December 14, 2009
The Mind of [my] 17-Month-Old
Buying books for toddlers is, I have discovered, a bewildering enterprise. It isn’t so much that there is a gap in the literature for the youngest toddlers – books tend to be “for babies” followed by 2-5 year-olds – though that can be frustrating. And it isn’t that there’s any lack of authoritative bodies to offer recommendations for parents without the time (or ability – spending time in the children’s section of a book store with an actual child in tow is an invitation to a disastrous shelving incident) to browse, for everyone from local library associations to awards bodies have lists for handy reference. It’s that toddlers have the most unexpected preferences. My 30-year-old brain can’t anticipate her 17-month-old one. I have had to resort to quantity over quality, in the hopes that if you swing enough times one is bound to connect with the ball eventually.
In the hopes that I can save even one of you from the same bewilderment I am experiencing, I have compiled below a list of recommendations and vetoes, based not on my literary expertise but instead on my child’s actual preferences.
5 Books My Toddler Loves For No Good Reason I Can Work Out
M is For Moose: A Charles Patcher Alphabet by Charles Patcher, Cormorant Books.
I really thought Patcher’s art was a bit high concept for a 1.5 year old. I mean, Elizabeth Simcoe? Margaret Laurence? Who is the target audience here? But colour me wrong, she loves this damn thing. We read it three times at a sitting. It might be the combination of photo-realism and bright, stark colours in Patcher’s art. It also might be the ducks and moose. See below.
A Barbecue For Charlotte by Marc Tetro, McArthur & Co.
This book was actually a gag gift to myself, bought long before Miss Margaret was conceived. Charlotte the Moose wants to play with the boys but THEY all have antlers and she doesn’t, so she wears a barbecue on her head to fit in. It’s sort of the story of my life. The writing is… well, not exactly clear and well thought out. The pictures are bright and shiny though. I thought that might be why Maggie likes it, but she really gets into the story nowadays, yelling “NO!” when we learn Charlotte doesn’t like pretty bows, and giggling with the other animals when Charlotte first puts the BBQ on her noggin. Go figure!
10 Fat Turkeys by Tony Johnston, Scholastic Books
I won’t lie to you, I don’t like this book at all. It’s highly annoying. It is a library book to us, and after it goes back I won’t be getting it again. My big pet peeve with kids books right now is lazy poetry. This one tries to get away with rhyming “down” and “none” as well as “dance” and “fence”. But man, Maggie loves it. Does she even have any idea what on earth all those turkeys are doing? I doubt it. But she likes the refrain – “Gobble gobble wibble wobble”. Fine. Whatever. But never again!
Have You Seen My Cat? by Eric Carle, Aladdin Books
Maggie is an Eric Carle fiend, which I suppose many children are. I don’t blame her, his books are simple and pretty. But this one in particular I don’t see the appeal of. It’s repetitive without being musical – “Have you seen my cat? This is not my cat!” over and over again. And can a 1.5 year old really tell the difference between a panther, a cougar, a cheetah and a leopard? Does it matter? She seems to grasp which ones say “meow” and which ones say “rawr”, at least!
Snuggle Puppy: A Little Love Song by Sandra Boynton
Okay, I admit I know why she likes this one. It’s based on a (totally uninspired) song off her Philadelphia Chickens album which I picked up at a garage sale for 25 cents, and so I “sing” rather than “read” this one, complete with hugs and kisses. So what’s not to like? Well how about THE BOOK? Boynton seems to have banged off this one on a weekend. There are hardly any pictures and the song is boring. I like Boynton when she’s at her best (Hippos Go Berserk, But Not the Hippopotamus, Moo, Baa, La La La) but the board book versions of her crummy songs all seem like cheap money grabs.
***
5 Books My Toddler Should Like, But Doesn’t
The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, Harper Collins
I remember loving this book as a kid, but the young Miss does not. Of course reading it as an adult, I’m sorta glad: this is the tale of a young spirit stiffled and smothered by an overbearing parent. Maggie’s complaint with it seems to be the dry black-and-white pages… she hastily turns ahead to the paintings. But even they are not enough of a draw to make her ever want to actually read this one.
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, Harper Collins
Okay, yes, this isn’t age-appropriate, but neither are a lot of the books we read. There is less text in this book than in many that she loves. The book is tolerated until we actually come to the place where the wild things are, and then she yells “NO NO NO” and shuts the book. I think the monsters are a tad too aggressive for her – we will revisit this one in the future.
Anything by Dr. Seuss
I started with Fox in Socks, because I enjoy reading it. We tried Cat in the Hat because it had more of a narrative. We downgraded to Hop on Pop and One Fish, Two Fish and finally, in desperation, tried the abridged pocket version of There’s a Wocket in my Pocket, but we’ve had no luck. Perhaps it’s that the critters are too strange looking, or that the books are too long, but she has absolutely zero interest in the works of Dr. Seuss. This makes me a sad, sad mother.
Have You Seen my Duckling? by Nancy Tafuri, Harper Collins
Have You Seen My Cat redux, right? Wrong. My best guess is that Maggie doesn’t know what to make of the many pages with no words. I tried to make up a story for her on those pages but she seems to know that something’s up, maybe because the story changes every time. She also can’t find the duckling, so the hide-and-seek format is lost on her. Instead she “finds” the other seven ducklings standing right there and wonders why the mother duck is such a bone-head. Sigh.
Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, Harper Collins
This is a no-brainer. Maggie LOVED this book up until a few months ago and now it (along with the Going to Bed Book) is the great enemy. Because Goodnight Moon means we’re going to bed, and that is a BAD THING. Even if we love to find the socks on each page, and the mouse and kittens are great old friends – no. I ‘m wise to your tricks, mummy. I know you’re trying to put me to bed and I won’t have it! Poor maligned Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd. Still I keep it on the night stand just in case. At the least, yelling at Goodnight Moon has become part of our bedtime ritual. I’ll take what I can get!
December 7, 2009
More Things To Do With Books & Giftmas
If you, like me, have been banned from buying any more books for your family this Giftmas don’t worry – there’s still a way for a good bibliophile to push the printed form. This year the bee in my bonnet is all about bookish gift cards!
From The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library's Christmas card offerings.
Libraries are a surprisingly good source of tasteful gifts. Fundraising has always been a major issue for libraries, though few of us seem to take notice outside of the occasional bake or book sale. Almost every library has, tucked in behind the front counter, a selection of items for sale like bags, publications, shirts or bookmarks available year-round.
Gift cards are probably a no-brainer for a good reference collection because so many of their books are beautifully photogenic and summon the aesthetic of Nutcracker Christmasses complete with giant fireplaces, trees trimmed with candles and leather-bound books being read to a clutch of excited children before bedtime.
This one available from the Osborne Collection of Children's Books.
Toronto certainly has no shortage of libraries with behind-the-counter gift shops, but ambitious gift-givers among you might enjoy looking further abroad. The J.P. Morgan Library in New York has a fabulous shop including a reproduction of the first known Christmas card, while the British Library has a huge selection including reproductions from the Lindisfarne Chronicles. Link madness here I come: see also the Huntington Library, the Library of Congress, the Bodleian, and the New York Public Library. But you don’t have to take my word for it – walk into your favourite library and just ask the librarian. I guarantee [1] they will have something cute you would never have expected.
[1] No actual guarantee available.
December 1, 2009
Canada Reads 2010 Quickie Thoughts
I won’t be back on this subject for months now, but I have to quickly state my apprehension at this year’s Canada Reads books.
For starters, I own four out of five of them already. Of those, I have read two (Generation X and Fall On Your Knees), gave up on one because I found it very, very dull (Jade Peony) and was anxiously looking forward to reading the fourth (Nikolski). So I suppose that makes this year’s list very inexpensive for me to acquire (here I come, Good To A Fault).
I will give Jade Peony another try I suppose, but the Coupland & Macdonald are headscratchers. I could read Generation X again to refresh my memory, though I don’t remember liking it enough to actually want to. Meanwhile Fall On Your Knees still lives in my mind as the single most painful thing I’ve ever read. I didn’t dislike it; it was quite good. But do I really want to live through that read again? I mean, eek. I won’t spoil it for anyone, but I doubt anyone would claim it is a pleasant read.
Interesting, though. Hm. Yes, hm.
November 30, 2009
Book Prizes and Book Recommendations
I can’t overstate how excited I am about tomorrow’s Canada Reads 2010 announcement. I have it on my calendar and plan to stay home from Miss Margaret’s drop-in centre in order to hear it, pen and paper ready to scribble down my order list. While the competition aspect of Canada Reads is definitely good fun, what I love best about it is simply receiving the recommendations. Does that sound strange? I find it very difficult to get reliable literary recommendations. It isn’t that there aren’t enough recommendations flying around out there, it’s that there are generally too many.
The seasons’ Best of 2009 Picks are a case in point as far as I am concerned. Every publication with a book reviewer publishes a “Top X Books of the Year” right around Christmas, and I find these lists utterly useless. 100 best books of the year? How are there even enough books published in a year for 100 of them to carry the title of best? I am not a prolific reader as far as bookish folks go – at best I might read 40 books in a year, more often I read 20-25. I can’t absorb 100 books in a year, or even decide which of them to dip in to. I need a short list. Best book of the year. If you read one book this year, make it this one.
That, of course, is something literary prizes can be good for. The Booker Prize winners for the last few years have been decent reads, but I’ll admit it’s pretty clear to me that the Giller juries and I have very different opinions on what makes a good book. Canada Reads is different. Although they’re limited to Canadian books, the wider sweep of time reaches more nooks and crannies than a conventional annual book prize. Because of the populist focus of the competition, they seem to go out of their way to represent a bit of everything: something small press, something funny, something a little strange, something that was overlooked the first time around, something classic but forgotten. And probably most importantly, they aren’t trying to find the best book under any technical criteria, they just want to pick a book they’d feel safe recommending to just about anyone. Be still my heart, recommendations actually intended for reading pleasure.
I even have this thought that I might bundle up Miss Margaret tomorrow and head down to the CBC building for the little meet-and-greet at noon. I’m sure I’ll have at least one of the chosen books on my shelf already, and it’s always fun to have signatures inscribed. Does anyone else have a similar thought? I started this blog last year after having a great time discussing Canada Reads 2009 all over the bloggosphere – I’d love to do the same this year, and maybe meet some (more) of you.
Glee!
November 9, 2009
Not Specifically About Books
Last weekend, early in the morning on Saturday, October 31st, the Children’s Storefront burnt down.
The Storefront was a community drop-in centre for children – mostly pre-schoolers – and their caregivers; a comfortable, welcoming and unparalleled space to play, read and create surrounded by friendly, like people. To put it like that makes it sound like an Ontario Early Year’s Centre, some government-funded space in a basement or a school gym for people who can’t afford daycare or a more elaborate for-profit indoor playground. What it was is impossible to describe. It was warm, tight-knit but welcoming to newcomers, flexible, accommodating, beautiful, comfortable, safe and peaceful. The kids were welcome to play with a huge range of high-quality, un-branded, well-selected toys in mini-environments that were built by volunteers and staff while parents and caregivers found comfy places to sit and hang out with free coffee, tea or leftovers from the previous day’s community dinner or brunch. The staff were omnipresent, ready to help you with your child or offer advice or just company.
Miss. Margaret in the playhouse at the Children's Storefront.
For us, the Children’s Storefront was a complete, unqualified life-saver. My husband and I are fairly reclusive people, anxious in social situations and more than a little awkward. Yet we have been gifted with a daughter who is friendly, generous and precociously social. Once we worked up the nerve to walk into the Storefront and introduce ourselves we never looked back – Maggie immediately bonded with the staff and the other parents, and tried at every opportunity to interact with and play with the other children (with great success, considering she is a mere 16 months old). The quiet and comfortable environment put me at ease; this was somewhere that I could set a good example for my daughter and let her learn the social skills that maybe I never quite picked up. It was a community I felt our family was welcomed into, something so essential to people like us who otherwise tend towards isolation.
Saturday, October 31st it burned. Over the course of the following week demolition crews moved in and tore it down. As of this Saturday morning nothing remains but an empty lot and a high fence. My husband and I have been struggling with a sense of loss that neither of us expected; not so much for the space as for the community we’d felt we’d lost. Our week was spent feeling trapped within the walls of our small apartment with a child who was clearly growing bored and impatient with us. We took tentative, shy trips to the park and another community drop-in to break up the tedium. But the spaces, complete as they may have been with toys, climbers and crayons were no substitute for the community. Even Maggie could tell this. She had no interest in swinging alone in a swing or sliding alone down the slide.
We are not the only ones to whom the Storefront meant a great deal – a Facebook group called The Children’s Storefront Needs a New Home has been set up and boasts already over 440 members. As you can see, the support of those community members is being mobilized already to get the Storefront up and running again, a huge task that will take a great deal of volunteer time and, most importantly, money. We are optimistic that the result will be a positive one, and someday we will take Maggie to the new Storefront which, for her, will be the only Storefront she will be able to remember. Twenty years from now that new, yet-unrealized space will be the institution in her fond memories.
If you should feel so inclined, please do visit the Children’s Storefront website and see if you can help us find a new home. You could attend a fundraising event, donate to the toy & book drive or just send money. Or simply join the Facebook group and let your presence lend strength to our efforts. It might not be a glamorous or life-saving charity but it is one which is very dear to our hearts. Strong urban communities are sometimes elusive; and I want desperately to keep this one running for generations to come.
November 6, 2009
Puzzles in Paper
I have been working these last couple of months with a privately-owned book collection of mostly German books, most of which were published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but some of which are a good deal older. The book’s current owner doesn’t read German and has no relationship with the books, so identifying and describing the books has been quite a lot of CSI with just a little of Indiana Jones thrown in. At this stage I think I have a good handle on most of the collection, excepting one particular item.
The book is a small black leather bound manuscript stamped “M.G” on the cover, and appears to contain Catholic devotions professionally inscribed in German kurrentschrift (German cursive hand, just close enough to our own handwriting to look familiar but dissimilar enough to defy easy translation) with calligraphic headlines. I don’t know who wrote it, for whom, why, when or where.
The best evidence we have of the book’s origin and provenance is an inscription on the half-title page:
This inscription is more problematic than it might first appear. The first two lines read (in German) “This book belongs to Josephine Krofft” followed by two lines of gobbledygook and a date which appears to be 1729. One might hope that this indicates the person the book was written for, her location and perhaps the date she recieved the book. Would that it were so easy.
The date is our first and formost problem. Many of the books in this collection are from the 18th century, and so we did take this, at first, to be the date of this book’s creation as well. The trouble began when I started to investigate the book more closely and found that the majority of the book is written on a nice weave paper with a clean, clear watermark depicting the monogram “OHL” with a crown or flame atop the “O”.
The watermark is so clean and clear that there can be no question of the paper type. If the paper were lain – the standard paper technology in the early 18th century – you would be able to see, however faintly, chain lines in the paper when held up to a light. Weave paper without chain lines was a technology invented in England around 1757, reaching the Continent even later. If my book reads 1729, it must be back-dated for some reason, as the very paper it is written upon was not invented until 30 years later.
Why back-date a book? The answer probably lies in the rest of the text on that line, which I can’t yet decipher. I have one great fear, and that is that the date is a guess made by a previous – but not original – owner. The second puzzle of that inscription involves a lost page. The hasty inscription has been corrected in two places – once where a word was scratched out and written again, below, and once at the end of the third line where one word has been written over another, previously-written word (unfortunately not very visible in this picture). The corrections were so hasty, in fact, that they have left an ink-smudge on the verso of the flyleaf facing it. In between our inscribed half-title page and this ink-smudged flyleaf is a hanging scrap of paper where once there was another page. So, the inscription was made after another page was removed. What was on this missing page? And if Josephine Krofft was the book’s first owner, why would she inscribe it after it has been altered? I suspect now that she isn’t the first owner at all, and the missing page probably had better, more accurate evidence of provenance. Evidence I will never actually witness.
Nevertheless the book is an intriguing find. I’m telling you this story now because I hope that somewhere out there someone may be able to help me source this book in some way. If you or anyone you know can read the text of that inscription, can help me identify the paper type or has any other information on 18th (?)-century German Catholic prayer-books, please drop me a line! Comment here or email me at charlotte@once-and-future.com. I can provide more photos and information as required.
October 26, 2009
Romance for the Rest Of Us
There comes a point where even I, perpetual outsider and pop cultural imbecile, start to feel the pull of social pressure. The final straw came this weekend, when shopping with my younger sister in a mall. In search of a cheap, generic hoodie we wandered into a shop which was branded top to bottom by a popular franchise – not in the sense that they sold t-shirts featuring the characters or lunchboxes like when I was a kid, but the fashions themselves were featured in an upcoming film, and this season the young and pretty would all be dressed like characters from the movie.
Something in me snapped, and I had to know what all the fuss was about.
This is why I acquired the first Twilight film (with, admittedly, the Rifftrax commentary), watched it, and then borrowed the book. I needed to know. And now, 150-or-so pages in, I’ve thrown it a few times, sworn outloud in exasperation several more times, and come perilously close to having my face frozen in a permanent sneer. Far from being an indulgent gift to my fourteen-year-old self, the book is terrible, offensive and outright insulting. But then, I knew it would be. This isn’t a review.
Twilight has sold over 40 million copies worldwide. Forty million. Though we tend to dismiss it as pandering to the imaginations of 12-16 year old girls, a huge bulk of the franchise’s fans are adults – adults I know – who are drawn to the romantic storyline. I suppose it avoids the stigma of the Romance Novel, though Harlequin makes about a bajillion dollars a year selling Romance Novels, and apparently half of their readers are college educated and employed, mirroring “the general population” demographically rather than being, as we might want to believe, the genre of the barely literate. But that’s not surprising either, given the massive cult of educated young women built around the work of Jane Austen. Who isn’t in love with Mr. Darcy?
I’ll admit it – I am a huge sucker for romantic stories. I have read Jane Austen’s oeuvre twice in its entirety and specific works more times than I care to admit. And I really did want to enjoy Twilight in some guilty way. I’ll hide behind the statistics here – we, women, educated, self-confident, modern women, love romantic stories. And isn’t the Love Story the greatest literary trope there is?
So why, exactly, am I having such a hard time finding the upscale replacement for Twilight? I don’t want to read this series – it sucks (ha ha ha). I don’t like my men overbearing, controlling and liable to eat me, thanks. I want to put it aside and read something for me – the well-written but nevertheless tragic/intense/melodramatic story of love and passion. I don’t see how it is possible that, given the market and archetypal nature of the story, there is nothing between Jane Austen and Stephanie Meyer.
I have taken a quick lap around my bookstore (okay, actually, I have spent a months worth of hours combing the place in desperation over several years) seeking my romance fix. There are a few paragraphs worth of indulgence to be found in War and Peace. I liked Carol Shields’ Republic of Love well enough though she is frustratingly restrained, and Doctor Zhivago has its moments. Don’t start me on those Brontes.
Love stories are in shockingly short supply among the literati. Either the genre is used with bitter irony to underscore some bleak topic or “realism” takes the stage and leaves us with some dull drawn-out affair the likes of which most of us have had in real life and have no especial desire to revisit. Happy endings are utterly taboo. The message seems to be that if you want a romantic indulgence, you can get it from the pulp-and-paperback section – greater minds are dedicated to higher things. Yet where in the Romance aisle are the strong, educated, indomitable women portrayed?
I don’t have an answer or a witty conclusion to draw now. Call this a plea for recommendations. We need a Twilight for the rest of us. We’re a huge friggin’ market, people. Surely someone has found a way to tap us directly?
October 21, 2009
Into the Sci-fi Ghetto with Margaret Atwood
My first and only prior foray into the work of Margaret Atwood was in high school when I was made to read Cat’s Eye. I hated it passionately. I was unable then – and I still retain this “problem” as a reader – to separate liking the characters from liking the book. The most poetic, well-crafted literature in the world will find itself being hurled across the room in my house if I can’t stand the characters, and Atwood’s limp, weak-minded “heroine” Elaine Risley earned nothing but my scorn. I couldn’t bring myself to give Atwood a second chance for almost 15 years.
The Year of the Flood seemed to me to be a good safe re-entry into Atwood’s work. After all, I do love speculative genres when well-written, and I have a special place in my heart for post-apocalyptic and survivalist stories. The book had been getting excellent reviews elsewhere and so I could also hope for a good read, regardless of genre. I was mildly put off by Atwood’s insistence that she isn’t writing science fiction (a preposterous claim well debunked by Ursula le Guin) but I resolved to give her the benefit of the doubt.
I don’t know if I succeeded. I’m torn now on this book. On the one hand, I enjoyed it. It was quaint, a page-turner and satisfied my bizzare craving for apocalypse scenarios. If it had been written by a denizen of the sci-fi ghetto I’d probably be writing raves right now. But on the other hand I’d been led to beleive by reviewers and Atwood herself that this book represented something else, some higher, more literate thing than mere science fiction. The New Yorker has likened Atwood’s “speculation” to Orwell’s offerings, and Year of the Flood was long-listed for the Giller (though, perhaps tellingly, failed to be shortlisted for any of Canada’s big literary awards).
What it certainly isn’t is anything special. As literary fiction it is a mediocre-to-decent work. On the whole it feels rushed, as if nobody bothered to do a thorough edit. Ren describes Toby with effectively the same analogy twice in the first sixty pages:
“You wouldn’t think it would be Toby … but if you’re drowning, a soft squishy thing is no good to hold on to. You need something more solid.”
“…we trusted Toby more: you’d trust a rock more than a cake.”
Early in the book Ren and Toby speak of each other in nearly whistful tones, as if they’ve played a great part in each others’ lives. Yet when their mutual history finally collides at the AnooYoo Spa, we are told they barely interact and Ren, ultimately, leaves within a few months. I found myself repeatedly faced with similar questions about the characters’ relationships (what was up with Toby and Zeb? Or Amanda and Jimmy? Glen and anyone? Mordis?) and the root of my confusion is ultimately Atwood’s haphazard character-building. Names and positions fail to pupate into fully-formed characters and so they phone in their parts in the story like high school thesbians who only barely learned their own lines. Even the two main characters fail to fully gel. Toby was the more successful of the two protagonists: Ren was a half-believable sketch whose early opinions made less and less sense the more you knew about her.
I also found what other reviewers referred to as “clever” to be quaint at best and more often, lame. Her future is populated with genetic “splices”, creatures created by man and released accidentally or intentionally into the wild. These critters are invariably called by a spliced name – rakunks, (raccoon/skunks), liobams (lion/lams) or wolvogs (wolf/dogs). She makes easy double entendres of the corporate overlords like CorpSeCorpse (get it? CORPSE?) and SeksMart (you know, like SEX) and Saints of most of our twentieth-century Greenies, which frankly seems to overestimate the long-term impact of people like Terry Fox.
Oddly the novel’s “roughness” is discounted as some kind of virtue by Jeanette Winterson’s New York Times review. Apparently “The flaws in “The Year of the Flood” are part of the pleasure…” – I beg to differ. But this is par for the course with Atwood reviews I am learning. The woman can do no wrong, which brings me to my next complaint.
If Year of the Flood isn’t a wonderful literary novel, is it at least good science fiction? Sure, it’s not bad. Nothing special. Science fiction motifs have been used to address Atwood’s themes already, from child abuse (Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber) to religious cults of sustainability (Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash) to mega-corporate control (Shadowrun, anybody?) But Atwood’s reviewers don’t seem to have any experience or history with science fiction, so they speak of her most mundane tropes as if they’re stunningly innovative insights.
This, I think, is what drove me the most crazy about the book. How can so many reviewers get off calling her “prophetic” for a book that simply re-treads the same material science fiction writers have been working with for the last fifteen years? She surely treads it well enough, but prophetic? Seriously? It’s insulting to the smart, clever, funny and literary science fiction writers out there who don’t have Atwood’s golden glow. Most of all I’m disappointed at Atwood herself, who rather than acknowledging the fine tradition of eco-speculation she is joining, acts as if she has invented the wheel.
So it’s a pretty good book. I guess. Shame about the pretentions, because they pretty much ruined it for me.
September 30, 2009
A View From the Front Line
Ah, ebooks. The literary bloggosphere’s favourite subject. One of my favourites too, but today I have a little bit more to offer than hysterical doomsaying: today I would like to report the results of a case-study I have informally conducted over the last month.
Under the general header of “ebooks” we actually have a number of issues. Amazon selling popular hardcovers for $9.99 for their Kindle is a wildly different issue than Google scanning orphaned academic works, or textbooks converting to digital, expiring formats. It is the latter I have had a startling new experience with – the former, and other issues, can wait for another post.
I work in a bookstore, one which specializes in academic texts – that is to say, books on subjects of remote and specialized subjects, hard to find but invaluable to the very small audience. I challenge anybody in Toronto to find a better and more well-stocked selection of the works of Giorio Agamben or Jean Baudrillard. Of Anthony Giddens or Hannah Arendt. We have an African Literature section that, at this writing, exceeds five bookshelves. Our best-selling title of September 2009, so far, is Amartya Sen’s Theory of Justice. You get the idea.
In order to finance our indulgence in this very small, specialized field we also carry course books and, occasionally, text books for the Toronto universities. I am absolutely sympathetic to the plight of the textbook publisher. Textbooks take a lot of time and expertise to publish and then sell only to a limited audience; that audience is absolutely hell-bent against buying the product and do everything they can to buy the books used. Textbooks wind up expensive and publishers feel pressured to release “new” editions as frequently as they can in order to gain market share back from the used market. If anywhere in publishing there is an ideal place for an electronic book, this is it. Students get the books cheaper than they would the printed version, publishers have fewer overhead costs, and the limited licensing allows them to keep the product up to date and salable without the cost and nonsense of printing a whole new edition. And, there’s no textbook to move into the used market and become next year’s competitor.
Well, here is the front line reality.
First, a note on my research methodology.
We have the textbook for a large graduate program – roughly 1200 students. The book comes in two formats: a physical textbook just like we all remember from school, and a “code” which retails for $30 less than the book and which gives the student access to the book in an electronic format for 12 months after the code has been activated. (The physical book also includes the “code” for the e-version bundled with it.)
Every student needs this book in some format or another. The book they used is custom published for them, and we have the exclusive right to sell it. So if the students want the book, short of buying it directly from the publisher, they have to come to us. The book is a new publication this year, so not only are there no used versions available, the students would not have been able to inspect either the physical or the electronic versions before buying. Further, I am one of only three people who ring books through the cash register and I am nearby or present even when I am not physically doing the selling, so I can safely say I have seen the vast majority of those books actually sold.
How did 1200 students choose to purchase their textbook?
After one month we have sold approximately 900 physical books.
We have also sold approximately 8 “codes” for the ebook.
Two of those ebook purchasers later returned to buy the physical book.
Now, it is true that at first – for the first 100 books, let’s say – I was selling the hardcopy book pretty hard. I gave the students the full run down of all the ways that the e-version was lacking. But after it became clear that overwhelmingly they wanted the book in any case, our tactics switched – suddenly we were hard selling the ebook to absolutely no avail. We ran out of the hard copy book at one point and even though we still had hundreds of the ebook codes in stock, nobody wanted them. They all left their names for hard copies.
What can we say about this? Despite the usual caterwalling about the price of the textbook, it wasn’t, apparently, enough to persuade them to use the ebook even though it was $30 cheaper. The students were turned off by the look of the thing, a flimsy envelope of cardboard with a scratch-off number on it. They talked about how they couldn’t read on a screen. How they needed the book with them in class (despite having laptops with, presumably wireless connections). Some didn’t like the fact that after 12 months they would have nothing to show for their purchase, as the license to use would have expired. The two who bought the textbook after trying the ebook both didn’t appreciate that they couldn’t print it out – I guess they thought they could create their own textbook at home.
But first and foremost, they didn’t like the price.
Yes, it was $30 cheaper than the textbook. But it was also still over $50. Hundreds of times I heard the phrase “For that much money, I might as well get the book.” This one blindsided me, I’ll admit. I know students that will drive to downtown Toronto from Aurora to return a book because they found it for $3 cheaper on Amazon. I thought a $30 savings was a no-brainer. So, apparently, did the textbook publisher.
This is going to be a tricky one for the publisher to negotiate, because even an ebook of a textbook isn’t going to get much cheaper. Students have a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that the majority of the cost of a textbook isn’t the paper (and how often have I heard “wow, all that for such a small book?” or “But it isn’t even hardcover!” as if the book is a bag of almonds bought from the bulk store and priced by weight). A textbook is – or ought to be – a high-end work of scholarship requiring one or more highly educated people to devote several years of their career to write. The book needs to be peer reviewed and fact-checked by equally-qualified people, then marketed and distributed as usual to a very limited audience. In short, you need to pay for the intellectual property, not the paper. Eliminating the paper will yield some savings but will not reduce the book to a $9.99 blowout.
(It bears mentioning that this illusion that an ebook is etherial and costs nothing to produce is perpetuated by Amazon, who keep their ebook prices artificially low for some unknown but no doubt nefarious reason. Novels are also created at great cost of time and effort and should also cost something, regardless of dead tree content.)
So this year, at least, the book held its ground against the rising tide of electrons. Is this representative? Did the textbook publisher mess up in some other way? I am going to be satisfied saying that I no longer consider the battle for the textbook market cut, dried and determined. I suspect the publishers will cry themselves to sleep over this one. We’ll see what they come up with next year. ..
September 25, 2009
Reviewish: Therese and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel
After only my second foray into the novels of Michael Tremblay (the first being The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant earlier this year), I am a solidly devoted apostle. After this year’s Canada Reads competition I find I am in good company. We in English Canada have been a bit slow on the uptake, I think, but we’re finally cluing in on what our fellow devotees in French Canada have known for thirty years: Michel Tremblay is one of the finest storytellers in the world.
Therese and Pierrette is the second book in Tremblay’s Plateau Mont-Royal series, following about one month after the events of Fat Woman. The cast of millions present in Fat Woman have largely taken to the background and we accompany Therese (the Fat Woman’as neice) and her friends Pierrette and Simone as they figure in their Catholic girl’s school.
One of the “complaints” I recall being voiced during the Canada Reads debates is that the structure of Fat Woman doesn’t “go anywhere”, that no clear story is being told – that hasn’t changed. That was never a problem for me; in fact, that is part of the genius of Tremblay’s work. He offers a slice of life, a portrait woven of the characters’ actions, thoughts, memories and digressions that reconstructs so accurately the sensation of living. Any traditional novel-wide narrative structure, of beginning, climax and finale, he intentionally subverts by giving away the ending. Tension created by fights, incidents and dangers is immediately diffused by a omnipresent storyteller’s intervention with a “years later” digression. The effect is that we are not distracted by needing to find out “what happens next” or by being carried away by the plot; instead we can focus on the immediacy of the events. You are drawn into the moment and are free to appreciate the relevance of that paragraph rather than looking ahead to the next event.
This trick of focusing the reader’s attention on the page and words rather than a story is reinforced by the “block of text” formatting which also put some readers off Tremblay’s work. You can not skim his books – not only is it physically difficult to do so but there is no benefit to doing so. The reward is in the moment, not in the cumulative effect of the whole. I have never seen a Tremblay play but I can see how his talent for drawing you into the now could be so engaging on stage. He creates a beautiful moment without it being reliant on a meta-reactions like shock, suspense and anticipation.
That said, I loved returning to the characters from Fat Woman and discovering what has become of them, just as I would enjoy catching up with a friend and hearing how their family is faring. We learn the latest on the playground-guard whom Therese kisses in the first novel, and the fate of Dupliesse the cat, so mortally wounded when last we saw him. Victoire and Josaphat-le-Violon find some closure and we get a brief glimpse at the Fat Woman and her looming infant. Tremblay doesn’t exhaust us with unecessarily melodramatic tragedies and incidents. Life is lived by the inhabitants of his Montreal just as you or I live our lives. It’s charming and inspiring without being syrupy and white-washed.
I bought the entire Chronicles of Plateau Mont-Royal from Talonbooks; six books all told of which I have now read two. I considered diving right into the next one right away but, just as email correspondence can become dry by virtue of its over-immediacy, I think I’d better wait and get some distance before I visit again. The visits are so rewarding that I want to savor them. The lives will sit there and wait for me until I am ready.