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Library of Congress Advances 2 Digital Projects Abroad

PARIS, Oct. 17 — The Library of Congress announced an ambitious plan on Wednesday to digitize a collection of the world’s rare cultural materials — artifacts ranging from a photo collection of a 19th-century Brazilian empress to a crackly recording of the 101-year-old grandson of a slave.

The library also signed an agreement with Unesco in Paris to move ahead with the World Digital Library project, which is in the testing phase and will not be available for public use until next year.

Other national libraries appear poised to cooperate in the venture, which is modeled after the Library of Congress’s vast American Memory project that has posted millions of original items on the Web, including Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

If you don’t have time to read, why not have the book come to you.  Dailylit.com is a neat web site where you can sign up for emails daily, three times a week or weekdays.  Whatever schedule you choose, Dailylit.com will send you a fragment of a classic book.  Right now I’m reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.  It comes in 237 fragments.  So, however busy you really are in life, take a moment to read your email.  You can’t go wrong by stopping your day to read a good book.  Oh and the nice thing about their emails, they are advertisment free.

Interesting article from the UK”s Telegraph:  The state of Amazon book reviews.   Some people, in my opinion, and the author’s opinion, have to voice their opinion.  Again, sharing one’s experience–bad or good–is an urge that many people need to fullfill. 

 

 

Nothing stands still on the web. There is emerging, on Amazon, a corps of regular ‘reviewers’, so called, trusted to kick up dust and move books. Dinahbitching is becoming institutionalised.

Why do the web-reviewers allow themselves to be recruited as unpaid hacks? Partly for freebies. But more because they enjoy shooting off their mouths. And they enjoy the power.

No, the book reviews on Amazon may not be the best literary reviews one can find, but they do allow what many people haven’t had in the literary world– a voice and a community venue to voice their opinions.

Ok… I have a new favorite book that I am reading.  The book is called The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.  Setterfield does a wonderful job mixing the present with the past that twists and turns to destinations you never expected.  I highly suggest reading Setterfield’s book. It’s a quick read… not as long as The Historian and better written than the The Da Vinci Code. It’s definitely a great read for the fall.

Dan Brown says he used the book The Holy Grail and the Holy Blood as a reference.  So, does that mean that all nonfiction can not be used for writing a FICTIONAL story?  What should writer’s reference?  When I was doing research for a paper about The Da Vinci Code, I came across several books that were nonfiction that read like The Holy Grail and the Holy Blood–so shouldn’t those books be on trial too?  Because,those books, too, are cashing in on The Da Vinci Code.  Here’s an excerpt from The New York Times that I think many writer’s fear–

 Judge Asks Sharp Questions at Close of ‘Da Vinci Code’ Case

Mr. Rayner James insisted that he was not asking the court to establish a precedent. But the case is being closely watched here by copyright and media lawyers, who say that a victory by the plaintiffs could have wide repercussions for novelists, playwrights and others who use nonfiction works as background research.

“The concept that you can infringe copyright by taking what is presented as fact in a nonfiction book and weaving it into a novel could have very serious implications,” said Fiona Crawley, a lawyer specializing in intellectual property and copyright issues in the London office of the international firm Bryan Cave.

“All sorts of people write novels about historical events and go to nonfiction books for research,” Miss Crawley added. She used as an example Jack Higgins’s novel “The Eagle has Landed,” based on the historical conjecture that the Nazis considered trying to capture Prime Minister Winston Churchill from his country estate in Norfolk, England, during World War II.

“If someone had written a nonfiction book about that, are you saying that when Jack Higgins uses it as the basis to write a novel, he can’t do it without infringing the author’s copyright?” she asked.

 

Overall, I just hope the movie is not affected by this trial.  I think many people need to realize The Da Vinci Code is fictional.  Yes, it tells a story that is controversial, but it also is a good read.  To me, fiction is about letting your mind expand to ask “what if” and this book did that as well as what The Historian did.  The Historian story discusses the existence of Dracula.  Do I believe that Dracula exists… no, but it was fun wondering–”what if…”

Register early for The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writer’s Conference of the Southwest. A weekend of lectures, workshops, panel discussions that will explore ”The Art of Narrative Storytelling”.

The conference will be Friday, July 14, 2006, to Sunday, July 16, 2006 in Grapevine at the Hilton DFW Lakes.  Some of the authors that are attending:

• Gay Talese:  A Writer’s Life
• Melissa Fay Greene:  Praying for Sheetrock
• Ron Powers:  Flags for our Fathers
• H.W. Brands:  The First American
• Hampton Sides:  Ghost Soldiers
• and many more

Register Now

Oprah asked the hard questions to James Frey who admitted he fabricated the truth or as Oprah simply said–lied in his book A Million Little Pieces.

As in any good journalism organization, the truth is vital.  What about nonfiction books? Should we hold the same fact checking standards to a genre that claims to speak the truth?  Or are their allowances in memoirs and in author’s memories that we should let go.  I mean it has been proven when a crime happens, witnesses all seem to have their own recollection.  

What should Frey have done?  Frey should have just said, ”This is a novel BASED on my life experiences.”  BASED ON is the key word.  The book should have NEVER been allowed to be sold as a nonfiction book.  Publishers do not have the strict policies as news organizations do, they only go by the word of their authors.  So should we go with truth with a small “t” or Truth with a capital “T” when it comes to nonfiction books?  It’s hard to say because isn’t it all relative?  I mean, take for example a celebrities memoirs?  How many people have refuted their depiction in one of those books?  Frey, I believe did wrong.  He mislead the public into saying, this is the ABSOLUTE Truth with a capital “T”. 

But, how many times do we embellish our own true stories? It makes me wonder how many other nonfiction books that I have read embellished the facts.  I’m sure it probably is not the first time an author of a memoir or nonfiction book has lied.  But, we also have to allow more creative freedoms than the normal New York Times’s article.  Let’s not forget that it’s called “creative” nonfiction for a reason.  Maybe Frey’s book was not ALL fiction, but shouldn’t books be placed in more than one category. I mean, sometimes I think Homer’s Illiad should not only be found in poetry, but also classic fiction and even in philosophy.   

The solution could be that we create a new genre category… “Almost the Truth.” 

Questions for Others in Frey Scandal - New York Times

The questions about how publishers should deal with the truth or falsity of the books they publish are likely to continue to resound through the book business. Yesterday, publishers, literary agents and booksellers said that, in the wake of Ms. Winfrey’s condemnation of Mr. Frey and Doubleday, they expected memoirs and other works of nonfiction to come under increasing scrutiny before and after publication.

Some publishers said they would continue to rely on authors and their literary agents to stand behind their works, even as they occasionally press them for details on some of their claims.

The New York Times recommended this book about Elizabeth Cady Stanton…

Some Books Are Worth Giving; Some Books Are Also Worth Keeping

The first is “The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” by Vivian Gornick, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Stanton belonged to that astonishing band of 19th-century American radicals who changed the way we live - among them Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Abolitionism taught the women to fight for justice; feminism challenged the men to expand their vision of what justice means.

I love writers who treat thinking as a dynamic process. Ms. Gornick does - here, and in all her books. Imagine a photographer of the psyche. She studies her subject from all angles. Whether in close-up or on a landscape crowded with political and religious movements, she explores the public and private selves.

The debate goes on about Google digitizing books. Google should just have a paid library subscription that allows people to peruse books. It just seems silly that we technology is hindering us from the inevitable.

Googling Literature: The Debate Goes Public

Publishers and authors are suing Google over its Book Search program (formerly called Google Print), which lets users search for terms within volumes. Though users will see only a few lines of text related to the search term, Google is planning to digitize entire copyrighted works from the collections of three university libraries. The publishers and authors contend that without their approval, that is a violation of copyright laws.

Microsoft scans British Library

About 100,000 books in the British Library are going to be scanned and put online by software giant Microsoft.

The books, which are out of copyright, will be digitised from 2006 and put online as part of Microsoft’s book search service next year.

Microsoft is already working with the Open Content Alliance (OCA), set up by the Internet Archive, to put an initial 150,000 works online.

A separate global digital library plan by Google is also under way.