I’ve spent the last few years prowling in the digital space and am more or less up to speed on what’s happening now, but the future? That’s a whole other thing.

So I’m going to talk about the e-present. For some of you it will sound like the e-future. It’s not. It’s real. It’s here. Now. In fact, much of what I describe is the past…but it’s the recent past.

Whatever I say today, by tomorrow there will be significant developments! For five hundred years ink-on-paper has defined the business of publishing. It no longer does. We are witnessing and participating in a radical transformation of publishing.

The changes taking place are having a profound impact on everybody involved. I’ll use myself as an example. I’m a pretty bookish fellow. Books have informed my life since I began reading, and I cannot remember a time when I couldn’t read. I can’t remember learning to read. I can only remember reading. And I often wonder at the fact that for my entire professional life my job has been to read. How can that be? How wonderful!

So, I’m as emotionally invested in books as anybody can be.

Here are three examples that embody my emotional attachment to books; three codex-form books that I love more than most.

(A quick definition of terms: when we think about the concept book we generally mean words printed on paper and bound in the codex form, that is, separate sheets gathered together and   bound on one side with a cover.)

First book: A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift, published in 1704. This copy is from the famous fifth printing, the first incorporating Swift’s corrections. It was printed in 1710. It is a thing of beauty and a wonder to behold. Rag paper. Letter-press printing. You can feel the indentations in the paper where the lead pressed against it three hundred years ago. The etchings are radiant. No book printed today reproduces images as vibrantly. It is hand bound, probably re-bound in the eighteenth century. Gilded top edge. Three-quarter leather binding. Marbled endpapers and cover panels. This little volume weighs three-quarters of a pound. It epitomizes the golden age of bookmaking. I love it because, to my mind, it perfectly embodies the concept book. I love it because it takes me back to my time as an academic, a student, when all I did for many years was read the classics, a wonderful time-out-of-time decade. I love it because it was given to me thirty years ago by a dear friend who died young of cystic fibrosis.

I don’t love it because of the content. It is virtually incomprehensible and isn’t read by anybody but the most committed academic scholars.

Second book: What Jamie Saw by Carolyn Coman, published in 1995. This edition is from the third printing, manufactured in 1996. It’s beautifully designed, decently printed on acid-free offset stock. Perfect bound (glued) in a three-piece case with paper-covered boards and a stamped cloth spine. The headbands are decorative. It does have a flat-back spine—a piece of board to stiffen the spine that makes it feel a tad more “bookish.” It has a full-color jacket with two shiny silver stickers on it. I love this book because it was one of only three books on my first list when I founded Front Street in 1994. I love it because it was named a Newbery Honor Book in 1996 and a National Book Award finalist in 1996. I love it because it then sold enough copies to help me fend off bankruptcy and keep my fledgling publishing company going. And I love it because I subsequently married the author… not because of this book, but it didn’t hurt! Oh, and I love the content. It’s a wonderful story.

Third book: POD by Stephen Wallenfels. I’ve lost count of the number of printings of the book. Not bad for a book published in 2010. Of course, it is a print-on-demand book, which means that each book is a printing in and of itself. One hundred books equals one hundred printings. It is beautifully designed, decently printed on acid-free offset stock. Perfect bound in a one-piece case covered in faux cloth. The headbands are decorative. The manufacturing specifications are typical of contemporary trade books. I love the book because it is the first book I published under my new imprint, namelos. I love it because it has been well reviewed in all the usual places. I love it because we’ve licensed paperback rights, and foreign language rights to publishers in Australia, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, and Brazil…so far. I love it because it has received considerable movie interest. I love it because it is already profitable and I have good reason to believe it will be even more profitable. And I love the content. It’s a really good story.

The reasons I “love” these three books are very different, and the only one of the three that I love because of the format is the three-hundred-year-old volume. The other two artifacts (that is, manufactured products) are, in comparison, shabby, adequate to the task of conveying the words of the authors long enough for someone to read them, and then subsequently only fit for shredding and recycling or for use as landfill, which is, in fact, where a great many of the books publishers print these days end up. In a few years, the books will fall apart. Loving these physical artifacts is akin to loving the paper cup you drank coffee out of this morning. What we really love about books is the content, which is unique and eternal, not the format, which is mass-produced and perishable. But we emotionally attach to objects.

Case in point. The other day I read an amazing book. Stoner by John Williams, originally published in 1965. Staggeringly beautiful writing. I read it on a Kindle. Actually, I read it on an iPad running the mobile Kindle for iPad app. When I finished it, I had a very strong impulse to order a hardcover copy. Let me quickly say that I crossed the digital divide the day I received the first Kindle e-reader from the first batch shipped, and I’m buying more books than I have in years, in digital, not print, form. But I really wanted a hardcover copy of Stoner. I was acutely aware of the contradictory impulse and attribute it to my lifelong passion for codex-form books. Rationally, I see very clearly that content matters, not form, but emotionally, I derive great pleasure and comfort from printed books. Unfortunately, the least expensive hardcover copy I could find cost over $250 and I successfully managed to repress my impulse.

The kids learning to read on screens now will be the first generation to slough off the emotional attachment to printed books. I don’t see this as a good thing. But in and of itself, it is not bad. It is what it is. It’s change. It’s different. I’m not here to deliver a eulogy or elegy for the codex-form book.

What about the e-present?

The first thing you need to understand is that publishers are not driving the change that is taking place. Until quite recently, most publishers had their heads firmly in the sand, hoping that the e-books phenomenon would go away, like pet rocks. A fad. Well, it’s not, and publishers are now doing everything they can to embrace the change. It’s hard because their business model is based on manufacturing processes, sales channels, and business practices that are rapidly changing. The driving force behind the digital revolution is hardware, machines—e-readers, tablet computers, cell phones—and it’s consumer electronics companies like Sony, Apple, and Hewlett-Packard who are making the machines. The other driving force is cloud-based computing services; that is, massive servers that store data that can be accessed via the internet. Technology companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple dominate. A third force is Amazon, which stands alone as the largest bookstore in the world with its own proprietary hardware, the Kindle; software—the Kindle app for every imaginable mobile device; and now, cloud.

Hardware is the key to the developing digital publishing marketplace. You need a machine to read an e-book or run an app. No one really knows how many mobile devices are out there. Amazon won’t say how many Kindles they’ve sold. Apple constantly flaunts how many iPads/iPhones/iPod Touches are selling. Sony has been in the e-reader market longest, but they’re third in line behind Apple and Amazon. Barnes & Noble launched their Nook last year and claim that it is the best-selling product they’ve ever carried. The actual numbers of all these devices are not public.

According to data supplied by Forrester Research at the Digital Book Conference in NYC at the end of January 2010, “10.5 million people owned e-readers and 20 million people read e-books last year…approximately $1bn was spent last year on e-books; the firm is predicting that total will hit $1.3bn this year…They spoke to 35 executives representing 27 different companies (firms that are responsible for a total of 65% of overall publishing revenue in the US)…A little more than half— 53%—expected print book sales to fall in the next few years. And by 2014, half the executives expect e-books to be the dominant format.”

The e-reader market is expanding rapidly, spurred by the advent of tablet computers, but the growth of cell phone usage worldwide is even more important. As librarian Eli Neiburger has observed, “There are already more cell phones in the world than there are toilets.” And, increasingly, those cell phones are smartphones, which function as e-readers. Recent projections suggest that the number of smartphones and tablet computers will reach two billion in the next few years. Some of the largest growth is in remote areas without landlines (e.g., telephone or cable). These numbers are too large and too speculative to mean much to me, but I’ll tell you how the phenomenon was brought home. I work with an author who teaches on a Navajo reservation in Arizona. The closest bookstore is hundreds of miles away. Most of her students, and we’re talking some pretty underprivileged kids here, have smartphones and, thereby, functioning e-readers. That means they have instant access to the entire collection of Project Gutenberg. And kids don’t mind reading on screens. In fact, many prefer it.

If cell phones were guns, and e-books were bullets, we’d be appalled. Cell phones are more powerful than guns, and books are more powerful than bullets. We should be ecstatic. But most of the publishing industry isn’t. Why is that? The issue is distribution. Distribution is the game changer. Because of digital technology, books are available to virtually anyone, anywhere, at any time. And the incremental cost of distribution is approaching zero. Universal access at low cost matters. This is big-time change.

Distribution is the biggest change occurring in publishing. H.B. Fenn and Company, Canada’s largest book distributor and a stalwart in the industry for thirty years, started bankruptcy proceedings in February 2011. The company “encountered significant financial challenges due to the loss of distribution lines, shrinking margins and the significant shift to e-books,” all of which dramatically reduced the company’s revenues. Then Borders filed for bankruptcy and, subsequently, has been liquidated. The REDgroup, the largest distributor in Australia and New Zealand, also filed for bankruptcy protection.

What does it all mean? Simply and crudely stated, publishers are screwed, and libraries are screwed.

I’ll start with libraries and immediately direct you to a presentation given by the previously mentioned Eli Neiburger, a very smart librarian, at a virtual summit meeting titled “ebooks: Libraries at the Tipping Point,” sponsored by the editors of Library Journal. Neiburger’s talk, “How eBooks Impact Libraries” is available on YouTube and is widely known as the “Libraries Are Screwed” talk. Neiburger makes the point that libraries are “invested in the codex,” which has become “outmoded.” Not “obsolete” but “outmoded…replaced by an increasingly convenient format that usually becomes less expensive.” This is combined with a movement away from content that is ownable and sharable. “Libraries are in the business of owning and sharing content. The faster the format becomes outmoded, the faster libraries are screwed. The brand of libraries is books: the library is the ‘book temple.’” The library brand and identity and—even the facility—is built around the codex. The codex industry is crumbling. It won’t go away, but it will get much smaller. Neiburger compares it to two other technologies, the vinyl industry and (I love this) the candle industry. They still exist, but they are much smaller. Neiburger says, “The real problem is that the value of library collections are rooted in the worth of a local copy.” You go to a library to get a book. If they have a copy, you go away happy; if not, you go away sad. In cyberspace, everywhere is local. You can get a packet of information from the other side of the world in milliseconds. When transmission effectively becomes duplication—a copy—the need to store local copies goes away. Hence, libraries are screwed.

Let me make this real for you. Right now my Kindle has about 800 books loaded on it; it will hold up to 3,500 books. I can get pretty much anything I want in under a minute. Why would I go to a library? My Kindle is a library. And so is an iPad…and so is an iPhone.

Let me quickly say that I’m not worried about librarians. Librarians have always understood that their job is to provide content. For a long time content was stored in codex-form books, so librarians became inextricably associated with them. But whatever emotional attachment librarians have to the codex format, delivering content is their job. They are in the vanguard of people who are figuring out how to accommodate the digital transformation. We may not need buildings full of books, but we’ll always need librarians to organize, track, and deliver content.

Publishers are screwed because from the very beginning of trade publishing our business model has been based on controlling the acquisition, development, manufacture, and distribution of content. Heretofore, publishers have found the content, contracted with the authors and artists to control the rights, paid for manufacturing and warehousing, contracted for sales channels (i.e., wholesalers and bookstores), and distributed the books to them. We also traditionally control the major publicity outlets. People who self-publish don’t get reviewed in The New York Times, or Publishers Weekly, or School Library Journal, or The Horn Book Magazine.

Of course, publishers do more than that. Editors identify and cultivate talent. It’s what we are trained to do. It’s what we love to do. But our job is to do that profitably, and that means we can only do it if the books we publish pay for those other functions. It takes more and more sales to hit the numbers that make it work. The financial model is complex, but it all comes down to people buying physical copies. Even when you make money on licensing a foreign edition, let’s say to Germany, for the model to work, at some point Germans need to go into bookstores and buy copies. Books sell for a certain price. That price is based on paying for all those functions and all the parties involved including, of course, the author. At one end of the whole ball of twine is an author or artist. At the other end is an individual buying a physical codex-form book.

Cast your mind back to Neiburger’s assertion: when transmission becomes duplication, the need for a physical copy goes away. That’s not all bad news because substantial costs are incurred in creating and distributing physical copies, and PPB—paper, printing, and binding—is only part of those costs. Shipping is expensive. Paper has to be manufactured and shipped to the printer (often in China). The printed and bound books are shipped to the U.S. and then trucked from whichever coast they land on to the publishers’ warehouse, and then again to the wholesalers’ warehouse, and, again, to the bookstore, and, on average, 40% of the time, back to the publishers’ warehouse as returns that didn’t sell. Those returns get sold at a fraction of cost or pulped. Warehouse space is expensive. The staff that processes this is expensive. All these costs are included in the price of a book. And consumers have become accustomed to paying the price.

But consumers aren’t comfortable paying the same price for e-books. You can discuss the merits of the pricing argument all day, but whatever price is put on a book comes up against its perceived value, and people aren’t willing to pay as much for an e-book as for a print book. Ironically, e-books are substantially more profitable than print books because the incremental costs of duplication and distribution approximate zero, but publishers have legacy infrastructures—warehouses and staff—that need to be paid for, and as e-book sales cannibalize print book sales, publishers’ cash flow diminishes and their business model crumbles. Publishers are screwed, but they’ve got some time to dodge the bullet.

I’m not worried about publishers. I love this business because the people I’ve met in my forty years in it are the smartest, most curious, most engaging people imaginable. We will figure this out. It won’t be pretty, and for those of us who work in the industry, it likely will be traumatic. These are interesting times.

So publishers are screwed. Libraries are screwed. What about authors and illustrators?

Actually, those folks are golden. They are headed into the sunlit uplands. They are living the dream. They have the best of both worlds.

Here are the big technological developments that have turned the world into a writer’s oyster. I’m borrowing from another very smart man named Martyn Daniels, whose blog is called “Brave New World.” A while ago he gazed back over the first decade of the twenty-first century, reflecting on the ten big changes in technology that have enabled publishing to go digital. Here are five of the ten.

Apple’s iPhone revealed the potential of the smartphone, a mobile reading platform that has been accepted and adopted by readers. I would add, especially young readers.

Amazon’s Kindle defined the dedicated reading device, providing a single platform accessible across multiple devices and secure, instant access to the world’s largest catalog of titles.

“YouTube did for film what iTunes did for music.” That’s a direct quote from Daniels. YouTube has made us all video makers, and that makes us all “starmakers.”

Facebook makes us all publicists. Publishers always aspire to getting word-of-mouth going for their titles. Social networks are technologically enabled word-of-mouth.

Lightning Source is the leader in print-on-demand technology and enables anybody to manufacture print books one at a time for a viable price.

Daniels named proprietary brands because they are recognizable. More important is the generic functions they represent. A universal mobile reading platform/format, virtual distribution, viral video marketing, social networking for publicity, and print-on-demand manufacturing.

There has never been a more exciting or vibrant time in publishing. Microniche publishers are springing up by the bucketload. Before “publishing” got tied to a business model, it meant “to make public,” and now virtually anybody can do that.

We’ve all grown up with a notion about what it means to be published. It involves editors in New York reading a manuscript and offering to publish it, advances that don’t need to be paid back, publication dates, advance reading copies, reviews in trade journals, publication parties, book signings, and, if you’re lucky, awards and honors and big royalty checks. That still exists, but it is harder and harder to achieve.

Those things are nice, but they don’t define a writer, they don’t touch the essence of what a writer is. They are trappings. They are just like the paper and print and binding of a codex book. Form, not content. They are also increasingly outmoded. They’ll always be there, but at a much smaller level, available to fewer and fewer writers and illustrators. So if they can’t acquire them, should people stop writing or drawing? Should they abandon the effort to communicate their vision to readers? Or should they look for another way to get there?

What writers and artists do hasn’t changed. They create art with words and pictures. The tools don’t matter: charcoal on the wall of a cave, pixels on a screen. The format or platform doesn’t matter. If it’s done well, the reader or viewer will quickly lose any awareness of the medium as they immerse themselves in the content. And if you can get your work into the hands of readers, then the trappings don’t matter.

Most big publishers won’t touch a book that they project will sell fewer than 10,000 copies. There’s nothing wrong with a book that sells 5,000 copies, but it won’t pay for the functions the publisher provides, let alone the dividends the shareholders demand. What if a first book, or better yet, a second book is a 5,000-copy sale? Do you think it shouldn’t be published because it doesn’t hit the metric imposed by a corporate profit and loss statement? I don’t.

Should writers not try to find a traditional publisher? Of course not. But technology has provided some options.

So, folks, it is, indeed, a brave new world. The future? Well, strap yourself down. We are in for a ride and it may get bumpy! But it is my strong conviction that for authors and illustrators these are the best of times. Opportunities are accessible and endless. The old order is changing, making way for the new. When the new world was discovered, most people stayed put, enjoying the security and comfort of their established order. But a lot of people got on boats and ventured out of their comfort zone. For those of you whose comfort zone isn’t all that comfortable, be adventurers. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Article adapted from the author’s speech on February 19, 2011, at the Austin SCBWI.

The post The e-Future appeared first on The Horn Book.

Harry Potter revealed a lot about children’s reading and changed how children’s books were published. I’d like to examine just how the world of books for children and young adults has changed since the last time I was here.

People throw around plenty of notions about what kids like to read. Or if kids like to read. Boys won’t read about girls, for example, a maxim of our profession to which British publisher Bloomsbury kowtowed (as did Viking almost fifty years ago with The Outsiders) by persuading Joanne Rowling to forgo the use of her first name on the cover, substituting her first initial and that of a pretended middle name. (She didn’t have one, so she took the initial of her grandmother Kathleen.) Would it have made a difference if the author of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone—more about that title in a minute—had been known from the start as Joanne Rowling, a lady? I propose that the biggest difference, if there was one, would be that adults would be the ones automatically thinking “girl book” and thus tailoring their recommendation of the book with that in mind.

And Harry Potter turned another piece of conventional wisdom on its head—that kids don’t like to read long books. Or books that have hard words like philosopher in the title, which had prompted Scholastic’s change to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Oh, do let’s keep going: kids don’t like hardcovers, kids don’t like books set in foreign countries, and to combine the two, kids won’t spend their own money on hardcover books set in foreign countries. Now let’s subtract. Take away the foreign countries; kids won’t spend their own money on hardcover books. Take away the hardcover; kids won’t spend their own money on books unless they are popular paperbacks.

And let’s take away the question of money altogether to reveal the conventional wisdom that unfortunately provides the basis of much of our work as teachers and librarians: kids don’t like to read. Kids must be forced to read, tricked into reading, bargained into reading. Like the terms disgruntled employee and scantily clad, reluctant reader is a compound cliché, one that slips far too easily from our professional tongues.

I could go on a long rant about this but will instead just give you a few points to consider:

Point one: Reluctant to read what? If you put down that novel and look around, you will see that lots of so-called reluctant readers are reading plenty; they just aren’t reading fiction, which in this age constitutes “real reading” as defined by “real readers”—mainly teachers and librarians. It wasn’t always thus; think of the first book to win the Newbery Medal, Hendrik Willem Van Loon’s The Story of Mankind.

Point two: If reluctance to read is considered the default, how do we feel about kids who already like to read? Do they get less attention by virtue of the fact that they don’t seem to need us as much? They do need us; in fact they are us, so let’s give them more respect.

Point three: Car commercials aren’t there to convince us to take up driving. Why do so many books, especially for younger children, belabor the point that reading is fun? A good book should be its own argument.

Let’s look at some more arithmetic, brought to you courtesy of The Horn Book Guide, to show you how Harry Potter proved we were wrong about a lot of things. The Guide, updated bimonthly at hornbookguide.com and published in print twice a year, reviews all new hardcover trade books for children and teens, rating each one on a scale from one (buy it now!) to six (hold your nose!) and indexing them in just about every way you can think of. Thus, the electronic version allows you to search, sort, and count reviews until the cows come home. I did some counting, and now I would like to show my work.

In 1998, The Horn Book Guide reviewed 3,613 books; in 2010, it reviewed 3,967 books, an increase of around 10%. A modest upswing: the much-discussed “explosion” in children’s book publishing has been largely in self-published books, both printed and digital, which the Guide does not review. Remember, however, that print runs for trade children’s books have increased, sometimes enormously; witness John Green’s recent autographing of the entire first print run of The Fault in Our Stars: 150,000 copies.

Here are some numbers to make fiction-happy librarians rejoice. In 1998, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was one of 652 novels reviewed in The Horn Book Guide. In 2010, the Guide reviewed 1,298 novels, twice as many. And where fiction constituted 18% of all trade children’s books we reviewed in 1998, in 2010 that percentage almost doubled, to 33%.

As you would expect, the success of Harry Potter meant a surge of fantasy publishing: the Guide reviewed 135 fantasy novels in 1998 and 415 in 2010. Even more meaningfully, at least 309 of those 415 were sequels or books in series; the number of reviewed series books of all kinds of fiction rose from 175 in 1998 to 520 in 2010, making up a whopping 40% of all fiction reviewed.

The appetite for series fiction neither began with Harry Potter nor ends with children. (If we would only accept how alike children’s reading is to our own, I am convinced that our reluctant-reader problem would almost entirely disappear.)

But what Harry demonstrated was a greater acceptance among adults and a greater willingness in the market for hardcover series. In the past we saw major crazes in paperback: Goosebumps, Sweet Valley High, The Baby-sitters Club. But Harry Potter proved, in the millions, that there was big money in hardcover, and an eagerness among kids for hefty books, ones that could be carried as totems of inclusion in a really big club (see Rebecca Donnelly’s “Hitting the Ground of Joy” in this issue for more on this phenomenon).

While hastening to give Harry Potter and J. K. Rowling their due for doing so much to put children’s reading in the forefront of cultural attention around the world, I also believe that we need to put them in context. There was stellar fantasy before Harry Potter, and there were children’s-book bestsellers, too: Goosebumps, anyone? In fact, it just might have been the Goosebumps kids who made Harry happen. And Goosebumps should give thanks to Love You Forever, published in 1986.

Here’s why. In 1986, children’s bookstores were flourishing, as were picture books, a symbiotic relationship based on two simple things: people were spending lots of money on books, and there was a population boom of young children. That arithmetic—consumer spending added to where the youth population is bulging—has far more impact on how well which types of children’s books do than anything else. And in the gung-ho 1980s there was a change in the balance of who bought the books, too. For most of the twentieth century, schools and libraries had been the largest customers for hardcover children’s books. But in the eighties, publishers—themselves increasingly consolidating and coming into the hands of publically traded companies—found there was more money to be made by selling books directly to children and parents themselves.

By the time Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone rolled around, those infant recipients of Love You Forever in 1986 were twelve years old. Goosebumps was at the height of its popularity in the early nineties, right on schedule for these now elementary-school kids, who were ready for something new. It takes nothing away from the phenomenon of Harry to say that the time was right. Unfortunately, the time was no longer so right for children’s bookstores—by the time Harry arrived to inject a fresh spurt of consumer willingness, too many of those stores had closed in favor of the superstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com was quietly stalking them. (Remember that when people discovered they could easily buy the UK edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets from Amazon.co.uk a full year before Scholastic planned to publish it here, entirely new publishing models were born.) In big box and online stores, books need to sell themselves, and that’s exactly what a series is good at.

I wish I could tell you that the recent baby boomlet (Wikipedia says that more children were born in the U.S. in 2007 than in 1957, the height of the baby boom) means YA books will go crazy again in 2022, but we just don’t know. There’s the economy, of course, and it would take a whole other speech, and a whole other speaker, to speculate on what effect the increasing ubiquity of electronic entertainment will have on printed books. No, movies did not drive out theater, TV did not drive out movies, and none of them drove out books. But—oh, let me take a stab.

I laugh when people worry about reading going electronic, because I already do most of my reading that way. So, probably, do you. I spend most of my workday dealing with e-mail, editing articles and reviews, reading news, and writing memos, book reviews, and speeches like this one. All of this takes place on one screen or another.

I do read children’s books in print, and so far the Horn Book has refused to review from electronic galleys. I’ll probably be overruled about this eventually, but my thinking is, If you’re gonna sell it on paper, I wanna see it on paper. My own recreational reading is a mix: newspapers online; half a dozen print magazines a month; books in hardcover, paperback, or e-book format on my iPad; and audiobooks on my iPod. I like to have several books going at once.

I expect that my reading will only become more electronically based—and I’m relatively old. What will it mean for babies today? What will my grandson, now two, be reading when he is twelve? How will he be reading? One thing I wonder, and part of me even hopes it will come true, is whether publishing might cease to be seen as a moneymaker by its governing corporations. That selling five thousand copies of a book might be enough, and schools and libraries might, I hope, be well funded enough to buy those copies. Wouldn’t it be funny—okay, I mean wouldn’t it be great—if libraries, currently trying to position themselves as the e-centers of e-everything, instead found themselves as The Place To Go when somebody wanted a book to hold in his or her hands? Every author in this room is going to disagree with me on this, but there are too many copies of too many books being published. A little curation would be a good thing.

In a speech at Library Journal and School Library Journal’s e-book summit (and referenced by Stephen Roxburgh in our March/April 2012 issue), Eli Neiburger brought up the idea of book publishing as being akin to the candle industry, a comparison I’m liking more and more. Particularly because the combination of candles and printed books means we will still be able to read if the lights go out forever. (Clearly I’ve been reading too many of those teen dystopia series.) But while candles have been replaced by electric light in the developed world, every house has some, everybody uses them sometimes, and you can buy them everywhere. We use candles in emergencies and in celebration. They are utilitarian and glamorous. They can be the center of attention or shine light on something else. They can be life-saving or dangerous. You can light one from another. These are all the things that matter about books, too.

Article adapted from Roger Sutton’s 2010 Ezra Jack Keats Lecture, delivered at the Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on April 7, 2011.

The post What Hath Harry Wrought? appeared first on The Horn Book.

1. Who or what was the inspiration for the character of Bear, and does he bear (get it?) any resemblance to you?

Leo Landry: Years ago, I took a stand-up comedy class to get over my anxiety about public speaking. The final class was a five-minute live performance at a local comedy club! My bit was about the things you find yourself saying or overhearing as an adult working in a children’s bookstore (such as how many times you might say the word bunny in a day or, in one case, being told by a mother, “it’s only little girl pee!”). I got through the five minutes, but I’m not sure I could do it again. “Write what you know,” people have always told me. And so Bear was born.

2. Your illustration style seems perfect for early chapter book readers; the pictures are spare and entertaining without being distracting. How do you find illustrating a book for this audience differs from picture book illustration?

LL: First, thanks! With early chapter books and early readers, a child relies on the pictures as clues to deciphering words in the story as he learns to read. I discovered this with my own daughter. The Green Queen by Nick Sharratt was the first book that she read on her own, and it was so simply drawn, no clutter, no distractions. So I try to do the same. With picture books, illustrators have the freedom to expand on a story, and even create a story-within-the-story in the artwork that you wouldn’t know if you just read the text alone.

3. What did managing a bookstore teach you about what works (and what doesn’t) in books for new readers?

LL: It certainly gave me an exposure to the genre as it grew over twenty years! When I first started working at The Children’s Book Shop, there was a rack of I-Can-Read and Dr. Seuss books, a handful of Patricia Reilly Giff’s Kids of the Polk Street School books, and David Adler’s Cam Jansen series. And that was it. Now there are so many more great individual books and series for early readers. I’m still partial to Syd Hoff (especially Grizzwold, another inspiration for Bear), who wrote many I-Can-Read books when I was learning to read forty-some years ago. My most favorite has got to be James Marshall’s series of books about Fox. The dialogue is so snappy and full of wit, and he really does make you laugh out loud.

4. Did you write Bear’s jokes yourself or did you enlist the help of six-year-old joke writers?

LL: As a kid, I used to go the library every day after school, take all the joke and riddle books off of the shelves, and sit down and read for hours before going home. They were full of the classic “groaners” that six- to eight-year-old boys love, and I still remember most of them! The jokes that Bear tells are a combination of those memories and the classic “why did the chicken cross the road” variety that still survive today among the same age group. I particularly remember taking out one book dozens of times — Jokes for Children by Marguerite Kohl. It’s a must-read.

5. Who is Bear’s favorite comedian?

LL: Fozzie Bear from The Muppet Show, of course. Wocka, Wocka, Wocka!

—Kitty Flynn

From Notes from the Horn Book, September 2011

The post Five questions for Leo Landry appeared first on The Horn Book.

No word yet whether or not Baby Einstein foretells a playdate with Old Sparky.

The post >Flunk reading, do not go directly to jail. appeared first on The Horn Book.

Have you noticed how much the web likes to talk about itself? That’s what I find worrying!

The post >Actually, should you even be here? appeared first on The Horn Book.

Speaking of the good stick. There’s something I’d like you to measure — heavy handed instruction — when an author sticks something into the text that clearly doesn’t fit in order to model some lesson– girls are just as smart as boys, or racism = bad, or it’s okay to be yourself. Heavy handed moralizing is the best reason to return a book to the library unfinished, I think. What I really like is insidious invisible moralizing that is going to creep unreflected into the reader’s head and take root!
Wait. No! Bad moralizing! Down you insidious lesson, you!
When you review a book, how do you judge the didacticism? Subtle is okay? Heavy handed, not? Or is the divide between didacticism that is currently accepted vs. didacticism you think is misguided?
Is subtle didacticism better or worse than the heavy handed? is insidious didacticism okay if it’s on the side of the angels?
I mean the deliberate kind. I don’t mean the unreflected reinforcement of cultural norms like Enid Blyton — those things that stick out like sore thumbs when the culture changes.

I’ve moved the comment to here, because it’s really a different topic, plus, this was the week of my return to the musical stage (it went fine, thank you) and I haven’t had time to prowl around for something new. Although I think you can discern very different editorial styles among the seven of us who have been editors of the Horn Book, one thing we will agree upon when eventually gathered together in reviewer heaven is that we all hated didacticism, even while we might have had different definitions of the word and varying degrees of tolerance for it. But here I will only speak for myself. I think one could make a case that all literature is insidiously didactic, attempting to pull you into an author’s view of the world. I have no problem with that.

And the problem I do have with overt didacticism is less with its frequent technical clumsiness, where swatches of sermons or lessons are just slapped into the story, then it is with the way it reminds readers Who Is In Charge. Having someone in charge is good for a lot of things–to return for a second to my singing class this spring, I loved the fact that the teacher, Pam Murray, knew more about singing than I did and could thus tell me, clearly and effectively (and diplomatically!), how to become a better singer. That’s what I want in a teacher. But I don’t want to hear it from a writer, especially when I think of myself as a child reader, being reminded, once again, that grownups are the ones in charge. Books are a great place for kids to escape from being told what to do. They are not a place where a reader wants to hear, “I know better, so listen up.” As a reader, I want to feel that a book is a place I can explore, or even a place where the author and I are exploring together. Didacticism shuts that right down.

Didacticism can also bite the author right in the ass. Think of Go Ask Alice. It was clearly intended to be a moral instruction about the dangers of drugs; instead, it was a wild ride through a crazy, exciting world. (I’m now remembering a comment years ago by a librarian colleague, Pamela, who said “these stupid anti-drug books with all their blather about ‘peer pressure’ and ‘self-esteem’ aren’t going to mean a thing until they acknowledge something else: drugs are fun.”)

The post >"Crap, here comes Teacher!" appeared first on The Horn Book.

The company Live Ink believes this in fact is a more efficient way to read prose. Look here to see what they’ve done with Moby-Dick.

The post >Maybe they were on to something, appeared first on The Horn Book.