m wondering if we think enough about the other side of the equation: More people visiting libraries instead of buying books doesn’t much help out the book industry, which has been feeling the economic downturn badly. If you’ve missed the many, many stories about this, see:

• More pain for book publishing and Macmillan joins others downsizing, freezing wages (LJ)
• Publishers announce staff cuts (NYT)
• Layoffs at Random House, Simon & Schuster (AP)
• Parsing Black Wednesday (Quillblog)

Over at BookLust, Patricia Storm — herself a writer — says that:

Sadly, one of the areas where I have had to cut back on is book-buying. I find this very, very hard, ‘cuz I walk into bookstores and see all the pretty new and delicious books and I just want to buy them all!! But I can’t. So instead, I trek it over to our local library and sign out books that only a few months ago, I would have bought.

It’s fascinating to look at the effect the economy seems to be having on publishers’ willingness to experiment with older models. Over at the Issues in Publishing blog, Fran Toolan offers some predictions for the next year, suggesting that it’s “going to be a great year for small and nimble companies.” Although neither small nor, generally, nimble, some of the larger publishers are taking tentative steps toward mixing things up. For instance:

Borders Group Inc. has agreed to accept books from HarperStudio on a nonreturnable basis, departing from a decades-old publishing tradition.

Under the terms of the deal, the nation’s second-largest bookstore chain by revenue will get a deeper discount on initial orders of books published by the new imprint of News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers — 58% to 63% off the cover price, instead of the usual 48%. In exchange, Borders won’t return any unsold books to HarperStudio, instead probably discounting them in the store.

In response to the crisis, The Association of American Publishers has also launched a “Books are great gifts” campaign at BooksAreGreatGifts.com. (Aren’t they?! And don’t forget that you can share the gift of Karen Schneider’s writing — or of mine, not to leave out the big ITI blowout sale .

Maybe what we need here is a “Librarians buy great books” campaign. I always give books to the kids (and sometimes the adults) in my life, how about you?

I know intellectually that people process information, and prefer their entertainment, in different ways, yet it always gives me pause to hear librarians talking about how they don’t tend to read a lot of books, or about how they’ve never personally liked to read. So, I was interested lately to see a couple of higher profile librarians mention this. John Berry’s most recent LJ posting, for instance, talks about new media in the context of liberating us from the book. He explains:

I never “loved” reading, the way so many people declare they do. It is especially true among those you encounter if you spend your life around libraries, books, and librarians.

I was intellectually motivated, so the ability to read fast and still comprehend the content was important to me, but I always tried to avoid or minimize the need to read.

In this new phase of my life, I have begun to view the progress of media and information technology as advancing my liberation from reading, or at least from much of the guilt and drudgery I associate with it….

Of course, I still read and enjoy books, newspapers, and magazines. But now I see the act of reading as a kind of last resort, something I turn to when no other means or format is available. I see reading as a time-consuming, inefficient, and increasingly problematic way to get ideas from another human into my consciousness.

Then, in a recent post on the Amazon Kindle, Jenny Levine talks about how her reading habits have changed post-Kindle, and notes that she’s now read two books on the device in four months:

I know two books doesn’t sound like a lot and some people read that in a week, but for me, this is a big difference. Before the Kindle, I think I’d finished two books in two years, both when I was away on vacation. And even though most people may read books more during the summer, I tend to read fewer, as I’m working and playing outside a lot more. In fact, during the summer I tend to start multiple books and finish none of them.

Berry realizes that people may see his post as a “confession.” Perhaps so; I’ll admit I’m taken aback whenever I talk to librarians who admit that they don’t read many books. Not in the “sustained reading of complex texts” sense, necessarily, but more along the lines of “how could you NOT?” I spend a lot of time reading (and, obviously, writing!) online, but couldn’t imagine ever giving up my books. Not only do different media serve different purposes, I think they also feed different parts of our soul — I’d buy a Kindle if I commuted by train, like Jenny, but I’d also keep making weekly trips to my local public library.

But then, the less knee-jerk part of my brain wonders if we actually do need different types of librarians to match up with our different types of patrons. We already have a pretty good lock on the brand=book thing — so do we need more librarians like me, who entered the profession in large part because of (yes, I admit it!) a love for the physical book? Or, do we need more librarians like Jenny Levine, who has greater insight into, say, gaming than I’ll ever possess (even if I do enjoy the occasional game of Guitar Hero).

I’m really enjoying the discussion over in the comments on this post regarding what books you would go to jail for. (If you missed the story that precipitated this: Woman checks out two books from her local library, fails to return them, ignores overdue notices and phone calls, ignores a citation, is arrested for failure to appear.) The missing books turn out to be White Oleander and Angels and Demons. Hilarity — mixed with occasional thoughtfulness — ensues.

One minor pet peeve about my local library: they’re just about always backed up at circ, so it can take a crazy amount of time to check things in. I’ll return a batch of books, and it generally takes 3-4 days for the last of them to clear off my record. This is bad, in that it’s conditioned me not to worry until a book is 5-6 days overdue… and accruing fines… before it occurs to me I’d better look for it.

Last night, I found 2 overdue books buried in the bottom of the wrong tote bag — somehow I threw them in there instead of into the “library” tote bag. Halfway to the library to return them, I realized I was probably spending more on gas to make the extra trip than if I just let fines accrue until our regular trip on Saturday. Oh well. I feel like such a responsible library patron, now. It’s been 2.5 years since I’ve worked in a library, and I still itch to get into that staff interface to the ILS…