Cow Creek Book Festival!

Mark your calendars - the former Prairie Book Festival has returned in a new form, with new features!  Saturday, March 31st from 10:30 am to 6:00 pm, the festival will celebrate the written word with talks given by local and regional authors.

Events kick off with a presentation from 2011 Newbery Award-winning Wichitan Clare Vanderpool!  Mrs. Vanderpool will speak in the library's auditorium at 10:30am.  There will be copies of Moon Over Manifest available for purchase and Mrs. Vanderpool will sign autographs after her presentation.

Throughout the remainder of the day, these great authors will be presenting programs in the big tent at 10th & Main (or in the auditorium if the weather is bad):

• Children's author Beverly Olson Buller, whose works include, From Emporia: The Story of William Allen White and A Prairie Peter Pan: The Story of Mary White 
• Linda A. Born, author of My Mom Has Alzheimer's: Inspiration and Help for Caregivers;
• Hays resident Joanne Emerick, author of Courage Before Every Danger;
• Great Bend resident and Barton Community College instructor Linda McCaffrey, author of "Praying Hard for You" - Love Letters to a Death Camp;
• Lowell May, WWII historian and author of Camp Concordia: German POWs in the Midwest;
• Roy Bird and Gwen Battis author and illustrator of Little Ike: Dwight D. Eisenhower's Abilene Boyhood;
• From Andover, Kansas, Robert Collins, author of 3 science fiction novels and more;
• Hutchinson's Mary Rintoul (author) and Betsie Andrews (publisher) with their book, Prairie Nutcracker;
• McPherson's Steven Farney, author of several Kansas sports books including Title Towns: Class BB Boys Basketball Champions;
• Kim Vogel Sawyer, author of many inspiration fiction titles including the forthcoming A Seeking Heart;
• Hutchinson-area authors Amy Bickel and Jason Probst authors of The Complete Guide to Kansas Fishing;
• Hutchinson writer and photographer Linda Laird, author The American Grain Elevator: Function and Form;
• Writing duo Vickie Britton & Loretta Jackson, co-authors of several mysteries, their latest is The Mayan Mask of Death

More eBook Nonsense!

WARNING:  Long, but extremely IMPORTANT!

[EDITED 2/12/12]
Sometimes I get frustrated with people.  Usually, it is because communication hasn't worked properly and has created a misunderstanding.  Sometimes though, it is because communication has been completely disregarded and subsequent faulty reasoning has led to a poor decision.  Now, whether or not that faulty reasoning has been mine or the other party's...let's just say I'm willing to discuss it.  The same can't be said of the 5 publishers listed at the end of this post.

Sometimes when trying to communicate, I must assume that the other party has completely gone off the rails and is just flat wrong.  Case in point:  Penguin ends eBook sales to libraries.  This news means that 5 out of the 6 "big" publishers have chosen to not sell eBooks to libraries.  Random House is the sole remaining "big" publisher still selling eBooks to libraries (thank you Random House!)

Those other publishers, rather than work out a solution, have chosen to walk away.  They want you, the reader, to only have the option to buy an ebook, never to borrow.  This despite decades of hard work by librarians, promoting authors and books for these big publishers.  Librarians want people to read.  We relish helping to discover new, great authors and sharing them with our patrons.  Librarians want more books to be published and more writers to succeed.  Librarians want publishers and publishing to grow.  These big publishers, apparently, want only our money.  And by "our" money, I mean ours individually.  They don't seem to care about choking off a source of free promotion and business that (although they dismiss it as inconsequential) has benefited them for years.

Here's the harsh truth:  Just as it disadvantages individuals, a lack of access to a popular format, a format that may reign supreme in the coming years, will kill libraries.  It will kill them utterly because while a new format changes habits and usage patterns, complete lack of access to that format will bring us even further along the road to a society of "haves" and "have nots".  Public libraries have always acted as a great leveler - providing resources to those who cannot afford them.  Public libraries work hard to create readers: Life-long readers. Voracious readers.  And we don't especially care if they buy books, borrow them, or both.  HPL's children's outreach brings books and story times to 600+ pre-schoolers per month with this single goal in mind.  That's 600+ potential book buyers WE are creating for you, MacMillan Publishing (and you other ingrate publishers).

Lack of access will also kill one of the other main reasons libraries exist - to accumulate and make available the totality of human knowledge.  Eh, so what, right?

Librarians are not unreasonable people.  We will negotiate terms, conditions, restrictions, whatever.  But we can't negotiate when the other party is acting in a childish fashion and simply takes their toys and goes home.

If this situation makes you mad, here's a list of contacts to which you can express your anger.  I will be contacting them myself and I hope you will too.

Macmillan
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
646-307-5151

customerservice@mpsvirginia.com

SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
PHONE: 212-698-7000

http://www.simonandschuster.com/about/contact_us

Penguin Group

375 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

Phone: 212-366-2000

ecommerce@us.penguingroup.com

Hatchette Book Group

466 Lexington Avenue #131

New York, NY 10017

Phone: 212-364-1100

http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/customer_contact-us.aspx

Brilliance Audio, Inc., 

1704 Eaton Drive

Grand Haven, Michigan 49417

Phone: 616-846-5256

consumerhelp@brillianceaudio.com 

[EDIT]  Here is a considerably more measured blog post on the Penguin / eBook topic, but one that also points out many of the very real, but bordering on whiny, problems of librarianship these days.

SF Book Discussion

The Apocalypse is upon us!  Well, at least in a fictional fashion.  Our newly formed Science Fiction Book Discussion group met for the first time on Groundhog Day (Feb. 2nd.)  We discussed William Forstchen's book One Second After.  My impression after the discussion was that generally the group liked the book and thought that Forstchen's portrayal of the breakdown of civil society was compelling and realistic.  As I read, I was most surprised by the author's take on the weaknesses in modern food supply for large populations and the potential - the certainty, really - that many, many people who are alive because of the marvel of modern medicine would very rapidly die off in the event of a major disruption in pharmaceutical production.

Our next book is Walter Miller's classic post-apocalyptic book, A Canticle for Leibowitz.  We'll discuss it April 5th at 7pm here in the Hutchinson Public Library.  Where One Second After warned of the dangers of EMPs to modern electronics (and civilization), A Canticle for Leibowitz warns us about the dangers of a more traditional nuclear holocaust.  The following is a description of the book I found at Amazon:

Walter M. Miller's acclaimed SF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz opens with the accidental excavation of a holy artifact: a creased, brittle memo scrawled by the hand of the blessed Saint Leibowitz, that reads: "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma." To the Brothers of Saint Leibowitz, this sacred shopping list penned by an obscure, 20th-century engineer is a symbol of hope from the distant past, from before the Simplification, the fiery atomic holocaust that plunged the earth into darkness and ignorance. As 1984 cautioned against Stalinism, so 1959's A Canticle for Leibowitz warns of the threat and implications of nuclear annihilation. Following a cloister of monks in their Utah abbey over some six or seven hundred years, the funny but bleak Canticle tackles the sociological and religious implications of the cyclical rise and fall of civilization, questioning whether humanity can hope for more than repeating its own history. Divided into three sections--Fiat Homo (Let There Be Man), Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light), and Fiat Voluntas Tua (Thy Will Be Done)--Canticle is steeped in Catholicism and Latin, exploring the fascinating, seemingly capricious process of how and why a person is canonized. --Paul Hughes

Our third title, for discussion June 7th will be Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse.  This is a themed collection of short stories by authors such as George R.R. Martin, Stephen King, and Octavia Butler.  Here is a brief review from Booklist:

With this well-chosen set of postapocalyptic stories, editor Adams provides a bit of everything that is best about the trope, from bleak, empty worlds to beacons of hope in an otherwise awful situation. Only Jerry Oltion’s “Judgment Passed,” about what happens when a space expedition returns to an Earth to which Jesus has returned, and the rapture has come without them, is original to the collection. Stephen King’s bleak “The End of the Whole Mess” opens, John Langan’s much more recent “Episode Seven: Last Stand against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers” closes, and they are wildly different. Highlights in between include Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” in which civilization has ended because a disease has made most people unable to talk, read, or do any number of once-taken-for-granted things, and Elizabeth Bear’s “And the Deep Blue Sea,” a brilliant take on a world laid waste and a devil’s bargain that treads in Roger Zelazny’s manic footsteps. A well-chosen selection of well-crafted stories, offering something to please nearly every postapocalyptic palate. --Regina Schroeder

While we want our inaugural year - 2012 - of book selections to be based around the theme of the "end of the world", we hope to continue our discussion group into the future (barring and ACTUAL end to the world) and branch out into the many other areas of speculative and fantasy fiction.  If you are interested in joining us, please reply here in the comments with your email address and I will get you signed up!

This is how we CAN have nice things

For all of the "smaller government" and "taxes are too high" talk that we all hear, day-in and day-out, there are actually good reasons for having robust, smart government:  Government that coordinates; government that practices efficiency (yes I went there); government that gets the job done.

Why do I think this?  Because there are lots of things in our daily lives that we take for granted AND that no one else is willing to do.  What things immediately come to mind that everyone wants and that government provides?  Familiar things like fire service, policing, trash removal, running water / sewer, and road repair.  Then there are more esoteric services (if you can call them that) that have made and continue to make modern civilization possible.  Things like a public education system, support for sciences, art, and higher education; and even libraries.  What's an efficient, coordinated way state government can help each and every public library in Kansas?

This is a quote from the State Librarian's budget presentation yesterday:

Last year the State Library asked one of the database vendors – Gale CENGAGE – to compile the cost for individual subscriptions, in short, what would be the cost if every library subscribed on its own.  That figure was $24,767,699 – nearly $25 M.  The statewide contract with this vendor is $632,000 so cost avoidance is over $24M.

The numbers are so wildly disparate, they almost don't make sense, do they?  The State - the STATE GOVERNMENT - can save taxpayers $24,000,000 by spending a mere 3% of that sum instead of pretending to be fiscally responsible by eliminating programs they perceive as being frivolous or unneeded.


Will all libraries in the state subscribe to Gale CENGAGE online resources with individual contracts?  Of course not.  Many simply will never be able to afford such tools.  But it wouldn't take many individual contracts to start bumping up against that $632k.  The State of Kansas can provide every library and by extension, every citizen these tools for a bargain price.  Funding for the State Library has been cut by an appalling 30.6% over the past 5 years.  Funding for the statewide databases will disappear entirely in the next year if a decision is not made.  I hope our legislators understand the tremendous economy of scale that can be achieved in this instance and decide to do the right thing by funding the State Library at a proper level.