Your Signed Books and Artwork Just Got Harder to Sell in California

From Eureka Booksellers

On September 9, 2016, California Governor Jerry Brown signed AB1570 Collectibles: Sale of Autographed Memorabilia into law.

The law requires dealers in any autographed material to provide certificates of authenticity (COA) for any signed item sold for $5 or more.

“That sounds pretty reasonable,” you might be thinking. The legislature and the governor apparently had a similar response, because the law was passed with almost no discussion (though eBay’s lobbyist’s fingerprints are on the bill — they managed to get themselves exempted).

Here’s the problem: We sell greeting cards by local artist John Wesa. He signs each one. If we sell one for $5, under this law, we have to provide a certificate of authenticity, and we have to keep our copy of the COA for seven (7!) years. For a $5 greeting card.

Each year, we sell more than a thousand books signed by local authors, every one of these will need to have an accompanying COA. In odd-numbered years, we sell books for the Humboldt County Children’s Book Author Festival. In 2015, we sold 1605 signed books to benefit the festival. That’s 1605 COAs, to be filed and stored for seven years.

You might think, "Oh, you can just have a generic COA." No.

Garbage Collector Rescues Discarded Books for Children

Of the 19 public libraries in Bogotá, Colombia, all are located far from the poorer regions of the city, thus restricting many people’s access to books.

Thankfully, 53-year-old garbage collector Jose Gutierrez is working hard to ensure that children everywhere are exposed to the joy of reading. As ABC News reports, Gutierrez began “rescuing books from the trash almost 20 years ago, when he was driving a garbage truck at night through the capital’s wealthier neighborhoods.” Due to the shockingly large number of abandoned books, Gutierrez was able to create a “makeshift community library stacked…with some 20,000 books” in his own home.

Gutierrez champions the power of books.

More from ElectricLiterature.

Where are the books? Libraries under fire as they shift from print to digital.

The hallmark of public libraries — the printed book, bound by covers and centuries of page-turning — is being shoved aside by digital doppelgangers.

Around the country, libraries are slashing their print collections in favor of e-books, prompting battles between library systems and print purists, including not only the pre-pixel generation but digital natives who represent a sizable portion of the 1.5 billion library visits a year and prefer print for serious reading.

[Millennials prefer reading in print. Yes, you read that right.]

Some of the clashes have been heated. In New York, protesters outside the city’s main branch have shouted: “Save the stacks! Save the stacks!”

More from the Washington Post

Can books save us from what digital does to our brains?

from Medium.com

When I think back on my life, I can define a set of books that shaped me — intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. Books have always been an escape, a learning experience, a saviour, but beyond this, greater than this, certain books became, over time, a kind of glue that holds together my understanding of the world. I think of them as nodes of knowledge and emotion, nodes that knot together the fabric my self. Books, for me anyway, hold together who I am.

Books, in ways that are different to visual art, to music, to radio, to love even, force us to walk through another’s thoughts, one word at a time, over hours and days. We share our minds for that time with the writer’s. There is a slowness, a forced reflection required by the medium that is unique. Books recreate someone else’s thoughts inside our own minds, and maybe it is this one-to-one mapping of someone else’s words, on their own, without external stimuli, that give books their power. Books force us to let someone else’s thoughts inhabit our minds completely.

The benefit of reading books

"It's no secret that reading is good for you. Just six minutes of reading is enough to reduce stress by 68%, and numerous studies have shown that reading keeps your brain functioning effectively as you age. One study even found that elderly individuals who read regularly are 2.5 times less likely to develop Alzheimer's than their peers. But not all forms of reading are created equal."

http://mic.com/articles/99408/science-has-great-news-for-people-who-read-actual-books

In My Library: Alan Alda

There’s a reason why there’s an Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University: The “M*A*S*H” star is obsessed with finding ways we can better understand the natural world.

Alda’s even set up the Flame Challenge, in which scientists compete to answer questions such as this year’s puzzler, “What is sleep?” in ways an 11-year-old can comprehend (a panel of them will pick the winner).

Given his fascination with phenomena, one wonders if Alda ever had to choose between science and acting.

“No, never,” he says. “I always wanted to be an actor and a writer. But as a little boy I’d do experiments, trying to see if I could get something to blow up. I did get my parents to explode. In anger!”

More from the New York Post.

To the despair of librarians everywhere, marginalia has marched on

Were you one of those students who, despite your teachers’ warnings, continued to write in your books? If so, you have a lot of company—some of it illustrious (no pun intended). And now, there are a number of efforts going on around the world to capture these scribbled snippets of wisdom.

The notion of “marginalia,” or making handwritten notes and drawings in the margins of book pages, dates back as far as the Middle Ages. Presumably, monks made random drawings and notes to relieve the tedium of the manuscripts they were copying. Once mechanical printing started, marginalia really took off as scholars of the day held debates with the books they were reading—not so different from comment sections on websites.

See more at Simplicity.

There's also a discussion taking place on Reddit.

Amazon and Hachette Resolve Dispute

The accord allows the publisher to set prices on its e-books, a major issue in a battle that led Amazon to discourage sales of Hachette books. “If anyone thinks this is over, they are deluding themselves. Amazon covets market share the way Napoleon coveted territory.”

More from the New York Times.

Science Has Great News for People Who Read Actual Books

It's no secret that reading is good for you. Just six minutes of reading is enough to reduce stress by 68%, and numerous studies have shown that reading keeps your brain functioning effectively as you age. One study even found that elderly individuals who read regularly are 2.5 times less likely to develop Alzheimer's than their peers. But not all forms of reading are created equal.

The debate between paper books and e-readers has been vicious since the first Kindle came out in 2007. Most arguments have been about the sentimental versus the practical, between people who prefer how paper pages feel in their hands and people who argue for the practicality of e-readers. But now science has weighed in, and the studies are on the side of paper books.

Reading in print helps with comprehension.

A 2014 study found that readers of a short mystery story on a Kindle were significantly worse at remembering the order of events than those who read the same story in paperback. Lead researcher Anne Mangen of Norway's Stavanger University concluded that "the haptic and tactile feedback of a Kindle does not provide the same support for mental reconstruction of a story as a print pocket book does."

Neil Gaiman's library (2009)

we asked one of our all-time favorites, Neil Gaiman, if he’d be willing to give us a peek into his personal library, and he graciously agreed.

Gaiman first gained wide acclaim with his complex and literate 75-issue comic series The Sandman, and has since broadened his scope to write award-winning and bestselling novels (American Gods, Anansi Boys), screenplays (“Beowulf”) and yes, he still continues to write comics.

Naturally we’d assumed that someone whose work is filled with references ranging from literary to mythological would have a fairly extensive library but even so, we were a bit unprepared for the scope of what he sent us. In the basement of his house of secrets we find a room that’s wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling with books (along with a scattering of awards, gargoyles and felines).

More from Shelfari.

What the 'death of the library' means for the future of books

From The Week:

Forbes contributor Tim Worstall wants us to close public libraries and buy everyone an Amazon Kindle with an unlimited subscription. "Why wouldn't we simply junk the physical libraries and purchase an Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscription for the entire country?" he asks. Worstall points to substantial savings on public funds, arguing that people would have access to a much larger collection of books through a Kindle Unlimited subscription than they could get through any public library and that the government would spend far less on a bulk subscription for all residents than it ever would on funding libraries.

Is he right? Are libraries obsolete? He might be correct — but only if libraries were just about books, which they are not. Libraries are actually an invaluable public and social resource that provide so much more than simple shelves of books (or, for those in rural areas, a Bookmobile like the one this author grew up with). A world without public libraries is a grim one indeed, and the assault on public libraries should be viewed as alarming.

Humans have been curating libraries for as long as they've been creating written materials, whether they be tablets, scrolls, handwritten books, or printed mass-media. They've become archives not just of books on a variety of subjects, but also newspapers, genealogical materials, art, and more. Notably, early libraries were primarily private, with only wealthy individuals maintaining stocks of printed materials due to their expense.

Book-spine switch-plate

From BoingBoing:

Bas Bleu's book-spine lightswitch plate seems just the thing for your library or other bookish venue. $17, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, and Sherwood Anderson. Caveat: one reviewer complains about a "high sheen plastic" that covers it.

Craig Ferguson is a late-night host who embraces writers

From Esquire:

Authors have always made damn good late-night talk show guests. Think Jack Kerouac reading On the Road accompanied by Steve Allen on piano. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal nearly trading blows on The Dick Cavett Show, which also featured the verbal dueling of Truman Capote and Groucho Marx...

But over the past couple decades, authors have gone largely missing from late night. I'm not talking The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, or Charlie Rose and Tavis Smiley, where you'll often see authors as guests... No, I'm talking strictly the Big Three networks. Sure, every once in a while Letterman will have on David Sedaris or Sarah Vowell or Anthony Bourdain. Yet they are as much radio and TV personalities as writers. Conan will occasionally have on a writer whose work has crossed over into film and TV, like George R.R. Martin. But when's the last time Dave or Conan — or Fallon or Kimmel or Meyers, for that matter — had on a true-blue novelist, short-story writer, essayist, or memoirist?

Craig Ferguson is different. He's an author himself — having published a novel and a memoir, both best-sellers — and in nearly a decade of leading The Late Late Show, he's regularly had on fellow scribes. He might joke about the perceived obsolescence of books in the digital age, as when introducing one of Sloane Crosley's four appearances on the show: "My next guest is an author. What's an author, Craig? It's like a bloggy person without a computer." But in truth, few modern media personalities short of Oprah have done more to promote reading and literature. Not to mention boost book sales.

10 Reasons Real Books Are Better Than E-books

Heather Newman claims: It might be cool to claim you have a Kindle or a Nook or whatever, but let’s be real. Books are better!

7. Libraries and bookstores!
If you’re a book nerd, you know the importance of libraries and bookstores. The smell of all that paper and knowledge in one room is almost too much to handle. These majestic places wouldn’t even exist without books!

Publishing: It’s Not About the Money

From First Second Books:

Over the winter holiday break, I watched the beginning of Murder, She Wrote, which I had never seen before. I was bemused to find that the protagonist writing a book and getting it published (having never met, talked to, or corresponded with her editor, publicist, or publisher at all prior to the book’s publication date) and in a matter of a few short days after publication getting on the New York Times Best-Seller List, afterwards getting on all the morning tv and radio shows. She was in fact so popular that her publisher brought her to New York City to stay there in a hotel indefinitely just in case (as far as I could tell) any future media requests came up. Realism was brought in only inasmuch as Fictional!Writer Jessica Fletcher does not hit #1 on the New York Times Best-Seller List — just #2.

So in the interest of fairness, aboveboardness, and honesty, I feel that I should let you know — aspiring writers and artists, this is not your life.

Book Paintings

A really great artist can create wonderful things almost anywhere – on walls, grounds, lips, eyelids, or on book pages. Look at these paintings from Mike Stilkey, I bet everyone would think of one same word “wow”. But wait, and imagine what will happen when these books fall apart onto the ground…

More HERE.

Who reads books in America, and how?

The Pew Internet and American Life project has released a new report on reading, called E-Reading Rises as Device Ownership Jumps. It surveys American book-reading habits, looking at both print books and electronic books, as well as audiobooks. They report that ebook readership is increasing, and also produced a "snapshot" (above) showing readership breakdown by gender, race, and age.

More from BoingBoing.

Simon & Schuster and OverDrive in Pilot to Bring eBooks to Public Libraries

Simon & Schuster ...ng, and OverDrive, the premier eBook distributor for libraries, today announced a pilot launch of the Simon & Schuster eBook catalog for select OverDrive partner public libraries in the United States. Simon & Schuster's full catalog of eBook titles are available for pilot libraries to purchase for lending to their readers, or for readers to purchase through their library's website with the new Library BIN (Buy It Now) option.

In an expansion of its existing eBook library pilot program, Simon & Schuster has selected 31 public libraries in the OverDrive network to participate. The pilot program provides access to Simon & Schuster titles such as Dr. Sleep by Stephen King, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman and many more. Other notable authors now available to library patrons include Glenn Beck, Cassandra Clare, Kresley Cole, Rachel Renée Russell and Brad Thor.

As part of Simon & Schuster's and OverDrive's pilot, each eBook purchased for lending can be checked out an unlimited number of times on a one copy/one user basis for a period of 12 months. Alternately, patrons can purchase the eBook from the library website and support their local libraries.

More from YAHOO! Finance.

Yertle the Turtle Quote Again Allowed in British Columbia Schools

More than a year after a quote from the Dr. Seuss classic Yertle the Turtle was banned from classrooms in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, a settlement has been reached allowing teachers to bring Yertle back to school.

The ban arose in April 2012 during a labor dispute. Teachers had previously gone on strike over “issues including wages, classroom conditions and the province’s response to a court ruling last year that found previous education legislation was unconstitutional,” but they were forced back to work by hastily passed provincial legislation. To continue their protest, many teachers displayed bumper stickers or wore t-shirts with quotes they found relevant. One of these was from Yertle the Turtle:

"I know up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here on the bottom, we too should have rights."

More from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund HERE.

Using Graphic Novels in Education: Boxers & Saints

Boxers & Saints (First Second Books, 2013) was recently placed on the short list for the 2013 National Book Award for Young Peoples Literature — the second time a graphic novel has been nominated. (The first American Born Chinese, also by Gene Yang, was nominated in 2006.)

We highlight Boxers and Saints here for two reasons: first, in honor of its prestigious nomination; but even more importantly, because this two-book set illustrates the importance of understanding and analyzing conflict from multiple perspectives, in the hope of teaching and reaching greater understanding and tolerance.

Boxers and Saints’ double volumes revisit the Chinese Boxer Rebellion (1899-1900), sensitively and evenhandedly relating Chinese peasants’ perspectives from each side of the conflict. Boxers tells the story of the illiterate peasants tired of being hungry, tired of failing farms, and tired of Chinese Christian ruffians who would steal, cheat and beat them while under Western protection.

More from Meryl Jaffe at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund HERE.