>> From the library of congress in Washington DC.
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>> Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.  It's a pleasure to be here, a pleasure to see all of you, so many old friends here.  My name is Marie Arana.  I am--I have the great privilege of being a senior consultant to the Librarian of Congress, Dr. James Billington.  And I'm also a writer and formerly the editor and chief of Book World at the Washington Post for many years and also a veteran of the publishing world.  I worked for Harcourt Brace as a senior editor and vice president for many years and then went on to work at Simon and Schuster as well.  So, I've been around the block a veteran in all fields, but we've learned so many things in this conference so far that just such, such a delight such a pleasure to have heard Ismail Serageldin's wonderful keynote speech about the importance of words.  And the report from the front lines of so many countries South Africa and Russia, marvelous, and to learn that the first encounter between Europe and the New World between the Conquistadors and the Inca was over a book and that on and on with the heritage of Thomas Jefferson and the wonderful discussions about copyright that we just heard, such a vibrant discussion, and so wonderful to know that it will go on in this summits as we go forward around the world.  Now what we have learned in the whole process is that the book culture is changing although we all know I think in our hearts that books will survive.  The world of books which we have known for so long and to which we have dedicated our lives will shift as it did and has done from scrolls to books, from monks to people and from leather-bound tomes to pocket books.  I just finished writing a book on Simon Bolivar which will come out next year.  And you know Bolivar would take a printing press onto the battlefield and he would carry it along with the cannon and the muskets and the horses and the cattle.  There was the printing press and the Spanish would laugh at him, you know, why was he lumbering through the jungle in the Indies with the printing press?  And he in the course of liberating six countries have changed the language because he begun to write in a kind of Spanish that was very different, that was very vibrant that was not the dusty old Castellan that was spoken and written in before.  And somebody asked me just the other day, "Well what--I bet if Bolivar were living today, he would have been using social media" and I'm sure he would of.  Would he have change the language?  I don't know.  And of course that's what we're here to discuss which would bring us to the subject of the making of books which is, you know, the Bible tells us, there is no end to the making of books.  So we're very lucky, very fortunate to have a great panel of speakers.  We're still waiting for the fourth one to come and I hope she will come descending on us like an angel from on high.  But we have two representatives of fiction.  I wanted to make sure that we have two representatives of fiction from different, a known fiction from different houses then I choose Nan Talese and Geoff Kloske as--well, I invited them because I thought they were two very different corners of the industry that it turns out that just I think it was 10 days ago, a week ago, Penguin and Random House have merged making probably the largest trade publishing conglomerate in the world.  So, although I thought I was inviting people from two corners of the world.  They are--they have become one corner of world even as we gather together here.  We also are very fortunate to have Karen Lotz, Candlewick and Walker, a company that has consistently been one of those innovative children's publishers around.  And Nico Pfund who represents the mass the very revered scholarly publisher, Oxford University Press.  Before I introduce each of them separately, I want to say a few words about publishing in general, and a few cameos of the notable events of the past year just to set the stage.  And let me start with the events of the past year.  First, after 244 years the Encyclopedia Britannica announced in January of this year that it is stopping its presses, ceasing its print publication and going 100 percent digital.  The Britannica's last print version is the 32 volume, 130 pound 2010 Edition, that's one cameo.  Another highlight from the year, number two, in June, Folger Library announced that for the first time in history all of its Shakespeare library Editions will be available in eBook format for less than the price of a mass-market paperback, each of the bard's works is now downloadable, electronically readable and printable on-demand.  Cameo number three, Publishers Weekly which is the official magazine of the publishing trade announced its choice for publishing person of the year.  Not Hilary Mantel who was the first woman to win the book of prize twice.  And not anything like the publishing people of the year in years past.  David Shanks for instance who was the CEO of Penguin who really managed to balance nicely the digital and print publications of his company.  He was the choice last year.  And not the choice before which was, anyone like the choice before who was the Barnes & Noblem, had Leon Riggio who managed to diverse it for his company at a very critical time and not going under as borders did.  Now he was not--he was a choice into 2010.  This year, the choice was E.L. James, not P.D. James, E.L. James, the soft-porn author of Fifty Shades of Grey, this was the Publishing Person of the Year, the rationale?  Because and I quote "Her erotic trilogy connects with people who are not regular leaders."  [laughter]  So, this is progressed folks.  [laughter]  Now to the industry in general, I mean we really have had dramatic, dramatic changes.  I'm just going to talk about the--just very briefly about the last five years.  United States as we know is the largest producer of books in the world, and the course for the last decade we've seen that production virgin.  When I began editing book road at the Washington Post in the '90s American publishers were producing 50,000 books a year.  10 years later I was still in the same position in 2003 they were producing 330,000 books annually.  Book World at the time we were getting 100-150 books a day, 40,000 books a year, and of that 40,000 only a 1,600 would be reviewed.  In 2007, that number climbed to 415,000 books a year published by American publishers.  In 2009, a mere two years later 1,100,000 books were published in the USA, according to Bowker, two thirds of them or 725,000 of them were self-published.  So you see the whole idea of self-publishing, the social media the put my--the Facebook culture, brought about a huge wave of self-publishing.  In 2011, just last year, Bowker reporter 3 million books published in this country.  I suspect only about 15 or 20 percent of those were published by mainstream university or small presses.
^M00:10:04 And this means that readers are faced with exponentially more and more books, but it also means less and less of a market for each title.  The average book in America, believe it or not, sells 250 copies--copies a year.  Average, when you average the millions that Stephen King might sell and, you know, the one that you might sell of your life if you were to self-publish.  Even so, the American Association of publishers concluded that actually this is the really interesting part for me and I hope we will discuss this, that books says overall have actually been increasing steadily since 2008.  Adult trade book sales are generally up, children's book sales are up.  EBooks in 2011 outsold hardcover books for the first time, and interestingly enough mass-market paperback sales have plunged.  Now, that makes sense.  I mean, people reading popular books are more likely to read them perhaps on their handheld devices.  But it's important to keep in mind that book publishing is a very unpredictable and very eccentric business.  Every book is a new start up, I mean, think about that.  And requiring with some product research and development, it's on design, it's on production, it's on branding, it's on marketing strategy, plan, it's--it's audience development.  And you can't sell a book by Ian McEwan with the same strategy you would use to sell Patricia Cornwell.  Each is like a different company unto itself.  So, it, you know, it begs the question when you put an ad in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal for a book, it's not like putting an add for a Honda or for a Cadillac or a Chrysler, it's for one book.  You know, it's not Random House advertising all of its books, it is one book.  It's very, very different and very subjective business which means that you can only plan so much when it comes to marrying books to readers, books for which publishers paid a great deal of money, and I remember being at Simon & Schuster when Simon & Schuster paid 8 million dollars which have been the record number, record size of advanced for Ronald Reagan's memoir called An American Life that earn out 8 million dollars and, you know, the math as well as I do.  You need to sell 4 million books, you know, if it's not right a million--a million advance, we need to sell 250,000.  Well, the book actually sold about 300,000 copies, so it was a spectacular failure even--because of the comparison of the size of the advance to the actual sales.  So, it's a highly complex business with a very thin margin of profit, and you add to that the dramatic changes in technology and the public's demands for new ways to read.  And you have an industry that needs to redefine itself and nobody knows that more than these people who are sitting on this stage here to talk to you about it.  You are either going to scramble to survive or you are going to take advantage of the unprecedented opportunities and that's what we're going to talk about today.  Now, I've asked each of the panelists.  I'm still waiting and hoping that Nan comes.  We'll see if she does.  She is taking the train and should be arriving in Union Station but we'll see.  If she does we will certainly sweep her up here.  I've asked each one to give a quick overview of his or her career, a bit about their personal philosophy of book publishing and how that philosophy perhaps has changed in the course of their career.  First up, is Nico Pfund who is the president and publisher of Oxford University Press in United States.  He joined the New York University Press in 1990 and rose to become its director.  He began at Oxford in the junior position in Law and Social Science before he rose to the ranks of that august institution to become its head executive.  Some of the books on his list Barbara Rogoff's "The Cultural Nature of Human Development", David Kilcullen's "The Accidental Guerrilla," Peggy Pascoe's book on "Miscegenation Law and Race in America," Daniel Walker Howe's "History of America between 1815 and 1848."  Ladies and gentlemen, Nico Pfund.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Well.  Thank you very much for coming here, and listening to us talk on a Friday afternoon.  I'm greatly flattered by how many of you have chosen to spend your afternoon with us.  I spent 10 years working for a librarian and spent about half of that time actually physically working in a library because as director of NYU Press, I reported into the dean of libraries.  So I'm thrilled to be here in Library of Congress, and to talk you about publishing.  In terms of--Marie had asked us to give you a quick overview of our personal philosophy of publishing which sounds a little portentous.  But I would say that in terms of how I look at what we do, it is squarely driven by the mission of OUP.  OUP Oxford is about fundamentally about education, it's about dissemination.  We often say that we don't exist to make money, but we do have to make money to do the things that we exist to do, and that really doesn't form all of the work that we engage in.  Personally, one aspect of what we do at Oxford that I particularly enjoy, and that--that is the kind of publishing that I think Oxford does especially well.  And then I think it's especially important, these days, is to essentially take the work of scholars who often exist in fairly insular environment speaking to members of their own discipline based tribe, and try to help them translate their work to a larger audience.  And that sometimes can be--can be a real challenge, but it goes to the heart of what I think press like Oxford should be doing which is not just publishing work to a very small groups of intellectual although that is actually an absolute crucial part of what we do, do.  But also trying to identify works that have broader input, and trying to bring those works to people who are interested, but who do not reside--reside in the academy.  So, I think the subtitle of the session today is the publishing world today and tomorrow, and I want to look back a little bit and tell you the differences that I've tracked in the last 25 years in my time in publishing through the prison of how people have responded--they had a cocktail party when I tell them that I'm in publishing.  It used to be that they were essentially two responses.  The first response was to ask me whether I read everything that we published which at the press I got through is obviously completely impossible, and the other was you tell me about their book idea.  And that of course is exactly as it should be that's, you know, our life blood as publishers is the book people want to write, but I was always reminded of statistics that appeared in Harper's index many years ago where--and those of you know, Harper's index, you know how they juxtapose statistics sometimes, and the first statistic was--they ask a group of--actually pretty significant group of people, a large number of people.  How many people did they think or what percentage of the population should write books?  And I started to recall correctly, and I'm sure I'm not going to get these statistics right, but it's an impressionistic anecdote more than a quantitative one.  And I think the number is sort of three or four percent, and then they asked the exact same group of people.  Well, but--what about you?  Did you have a book in you?  And something like 75 percent of people said, "Hell, yes I have a book in me."  [laughter]  And I think that's in some ways--that's where publishers live, right?  That is--and that goes into some of the statistics Marie was providing about the explosion in ISBNs, the number of books that have been published.  Now, I'll talk about that a little bit in a second, but now when I tell people that I'm in publishing.  There tend to be two reactions, in addition still to those--those two that remain.  And the first is that people instantly launch into this impassioned monologue about their own personal reading habits.  And it used to be, just a few years ago, it was--how much they love print, you know, the relationship between the thumb and the forefinger when they're holding their book, the smell of the book, all of that.  And what's been very interesting is how that's--that started to change.  And people now who I once would have thought, actually one of our sales reps no less, who I once, I would never have thought would start reading on a handheld.  Now, says he reads on handheld.  But the point is less that it's changed.  The point is more that people feel incredibly passionately about this issue.  And they will talk to you about it ad infinitum.  And it doesn't really matter whether their habits are the same, it doesn't matter whether they're shifting, it doesn't matter whether they have shifted entirely.  The point is it is something that people feel extremely passionately about.
^M00:20:02 And if there's one thing that I hope you'll come away form at least my comments thinking is that things really aren't quite as direr as they may look sometimes or that some people might have you believe.  I think that, you know, it's a challenging times to the publishing industry.  I don't think there's even been a better time for reading.  And I think that that's really crucial distinction, right, because reading is a fundamental human experience.  So there's this fantastic quote by John Updike about how, "Reading is the encounter and silence of two minds."  That's really important.  The publishing industry is important as it means of facilitating that, but it's--there's an enormous difference there and I think that that's an important difference to highlight.  So, the second new reaction that people have is they essentially commiserate.  They look at me and they say "Oh, yeah, well, you know, it must--it must be tough out there in publishing."  You know, every time I pick up the New York Time and read David Carr's column about the media, the phrase, "The crumbling publishing industry" comes up.  And I think it's actually worth pointing out relative to Marie's point about the Publishing Person of the Year that was--last night as I was sitting in my office trying to finish up, I was writing a letter to our staff informing that them as one of the gifts that we're providing to our staff for the holidays, we're going be giving everybody a free copy of a very short introduction to American history, by the late, Paul Boyer, who as Oxford author his whole life and he's written his marvelously tidy book about American history.  And just as I was, you know, putting the finishing touches on his memo, somebody sent me an email which was an article from the New York Times that has just gone online about how Random House had giving every single member of their staff 5,000 dollar holiday bonus.  [laughs]  That was obviously little discouraging.  [laughs]  And it's--but I think it's crucial to highlight that, you know, there's a direct connection between, you know, the publishing of an E.L James book like that which, you know, has been obviously fantastic, she's successful.  And the ability to actually sustain the publishing industry even if it's doing a host of other things.  And I think I would probably differ slightly with Marie on that particular book which I am going to point out but I haven't read yet.  But--and say that here I'm parodying my wife who's a teacher that sometimes it is actually a useful thing just to get people reading.  And I think that the notion--somebody, a while ago was advancing the notion to me in the conversation that Harry Potter was essentially a gateway drug to books for an entire generation.  And I actually thought that was a really peavey way of putting that.  Okay, so I want to read you a letter that appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine last week and it read as follows.  As I'm about to self-publish my novel after rejections from big publishers I watch the struggles [inaudible].  All they do is put their imprint on your product then take a big cut.  No thanks.  Amazon may end up being the monopoly for everything we buy but right now it's giving me the chance to have the industry denied me, access to readers.  I get that a lot.  Could we all get a lot in publishing, and my response to that is basically, well, yes and no.  I think that one of the best things for readers and arguably even for publishing in the last decade has been the democratization of dissemination, they way in which technology now enables anybody for a few hundred bucks to print out of their books of short story, their poems, their family histories, memoirs.  That's a really good thing.  It might not be a great thing ecologically in terms of all the books that are being printed environmentally.  But I think it is actually--it's a good thing.  And E.L. James book I think originally started that way or the trilogy.  But it's also really important to point that there's more to publishing than access.  And in fact there's more to publishing now than there's even been.  One of the things in business parlance that you hear a lot is this notion of double running cost, right?  The idea that you're doing one thing and you're trying to build a new business that's related to your old business and you are--you're having to do two things at once, whereas before you were just doing one thing.  And to me, Netflix is always a perfect example of this, because they, obviously, have to know that in 10 years people won't be watching movies but shifting physical objects through the US Postal system presuming that still exist.  And so they're creating this, you know this cable delivery system even as they're building physical distribution plants.  So publishers are actually in the position.  I would say where--we were almost dealing right now with triple running cost.  We have on the one hand, we're doing old things in old ways, right?  We're still editing, we're acquiring, we're working with authors, we're marketing, we're promoting, we're doing publicity, so pretty much all of that is exactly as it's been before.  Some of it has gotten a little easier.  We don't have to take enormous chances on print runs.  We can do multiple short runs.  So there have been benefits but we're still doing all that.  Then secondly, we're doing all these old things in new ways, right?  So when you--when you start selling ebooks you have to create a whole infrastructure supporting ebooks.  Social media, the promotion of work through social media requires a whole different kind of expertise.  For press like Oxford which is almost evenly split between academic research publishing and English language, training, and even as a second language publishing.  We have about 50 offices the world over and we have--historically I think looked at a lot of overseas markets as just as that as markets.  And now we're moving more and more towards thinking these also places where we should be publishing content from.  And that's enormous shift for us.  And then finally we're doing completely new things that we never even thought or done before.  So the press like UEP, we have something called Oxford Bibliographies Online.  And I say this not hint of showing for this as all but just as an interesting example of how some thing like this emerges where--when we went out to our scholars and we ask them "So what do you want from us?  You know, we are--you're the dog and were the tail.  How do you want us to wag?"  We obviously even, you know, we keep publishing books.  But what else should we do?  And what we kept hearing over and over again across disciplines, regardless of what we talk to is we are just pinned to the wall by this fire hose of information.  What we want is somebody to help us, make sense of it all.  And we want them to help us make sense of it all in our discipline 'cause we just can't keep up.  We used to walk around at the Annual Convention and looked at the new books and that's impossible.  They're just too much stuff now.  So we created something called Oxford Bibliographies Online which tends to do precisely that.  And it's not a sterile bibliography.  In fact you have quite subjective, quite opinionated resource that tells scholars what we have decided through our long, established half a millennium old review system what's good and what's not good and that has been extremely successful.  But again, it requires a whole host of different ways of thinking.  And I think it's important when one makes a point like I just I made about triple running cost is that, you know, it's not to sense--to be sensitive about it, right?  That sounds like a little bit of whinge, a little bit of, you know, we have it really hard.  And I think that, you know, that's kind of beside the point.  If what we do is actually no longer valuable to people.  We'll go away.  You know, we'll go away.  People will vote with their wallet, you know, the ominous phrase disintermediation has been hanging over publishing for 15 years I think since Nicholas Negroponte first debuted.  And so I don't actually worry about that too much and I'm actually quite confident that we'll be fine in that respect, so just a few closing thoughts.  The notion of being format-agnostic was raised in the previous session and I would say that Oxford and many publishers I know have firmly embraced the notion of format-agnosticism.  We want to get good books to as many people as we can.  And increasingly in a globalized world and in a world where there is a booming middle-class especially in places like India and China, we want to try to get as many books and journals and as much access to online content as we can to as many people as possible at as lower prices as we possibly can while still sustaining our mission and doing what we think we should be doing.  And I think that's a really critical distinction.  There were--I was at meeting earlier this week with a gentleman named Roy Kaufman, at the Copyright Clearance Center, and he said something that I wrote down 'cause I thought it was so interesting.  He said, "It's easier to get people to pay for content they've already--they're already reading or using for free.  If you offer it to them at a reasonable price, then it is to get people using it in the first place."  And I think that that's actually quite a debatable notion.  And by that, I mean, it is actually genuinely debatable.  I think it actually--it's true in some instances, it's less true in others.  But as an orient in principle, and thinking about how we should be doing what we have long done, and how we can do that differently, it's already changed the way I think.  A colleague of mine was in Vietnam recently.  He was walking down the street, and there are all sorts of kiosk on the street and she saw that are--some of our English language training books were prominently displayed.  And so, she thought that was terrific to see because it's, you know, it's like a newspaper stand, essentially.
^M00:29:58 And then she was doubly thrilled to see that they actually had the ministry of education hologram, the anti-piracy hologram on them.  And then she was somewhat dismayed when she looked a little bit more closely and realized that it was actually a pirated edition with the hologram on it.  [laughter]  And I say pirated in varied quotes 'cause I'm not entirely comfortable with that term in that context.  But, you know, I think you can make the argument that even though it may not be desirable for people to be taking your content and giving it away or selling it in an illegal fashion.  It is creating a consciousness of Oxford as a publisher in that market that didn't exist before.  And again, for the mission's stand point, it's, you know, they are worst crime.  So, finally, the one, actually two closing thoughts, I would just admonish you to mistrust the theologians when it comes to talks about future books and the future publishing, right?  The Wikipedia denigrators, the book will never die, biblio files, the book is already dead, technofiles, you know, everybody stakes out these extreme positions, and the reality, and I can tell you--I can tell you this with conviction from this vantage point of a publishing house that's got a billion dollars a year, we publish bibles, we publish medical textbook, we publish college textbooks, we publish highly specialized academic research, you know, it's just a messy time right now.  Everything is splintering and fragmenting.  And one of the ways in which we're struggling is to figure out how to continue fulfilling our mission while sustaining the back office and back, and the aspects of all these new dissemination models.  And a lot of that is just tedious hard work and that's kind of what I mean when I say there's more to publishing than just access.  But--and finally, the close on it on--on an encouraging note and I touched on this briefly a moment ago, but I really think that there has just never been a better times for books.  I can't remember a time in the 25 years I've been doing this, I can't remember a five-year period where a room like this has more people in it when you have a conversation like this, because people really do care about books.  People have a deeply autobiographical relationship to books.  And I think that that, given that we've traffic administering books that actually bodes pretty well for us.  So thank you.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Thank you, Nico.  Thank you for keeping the standards so high.  And, you know, indeed, there are wonderful books being published today, quite--there seems to be no shortage of good books.  Next is Geoffrey Kloske.  Geoff is vice president and publisher Riverhead Books, a dynamic maverick arm of Penguin Books.  He has been an executive editor of Simon & Schuster, and an editor at Little Brown.  At Riverhead, he is managed to infuse the imprint with his own very distinctive personality.  In the course of his career, he has published such authors as David Sedaris, Dave Eggers, Bob Dylan, Sarah Vowell, and Junot Diaz.  Geoff Kloske.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Thank you.  Thank you, Marie, and thank you to the library and to Congressman Larson for holding this summit for the future of the book, a future that as we've discussed and you read in the paper, is very much always in doubt.  I teach a course at Columbia about publishing, and one thing that I always do is read them headlines about the publishing from the New York Times, and then I quiz them as when they think those were written.  And there are things like, you know, editors don't edit and good books aren't published anymore, and decay of our book culture and our intellectual culture, and so forth.  And you can find them in different forms, but fairly similar forms in The Times, almost every decade, for the last hundred and twenty years.  Book publishing is a melancholy industry, for some reason.  [laughter]  We are always in a fallen age.  I have been doing it for 20 years, and the Golden Age ended right before I showed up,  [laughter]  and it really, within highest wing, depending on the age of the person telling the story.  But it's always been the case that books has this spirit of not quite being what they used to be, which is amazing because we can show up everyday, and we do it again, and we find new authors, we publish new books, we get excited about things, which, maybe, makes us book publishers, strange people filled with incredible hope, irrational hope sometimes.  Like define memoir by President Reagan, many books fail in any way of looking at it critically, commercially, but we lived with that failure and we continue to find new authors with a great deal of hope and ambition that we will find readers for those particular books.  I work at the Penguin Group, which is the largest English language trade publisher in the world.  And we have a number of imprints of doing different sorts of things.  There's of course payment paperbacks, which everyone has heard of, started in 1935 with Allen Lane, seeing an opportunity for really low priced paperbacks.  And he published 10 in his first year, 10 different titles.  And within, I think, the first two years, he sold a few million copies of these low priced paperbacks, and really created a format and a piece of the industry.  We also publish Putnam books.  The Putnam started as booksellers in Boston, and as many booksellers do, they want to publish--they want to sell good things.  And so they became publishers, and published people like Nathaniel Hawthorne, all the way up to today when they do Patsy Cornwell and Tom Clancy.  We also have Viking, which is story imprint and published the Grapes of Wrath and Steinbeck, and now publishes many best-selling fiction and non-fiction writers.  I'm the publisher of Riverhead, and Riverhead is a very specialized imprint.  We're a small imprint, a literary imprint and our goal is to bring new voices, new perspectives to readers.  So we're always looking for something appealing that we haven't heard before.  The first book as I've mentioned that I ever publish was a book by a guy I heard on the radio, and I couldn't remember his name, I couldn't remember anything about him, but there is something so depression instinct about his voice that I had to call him up to find out who was him, call him up and buy that book, and that was David Sedaris.  And it turned out, I was not alone.  Many people wanted to hear that same voice.  And that's what we look for.  We have this irrational hope in the midst of a constant state of collapse.  And we continue to do it.  Part of, I mean, it's been touched on here at the summit that I--and we'll probably talk about it today, a lot of--the history of book publishing is a coming together of formats around, successful publishers have adopted new formats and amalgamated them into a single company.  Paperback and hardcover publishers used to be separate, which was a problem for paperback publishers because they needed product so they bought--or started hardcover--or started hardcover imprints.  Ultimately, it's about the book.  And as most of us up here are going to support, we are agnostic about format.  We just want to bring books to readers, readers that are waiting for them, and enjoy them whether it is E.L. James or one of the writers at Oxford.  So wherever had, we look for those fresh voices that we haven't heard before.  And we take a lot of care, and developing them over time, working close with the writers, and then publishing them with a great deal of marketing and publicity support to try to create leadership and we've been doing it for, now, 18 years.  And our authors include people like Khaled Hosseini, of the "Kite Runner," Chang-rae Lee a native speaker, Junot Diaz, who won the poet search a few years ago.  Those are the kinds of authors that we look for, and we publish with this enduring hope in a state of collapse.
[Inaudible Remark]
[Laughter]
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[ Applause ]
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>> Thank you Geoff, obviously, not collapsed with that kind of hope.  And Geoff has been enormously successful and he's very modest about it.  I'm so glad to see that Nan has made it.  Hello Nan, we've been nattering on about the publishing business.  And I have explained that what I've asked of you is for you to tell a little bit about your career and about your personal philosophy of book publishing and how that philosophy has changed or held up or modified in your very long quite illustrious career.  Nan Talese is Senior Vice President of Doubleday and she's the Publisher and Editorial Director of Nan Talese Doubleday books.  She's worked and Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin before becoming part of the Random House pool.  She's published some of the most distinguished and popular authors of our time among them, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Thomas Keneally, Barry Unsworth, Valerie Martin and Pat Conroy.  Nan Talese.
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[ Applause ]
^M00:41:19
>> I do apologize for being late.  Trucks engine decided it wanted to put on the bricks and it did it by itself and I had a terrible time getting it on and getting us going, but here I am.  Well, as Maria said, I have a very long career beginning--really learning publishing at Random House.  At the time that publishing, I mean I think often referred to us the Golden Years.  But Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer owned Random House, Roger Straus owned Farrar, Straus, Charles Scribner owns Scribner, Alfred Knopf, owned Alfred  Knopf and so it was really--I mean it wasn't a joke that it was gentlemen's publishing because in fact, you had to have enough money to go into the whole thing to begin with.  But I started at Random and my interest has always been serious fiction and non-fiction.  So that is what I published through the 60s and in the 70s, I was at Simon & Schuster where I first began to publish Ian McEwan and Margaret Atwood, Barry Unsworth and I commissioned Schindler's List at that point.  It was rather--Tom Keneally always submitted two books to be published at the same time and one was perfectly wonderful and the other was I thought a clinker.  So, I would ask to--I would make an offer on one and I never allowed to publish them.  So one day I got a letter from him, hand written saying "I've come upon these remarkable files in a letter shop.  Are you interested 'cause you've always been so nice and liking my work?"  And I said, "Well, can you tell me a little bit more."  And--so he wrote a little bit more.  And we had to have--we didn't have a letter agent for him in dealing with this because I found out later the Schindler archive, his life had already been sold to, I think it was MGM.  So, Tom had to pay back MGM in order to write Schindler's List.  And I was dealing with a lawyer the whole time and Dick Snyderr who was the head of Simon & Schuster then said, "Oh man, don't bother with amateurs.  Don't bother."  But I was quite keen on publishing this book and publishing this author.  So eventually, I did and paid a shocking price to today's market, 60, 000 dollars for world rights.  [laughter]  And of course the book has never been out of print and everything went back to more, I notice when Steven Spielberg did the movie and I remember when Tom was in Poland and he telephoned me and he said "Young Steven is really making a good film."  [laughter]  And I stayed until--with Simon & Schuster until 1981 and went to Houghton Mifflin which was much more--I mean I learned a great deal about marketing at Simon & Schuster.  But Houghton was much more the kind of old fashion publishing that I really felt at home with.  And with me came on, their own coalition, Margaret Atwood, Barry Unsworth, Ian McEwan, Keneally, I mean it was wonderful.  My authors just followed me.  And I wasn't at Houghton for about six and a half years and that was at the time that there were all of these takeovers.  I mean at Random House, Random was the first one to go public.  And Bennett Cerf called us into his office and said, "Now, we're going to go public and there's going to be a stock offer and let me tell you what's going to happen.  Everything is going to go out and it's going to right down again."  So, I'm not advising anyone to buy stock, I'm just telling you what we're doing.  And then RCA bought us then I went to Simon & Schuster.  When I was in Simon & Schuster, Gulf & Western bought Simon & Schuster.  At Houghton, Houghton was already a publically held company.  But Maxwell was trying to buy it and only 10 percent did general books.  And I remember the director Austin Olenick [phonetic] kept coming to me in those first few months and say. "You know they're not going to sell the trade division." And I said, "Oh, you just brought me here, stop telling me that you're not going to sell the place that I come to."  But they were very smart.  It was very hard on General Publishing, 90 percent of the company was--the very profitable school division, textbook division.  And I sell it as much as love Houghton and I don't want to leave.  I felt that the general books were being given short trips.  And I was traveling up and down between New York 'cause I was the head of the Boston Office--I mean the New York Office in a Boston company so I kept having to take the shuttle back and forth.  And the last summer, I was there, I realized I was traveling 900 miles a week and not really doing anything, worth anything.  So, I resigned, as I said I resigned from the Boston Shuttle, not really from Houghton.  Houghton was a wonderful company and I loved it dearly.  But happily, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Barry Unsworth, Tom Kennealy, everybody came along with me to Doubleday.  And when I was at Houghton, poor Pat Conroy had a new editor for every single book and they assigned me to him and he--we got along terribly well, and that was The Prince of Tides.  And I remember Pat is--I mean every writer is very, very different and Pat just sends a thousand plus pages and it's up to you to do it with what you can.  And having never worked for him, I didn't know what to do so I made a scheme like a movie scheme of timeframes, themes, characters, and when he came to New York to work with me, I remember he looked at it and shook his head and said, "Nobody ever has read my work this carefully."  So, as you know it was quite a success.  And, so we signed him up for another book and that's just after that time I went to Doubleday and Pat keep bringing in saying "I don't--I really don't want to stay here without you so I'll come to Doubleday too."  And I said, "Look, you got a perfectly good contract.  I can't do anything about it.  It's just entirely up to you."  And so, I think what he finally said was he was never going to write another book if they didn't let him go.  So he came to Doubleday and after I had been there two years and it was rather chaotic.  I said "Listen, I can't work in this chaos."  So, I started my own imprint and that was in 1990.  And I've continued just published the same--published the same writers ever since.  I've done Thomas K. Hill's books of history.  But all of the books that I have done, they--each one of them has something uncommon.  And that is they use language beautifully, they are story tellers and they're passionate about what they're writing.  And whether it's fiction or non-fiction, that's what goes on in my imprint.  Obviously, in the last year and a half, it's been a very dicey time to say the least, sorry I missed everybody else's talking about it.
^M00:50:02 But I feel I've just been going on doing the literary fiction and nonfiction and flying under the radar.  And the independent book sellers are great supporters of my authors.  And with ebooks, of course, in America, we started it much earlier than it's been--than it's done abroad.  But we're beginning to get a sense of what the ebooks are--how they're going to be done.  And the other night, I saw a presentation of what was called an "eLume" and it was a book--it is a book by Richard Mason.  And he and his partner have developed an ebook on the iPad that if you--it takes place--the story takes place.  It's the history of the Pleasure Seekers and the story takes place in Amsterdam.  And there the picture of a street in Amsterdam and if you put your finger on it, it will take you through Amsterdam.  If you put your finger on the text, it will be read loud to you.  There is music.  There--this is what everyone said ebooks were going to be but this is really it.  And I do think that what is going to eventually evolve that that will be the ebook that most people will want because you can listen to it and you get a good deal of history.  Not every book is adaptable to it, but I think for literary books, a lot of them will.  And--but I continue to publish as I did at Random House.  I'm afraid I don't have any new tricks except marketing.  We do a lot more marketing on the internet than ever did before.  And publicity is--although it's important, it really is for celebrities and big authors already established.  I'm not sure how we're going to continue to nurture young writers.  It was his eighth book.  I think I published seven books before by Ian McEwan before Americans had any awareness of his being around.  So I think the big changes are going to be that there are going to be smaller advances for authors.  And I said something very topical and fought over.  I think that I remember Philip Roth saying he thought there were 9,000 serious readers in the United States.  And I was very impressed because I thought there were 4,000.  [laughter]  And so as far as what I'm going to do is continue to publish.  Someone from sales came in to the office the other day and you probably read about the bonus that we all got because of 7 shades of gray, et cetera.  And she came in to the office and she said, "I can't believe it, I'm still selling and still impressed pushing that book." And I--those books and I said, "It's just fine under that elusive money, I'm contributing to publish my good books."  [laughter]  Thank you.
^M00:53:24
[ Applause ]
^M00:53:30
>> Thank you, Nan, and she does publish incredibly good books.  I'm so glad you could make it.  Karen Lotz has been the president and publisher of Candlewick Press since1999.  Among her many books, "The Mercy Watson Series" by Kate DiCamillo, "What Color is my World" by Kareem Abdul Jabbar, "Ladder to the Moon" by Maya Soetoro-Ng.  Last year, she took on the additional responsibility of being the managing director of Walker Books, Candlewick's British parent company.  The mother of two young children, she manages to split her time between London, the home of Walker Publishing, and Somerville, Massachusetts where Candlewick is based.  She is truly a global publisher.  Please welcome, Karen Lotz.
^M00:54:25
[ Applause ]
^M00:54:30
>> Thank you so much, Marie, and thank you everyone, Dr. Billington, representative of Larson, and our good friend, John Cole at the Center for the Book.  It is such an owner to be here, to be included in the summit and thank you all for you attention.  One of our speakers earlier today, former congressman Tom Mallon, who's now at the AAP, talked about how the world of publishing is divided into many different industries really now.  And I would say that the corner that I hail from Children's Publishing is rapidly becoming even more different from our big book partners on the adult side.  And in children's book, we actually call it adult publishing all the time which we take it into the E.L. James family means one thing.  And to us, it simply means adult books versus children's book.  But children's books, it's interesting when you think about the context of yesterday because we've been looking at the past we've been talking a lot about classics and very, very ancient and beautiful books such as the ones we saw last night.  And the entire field of children's books is actually fairly young in the scheme, the whole idea of creating a literature specifically for children is rather new in the large, large history of publishing.  And I think that that is something that's very interesting when you look at also some of the big, big titles that have united us over the past couple of decades, Harry Potter, which has been mentioned, Twilight, of course, more recently.  A lot of these books have come out of the children's and the teen arena and they have united readers actually all ages in sort of imagined community.  But there was a time, not that long ago, there was the time my career when that wasn't really true.  I think I was probably always destined one way or another for a life in the world of books.  I think father knew this because when I was just about to head off to college, he took me out for breakfast and he actually didn't live with me at the time but he took me out for breakfast and he said, "I'll help you find your college education as long as you promise this one thing."  And the one thing was don't major in English.  [laughter]  So he had--he had a good insight.  He was hoping, you know, virtually anything else I could have picked would have been fine.  So with the unerring wisdom of youth, I agreed and I went to college and studied Serbo-Croatian, be poetry.  [laughter]  So an even more direct path to the job market was mine when I graduated.  And I had very--I definitely wanted to go into publishing and I had lofty ideals of what I would do and what I would publish and the types of books I would work on.  And I went to what was then the Radcliffe Publishing course, now the Columbia Publishing course.  But I hadn't done my homework and there was a tremendous amount of homework that you had to do before you showed up at the course.  And again, showing my wisdom, I did not do my homework and as the punishments, I was put into children's books.  Because at that time, nobody wanted to be in children's book.  And at first, I protested and I thought this was awful but actually, when I met the practitioners who were teaching the children's book course, they were amazing people.  There were so dedicated to their craft and that one summer, they completely changed not just my view of what children's books were but my entire life.  And I ended up going to New York and working for one of them at was then E.P. Dutton.  And the day that I arrived was also the day of the announcement of the first of many mergers which would take E.P. Dutton all the way through the days of New American Library, Penguin--Penguin and Putnam and now of course, Penguin and Random House soon to merge.  But when I arrived, it was still in these offices on 2 Park Avenue that had been its home for 100 years.  And one of my jobs is the lowest assistant on the totem pole was to keep something called the key to the Centennial Library.  And the Centennial Library was actually in the lobby of the building.  You would walk in, roll up the carpet, put the key in the floor and the wall would swing open like in Batman or something.  And behind it was the archives.  And in that archives, there were just amazing treasures.  There was, for example, Ernest Nister who invented the pop-up book.  They were his early dummies for how to make the first pop-up books.  There were things like that.  And also in my little cubicle, which was actually a closet in the hall, there was this locked file cabinet.  And when I used to prowl around the Centennial Library and I also always wondered what was in the file cabinet.  And one night, I finally got it opened.  It turned out, the top drawer was full of royalty checks from the 1970s that some assistant had not wanted to mail and instead, he kept filing in his filing cabinet.  [laughter]  And then the bottom drawer was filled with original art from Ernest Shepard, lost for dozens of years, and ended up in the Children's Museum in New York.  And all of this was going on for me, the sort of entry ends of the world of publishing and this discovery about publishing's past when all these mergers and things were happening at the same time.  And we were very quickly moved out of those offices, combined, put into larger and larger offices and that was how my career sort of went, watching this amazing work of big business intersect with this artist and craft, and the uncomfortable tension between those two things.  And then when I had a change to move a company called Candlewick Press in Somerville, Massachusetts, I was very, very excited because Candlewick was an even newer company.
^M01:00:06 We're actually only 20 years old this year so I've been there for 13 years out of the 20 and we publish only children's books.  So we start with zero and we go all the way through teenagers and then we published some books about the craft of children's literature as well.  And we are part of a group of companies that has its origin in a man named Sebastian Walker who was Brit.  He was a publisher in corporate publishing in England and he decided that he needed to make a place where authors and illustrators could essentially come as a haven from big business.  And so he founded this company and when he died, he left the half the company to his family and half to the employees and we eventually purchased the whole company.  So we have now Walker Books Australia.  We have a children's television company that's very small and new.  And we have the two big presses in the United States and in London.  But we also have as our owners, 150 of our authors and illustrators who publish with us for a long time and we invite them to be part owners of the company.  And what this usually means is that they are as depressed at the end of the year as the rest of us, when there is not a tremendous amount of profit to share.  But in the good years, it also means that we're able to thank them for everything that they do.  And I think it's also a fabulous reminder to those of us who work on the creative teams that our authors and illustrators are really what it's all about.  And they're part of the creative decision making and the strategy of the company.  And with this model, we have just sort of bump along and we have been able to really publish some amazing books and some amazing authors.  And as Marie said, we tried to do it globally wherever possible and wherever practical.  And we are really I think in incubator in a way for the connectedness that's now affecting the whole industry.  Because basically, in order to get our print runs big enough to work and to have the company survived, we've always had to work with each other.  And even though we're sharing a common language, English and theory, there are a lot of challenges to that in the day to day practice of it.  But that's Candlewick Press and Walker Books and that's who we are.  And the other thing I just wanted to quickly say about the sort of challenges obviously we're talking a lot about the place where digital and print publishing meet and for the YA portion of our list, the young adult portion of our list, that's extremely relevant.  When you're talking about children's books and you're talking about books for children 0 to 3, 0 to 6, what does that mean all over again?  And I think it's just a whole another question and a big new set of issues.  There was--some--there's a phrase that often comes up in our meetings when people are getting very stressed for one reason or another, margins aren't working, sales aren't happening, something is going on and we'll be in the room and someone inevitably always says, "Okay, this children's book.  It's not brain surgery."  But a few years ago, it suddenly hit me.  Actually, it is brain surgery because what we're doing is we're creating the books that are building the reading brain hopefully.  And that is something that we keep very, very much in mind.  We're trying to make the best books for children always and our definition of that really means, the books that will help children grow up to become life long readers.  That is our definition of the best book.  And as they are figuring out how in their own mind that part of us, that speech that inherent and the part of us that's vision is inherent and they are putting it together with learning how to read and learning how to write, what does that mean in a world of tablets and devices and apps instead of a tactile world of beautiful objects.  I think it means only good things but right now, I would say, we are definitely in the middle of the big squeeze.  And if you'll pardon the metaphor, maybe it's the birth canal and we'll see what happens when we come out on the other side.  But it is a very, very interesting time and I think it's important for all of us in this room who clearly cares so much about books to remember that with this truly golden age of production that's going on, we need to figure out how to make those connections with those very youngest children and get them reading right away.  And that would be the key to any future that we want to have.  Thanks.
^M01:04:28
[ Applause ]
^M01:04:34
>> Thank you, Karen.  I think that's the first time--can you hear me?  I think it's the first time I've ever heard of children's publishers as referred to as brain surgeons but it's very true.  It's very, very apt.  In fact, I'm going to ask a question about that in a moment.  We actually have time for very few questions so we only have 15 minutes but--which means I will limit it to the big questions.  And the big question--I have two big questions really.  The first big question to all of you is really, are there too many books?  I think I remember Bill Keller of the New York Times complaining that there are just too many on the market.  And certainly, self-publishing Amazon and Google and Apple have in their rush of publishing have perhaps taken a different stand on these standards.  I mean, perhaps, even lowered the bar of quality in the kind of books that Nan has been talking about or all of us had been talking about really because they see it as a money making business.  In other words, the more you turn out, the more money you're going to make.  It doesn't matter whether it's self-published books or whatever but it's--what happens of course is the publishing enterprise that requires gate keeping and judgment and the sort of notion of what is it that makes a book great and lasting and enduring in a piece of literature or a piece of important information, sometimes that goes by the buy when you keep making more and more books.  So I asked you, are we making too many books?  And certainly, the librarians and the audience who have been archiving them may be are a little fearful when I quoted the figures about the 50,000 going to 330,000 going to a million, going to 3 million, are we publishing too many books, Nico?
>> Well, for those of you in the audience who are readers of the New York Review of Books, I'll be interested to know, how many of you have noticed in the last year or two, how of many of the ads in the New York Review of Books are actually ads from what are called author service houses or vanity presses as we used to call them, Xlibris, iUniverse, AuthorHouse.  Because what struck me and I traffic in or I'm moving circles that--where people play a lot of attention to what's reviewed and what's advertised in the New York Review of Books is how remarkably few academics see those ads.  And I think that's actually a useful metaphor for that--all those 3 million new books because I actually think they are largely invisible.  I don't think they clutter the literary landsc2ape, the extent that people think they do.  I think that people just don't see them.  And I think you could make the point that in each of the last issues for over the last year or two, I would say, author service houses had been the primary--if not the primary, then one of the top two advertisers in--for the New York Review of Books.  And for a press like Oxford and from publishers of series nonfiction, I think it's actually fantastic.  'Cause what it means is that shoring, a very important review vehicle for us without necessitating our advertising dollars.  [laughter]  No.  And so what it is, you know, every author understandably wants to be read.  I mean somebody made some--you were making a comment earlier about, you know, the importance of hope over experience.  [chuckles]  And we all traffic in that.  Without that, you know, we wouldn't be able to come to work every morning.  But I think the question is actually more question about, are there too many books published by traditional publishers?  I think there probably are but I don't have any idea how it goes about preventing that or whether that's actually genuinely a problem so.
>> You know, I think there are too many books and I think there always will be too many books, but you know, of all the arts, the book is the most personal.  I mean we view movies together, we see paintings and photography and museums together.  We listen to music together.  But when you open a book, it's you and the reader's voice and that's all.  And because it very personal, there are--people have a lot of different taste.  I mean I know a lot of the best sellers of books that I've passed on because I didn't think they were good enough.  So that's rather hard for the company to keep me going.  [laughter]  But I think one thing, there are too many books and I think the other thing is that now, we all have to begin reading foreign literature and understanding more in the global community where I think I do quite a bit of translation, which you know, maybe 2,000 copies or so.  But there'll be a few in ebook and bit by bit, they will grow.  And it's just that people have very different taste.  And with Amazon and with self-publishing, I mean people will, you know, the "Fifty Shades of Grey" was not self-published.  It was just a small publisher that published it in Australia.
^M01:10:01 But you know, I think there always will be, but I think editors probably, there are too many editors acquiring books.  [laughs]  And we'll see if that goes down.  But the one thing we mentioned in the New York Review of books and I always ask that advertisements for my book to be put in the New York Review of Books because I think that's where serious readers are, and so--from my type of work, that's perfect.  For best selling, you know page turning marvelous report, probably USA Today is the best place to advertise.  But, we'll always have too many books.  Geoff?
>> I think the notion of publishers as gatekeepers is a false conceived and now with the author services, everyone should just give it up.  It's not--it's never been the case.  There are no gatekeepers because there's no gate.  And self publishing and distribution has actually been possible in physical form for decades.  So, it's the wrong way to think about it.  Some people now like to talk about, well, it's more like curation which is the new--I think that's the wrong conceive too.  It's more enthusiast publisher as enthusiast and you have millions of books published and you have to pick the good ones and share that enthusiasm with a lot of people and that's the challenges, not  [noise]  focusing on the number of books.  [laughter]  Is that me?  Is the wrong way to go about it.
>> Okay.  I like that, enthusiast.  How about you?
>> I think that we could flip it and we could say the fact that there's so many books being published means that there's so many more writers.  And as we know writers are great consumers of books so therefore there are a lot more readers.  So those writers will just actually buy more books.  We could get those averages, if it runs out.  [laughter]  right there.  Start with that community and then build out.
>> A little loving circle that's right.
[Laughter]
Virtuous recycle, yeah.
>> A Neil James joke.
>> Right.
[Laughter]
>> Now, I want to ask--
^M01:12:27
[ Laughter ]
^M01:12:31
>> I was told you would be a problem, Geoff.
[Laughter]
>> Now I want to ask a question that has concerned, Dr. Billington, the Librarian of Congress who have, I have--he has posed the question to me personally and to people in and out library.  It's something obviously that concerns him very much and concerns all of us and that is, "What is--I mean new publishers are as you said so well then you are a publishing a book that is going to be opened and shared as a kind of bring experience over here, we heard that too, between a reader and a writer. And we've known what that has meant over the course of centuries of reading in the codex form.  But what happens to cognition, to the way they think, to the way we process information, to the way we are inspired, to the way we are moved, to the way we are--our desires or race, what happens to all of that when the process of reading has changed?  Is this something that you are thinking about in publishing?  Is it something that you are thinking about then when you are looking at that--at that handheld device that does all those things that takes you to, you know, Brazil if you're reading [inaudible] or, you know, what are you considering now as publishers, as people, as enthusiasts, people who will have to work with this new technology as we move forward.  But what are you thinking?  What are you planning?
>> Well I think one thing is I just have to share this with you, Pat Conroy approached me recently and he said, "In the summer time, I always go up and down the beach to see what peopler are reading and they all have those Kindles, of course I have no clue so we're going to have to invent some sort of bubble that tells people  [laughter]  what--what they're reading.  But I think, I mean right now, part of the transition is that people are fast, and they can reveal these to mode technologies and I live in New York and if you go in New York, I mean people are--they don't look where they're going, they don't talk to other people, they are on their iPhones all the time and I think for 10 years or so we're just going to have to hold ourselves together,  [laughter]  and think lesser profit and more of the importance.  I mean when you think of how books change the world.  I mean its rather amazing, Rachel Carson, Silent Spring sign, I mean getting, but now I think we're--I remember Norman Miller said at the--when television became so popular, it's not what's on television that's harmful, it's this--every 15 minute there's a commercial and there's no sense of concentration, and quite frankly I think that in the younger generations, they never learn the ability to concentrate.  I mean having you still going to get readers but you're going to get them in fewer numbers, and then hopefully if the education system improves, they'll begin to grow, but you can't be hyperkinetic human being and reading an 800 page book.  It just doesn't work.
>> Correct, correct.
>> One of the distinctions that we're trying to make at Oxford is the difference between immersive reading which is what most of us talk about in our meeting when we talk about reading and then the more extractive research-based work that happens a lot in the world of the academy.  And I think that that has proved to be a very helpful distinction for us as we try to transition a lot of our books online, as we try to create resources for our constituents.  A good example is something that we just launch called Oxford's Scholarly Editions Online which is all of the work that we published something like 700 scholarly editions, the definitive work of major thinkers all over the world throughout the ages and with the focus on the last 200 years.  And I think the value of that in terms of people's research, in terms of what we're doing as a press to enhance knowledge is vastly improved by the fact that all of this content is online.  It's searchable.  It's far more valuable and far more useful than having 20 of this dusty enormous volumes open before you.  So I think that's a--I think there's a great deal to be gained on the extractive and research side.  I think the question about immersive reading, you know, I have kindle and I actually don't want to upgrade to it to a tablet because I think one of that reasons I love my kindles and one of the reasons I think a lot people to love eReaders is because--they make you a better reader.  You can't do all those things, it's--it's just does one thing.  So the idea that we're, and actually removing towards this conflation of all sorts of functions and utilities into a single object, I actually don't want that.  And I think that you know, carrying around a net something that weighs a pound is price lower name for something--'Cause I would argue that the kindles actually makes me a better reader, I find it a more immersive experience than reading a print, and that's not something I would have said 2 years ago.
>> Geoff?
>> I don't have any predictions about how reading will change but I don't know as publishers, we spend a lot of time investing in technology and new strategies and have to experiment and fail to make any sort of progress and trying new things, and at Penguin we to do a lot of that of iterating new forms to see, what works and ultimately a good open market will design first.
>> I see, yeah, I'm going to stop you there because I see your readers as being, you know, sort you, you have a quite young generation, I mean this--your readers are I would say between 17 and what?  35.
>> I'll take them off, yeah.
[Laughter]
>> And these are perhaps--have you--do you sense that there's a change in there kind, are they still reading the way that you read or the way that any of us in the audience have read in the past?
>> I--I think they want great story, they want distinctive voices and I mean what's changed a lot it's true is how we market and advertise and so that tense to change rapidly and we have to adapt to it.  But, you know, a work like Junot Diaz is very popular but also very dense and very complicated, and he has young readers as you say that will come to him and just get really excited about this aggressively complicated work.
^M01:20:07
>> Uh-hmm.  Uh-hmm.  You, Karen?
>> I think about cognition in reading all the time, really, especially when we're talking about the youngest books.  And one of the factors that I think it's important to remember in the digital age which can be very input oriented is that when we're learning to read and we literally talking now about books that were, that are read aloud to us, there's a constant change in the interaction between the reader and the one read to.  So that is the one read to is getting a little bored or a little scared or a little excited, the reader adopts the telling.  It's the old story telling.  It's story telling to an audience and that's something that a device can't do.  And when we're learning how to read and we need to learn how to understand the paucity of what's happening, the new ones and the voice that will allow us to grow up and officiate the books that Geoff and Nan do and take in the information that Nico does.  If we don't get that early on through that human interaction and we won't be able to have it later.
>> Well I have to say these four panelist have made me keep the faith and I think that--
^M01:21:30
[ Applause ]
^M01:21:37
It has been wonderful.  I want to thank Congressman Larson and Senator Reed for suggesting this summit, and I want to thank Dr. Billington for holding it.  But I want to thank you especially for coming and giving us a bit of your expertise and so good of all of you to come and listen.  Thank you very much.
[Applause]
>> I believe that this panel, the last of the summit constitutes something like the 36 through 39th speakers.  So, some might say they saved the best for last.  What I would do--
^M01:22:21
[ Applause ]
^M01:22:26
I would like to introduce the speakers very briefly one at a time and let each one have her or his due.  If we have time we'll have some questions then I will try to offer a very brief conspectus of the summit by way of what I believe are three important questions we should come away with based on the remarks we've heard and then we shall adjourn to a reception and the handing off ceremony.  So, very briefly not to give her, her due at all but Karen Keninger is director of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped.  She holds the highest position in the land for handicapped service.  No wonder then that she's the current president of the National Council of State Agencies for the Blind and she's the past chair for six years of the Consortium of User Libraries.  She is truly one of the world leaders in her field and we are very privileged to hear from her this afternoon.  Karen.
^M01:23:38
[ Applause ]
^M01:23:44
>> Thank you for that very generous introduction.  It is a pleasure to be here this afternoon.  I do want to acknowledge my colleague Mark Leighman [phonetic] who is in the back there running the PowerPoint for me so that I don't have to mess with that.  Thank you, Mark.  This afternoon, we've all, yesterday and today we've been talking about books and last night we saw some beautiful examples of rare books and we heard about Thomas Jefferson's collection.  And a book truly can be a beautiful thing.  Something that you want to touch, something you want to have the smell of and the feel of in your hands.  Something that has beautiful illustrations capture your eye and your imagination and then of course, there are the words in there.  I personally once had an opportunity to hold in my hands a 500 year old.  They won't let me touch anything last night but--but I did and it, it was an amazing experience to me because the book was kind of raggedy.  It had been around, it hadn't, been what, it was not in the United States, I'll point that out.  They would never let me do that here, but where I was, which was not here, they just said, "Oh here, here's one, you can look at his," and I did and it was, it was old and well worn, but the thing that was remarkable to me was the fact that someone from 500 years ago had written that book and it was here to talk to me today if I could only read it.  But it was amazing that that container of that old raggedy book contain the words and the voice of somebody that lived so far along ago.  Books has physical objects.  We line our walls with them.  We trade them.  We share them.  We hand them to our cousins and our sisters and said, "I read this fantastic book.  Here you got to read this."  Or we study them and we, we treasure them, beautiful, handy, functional, well loved containers.  The containers nonetheless, the real treasure.  As we've heard before is the binding, it's the gold leaf, it's not the vellum.  It's not even the ink on the pages, it's the words.  It's the meeting of minds that a book can entail.  The transfer of information, the sharing of ideas, the exploration of possibilities, the cultural imperatives and the gold old fashion stories contained in books.  That's what makes them truly valuable.  As a work of art it has value in itself as an object.  But really it's the ability to read it, to study it, to evaluate it and then to add to the world's dialogue.  That's what matters.  And the creative work contained in the book is the key to that sharing.  As a container, it's content has worked for most people for a very long time but for some of us a book like this one is one of the most frustrating, aggravating objects in the world.  Why is that?  It's because it's tantalizing, there are voices inside this book I want to hear.  There are stories that I want to know.  There are perspectives that I want to understand but I can't access this container.  I cannot access the voices within.  No I'm not the first person who's had this problem and I won't be the last.  I'm sure that you have picked up a book and a language that you didn't understand and wondered, "Wow, if I could only read Chinese or if I could only read something, you know, Sanskrit or whatever I can't read, I could unlock the treasures in this book."  Louis Braille undoubtedly had the same experience.  He wanted to know but he was blind in France 200 years ago and he couldn't read.  Still he wanted to experience the literature of his people.  He wanted to share in that dialogue that Dr. Billington talked about.  He wanted to be part of the world and he had things to say.  They say that necessity is the mother of invention and it was necessity, not just a wish, not a desire, not a passing fancy.  It was an imperative, a necessity that led him to create a reading and writing system that he as a blind person could use as fluently, as independently and is readily as you use papers and pens.  Louis Braille wanted to participate in the dialogue.  He had things to say.  He had a perspective on life that was unique to himself and he wanted to know about other people's thoughts and ideas and experiences.  He refused to accept what others thought was a simple fact that a blind person couldn't read.  He heard about a night writing system developed by the military and he took that idea and he refined it to create and writing system that we know by his name today which is Braille.  Braille has a one to one equivalency with print.  There's an A, a B, a C, a period, a question mark, a parenthesis, is this it?  Whatever, so when I read Braille, I am not reading foreign language.  I am not reading some abstruse and obscure thing.  I'm just reading English in a font that my fingers can recognize.  Now a Braille book is not a particularly beautiful thing and itself I've never seen and beautiful Braille book.  Its covers are bare and there's no photos, there's not fancy writing, no creative art and it's bulky and it's kind of big and it's not really all that handy but it is a book in the critical sense of the word.
^M01:30:10 It contains the words of author.  And that's the thoughts, the ideas, the messages, the view points to the person who wrote it.  And I can sit down with that book and have that one on one dialogue with that author, whether they are Shakespeare or Homer or the James person.  [laughter]  My container is different but the content is the same.  And I've been reading books like in Braille since I was 7 and I've had the same excitement and the same joy and the same vistas of possibility that my sighted sisters have.  But the numbers of books in Braille are limited.  It's expensive.  It's a niche market.  There's not very many people that produce them.  The National Library Service for the Blind produces about 500 of them a year which as we just heard it's not very much compared to 3 million.  Buying people want to read whatever is out there, not just the book that someone else picked but any book, every book.  So enter a pair of visionaries, Kenneth Jernigan and Ray Kurzweil.  Jernigan again is blind, but he wanted to read print books.  He wanted to read everything that everybody else had access to.  Ray Kurzweil decided but he had to--knew a whole lot about computers and he had an idea that he thought would solve Jernigan's problem.  So he combined what he knew about the computers and cameras and all of that and he created the first ebook system.  It was--he used optical character recognition to scan the book into the computer and then desynthesize voice system to read it back out.  It was a big refrigerator size thing with magnetic tapes and a very big console keyboard and it was cost 50,000 dollars.  So it's not something that you could just, you know, setup in your living room.  But for the first time a blind person could take a print book, a book like this print pages and let it down on that thing and suddenly have access to the book without an intermediate organization having to put it into Braille form.  I remember reading my first book on the Kurzweil Reading Machine in 1978.  That was 20 years or more before the Kindle came out.  Now the book I read was James Herriot, "All Creatures Great and Small."  I remember that because it was such a big event.  It wasn't a scholarly book and it wasn't something I had to read for school or anything.  But it was something I could read.  It was really exciting.  And 10 years later I had my own computer and a scanner which work so hard, I have to take, cover up the computer and put a fan on it, so it didn't burn up.  But it was the scanner and it was scan material into the computer and I could read it or I could Braille it out.  This is my first access.  This is an expensive system but it was something that I could use.  And then, about 15 years before the Kindle came out I had my very own portable ebook reader, portable this time.  It looked like this up here on the screen, a small computer with the refreshable Braille display across the bottom.  Now refreshable Braille is a system where little pins make the dots.  They pop-up and down according to what the computer tells it to do.  It makes the line of text across there.  You have to only read one line at a time right now.  But that is a refreshable Braille display.  So I could put my book or I could put a hundred books in that, because now they're just small etext files and I could carry it with me anywhere I wanted to go and read it wherever I wanted.  I now for the first time could take to the beach.  I could take it on the bus.  I don't have beaches in Iowa where I come from so mostly it was the bus, but I could read wherever I went.  Today this Optical Character Recognitions Software, this whole technology that was developed initially and refined so that a blind person could read a book is being used in all kinds of settings.  We've heard a little bit about Google and HathiTrust and that sort of thing.  There's all kinds of ways that is being used today.  I happen to be kind of excited about HathiTrust, by the way.  But my refreshable Braille displays with these little pins that pop-up and down with these little actuators that's expensive technology.  One of those things cost about 80 bucks per sell.  So my display if you multiply that by 32 is a little bit expensive and too expensive for a lot of people.  So we have developed synthetic speech.  It was pretty primitive at first and not particularly easy to understand it's not like this.
>> Chapter 1,  It was almost midnight in Virginia late for the farm lands North of Richmond when the breathing quickened in the stall.  The phone rang in the gentry home and two men came out the front door hastily crossing the launch of the car.  They swung up the driveway onto the deserted road and took off north.
>> Now if you think that a pleasant way to read a book.  [laughter]  they have improved it with time and it can now sound like this.
>> Chapter 1, It was almost midnight in Virginia late for the farm lands North of Richmond when the breathing quickened in the stall.  The phone rang in the gentry home and two men came out the front door hastily crossing the launch of the car.  They swung up the driveway onto the deserted road and took off north.
>> You may not realize but that's exactly the same thing that the first one read.  It sounds a lot better.  You can understand it more easily but it's still synthetic speech.  One size does not fit all in the blind community as anymore that it does in the general public.  A lot of blind people do not read Braille and the reason they don't is often because they are--are older when they lost their vision and they--it's difficult to learn to read Braille as an adult, because of the wiring you have to develop between your fingers and your brain I think.  So a lot of people didn't learn that, but they still wanted to access the treasures that are found in books.  So the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicap back in 1930s invented a new kind of container, The Talking Book.  It was the first time that long playing records were used to record human voice and read a book with that and a less paid actors to narrate an entire books and the result was access to the content of a book by listening to it being read.  Although it harkens back to the old tradition of years passed it added the full and carefully crafted content of the written word.  And here is an example.
>> Love's Labour's Lost.  On a day, alack the day, love, whose month is ever May, spied a blossom passing fair, playing in the wanton air.  Through the velvet leaves the wind all unseen, 'gan passage find that the lover, sick to death. Wish'd himself the heaven's breath.
>> That's a little better.  Blind people use Talking Books for 40 years, before the general public caught on and say, "Whoa!  That's not a bad way to read some kinds of books."  And now you know you can get audio books from all kinds of places, and a lot of people are benefiting from audio books.  Audio books have their placed and people have discovered that.  The containers evolved.  The records got smaller and they played longer.  And then we adapted the cassette tape that came into favor and that's about when the public started using audio books because you could put them in your car and listen to them on the way to Boston or somewhere.  And most recently the National Library Service has developed what we call the digital talking book which is a very sophisticated digital book in a container.  Again, that has been specially design for people who have limited dexterity and limited or no vision so they can run it quite easily.  But once the technology for digital books became feasible blind people got together to look at better ways of accessing the contents of the digital book whether it's a digital text or digital audio.  Because now we don't want to have to read the thing from start to finish without, you know, moving around in it.  We wanted to be able to jump to page 57.  I wanted to be able to find out, go from chapter to chapter or skip this boring part and go to the next part.  The DAISY Consortium was formed and its members were organization serving the blind.  Based on their unique, the unique experiences of this population.  The consortium developed the concepts and standards for structuring a digital book so that it could be navigated without reading it straight through.  And this intern laid the ground work for EPUB 3, which is the current open source format for--used by a lot of mainstream publishers and we would like to see, use that all because it's very accessible.
^M01:40:09 What does all of these have to do with the International Summit of the Book?  Well, folks, the book as an artifact is a physical work of art is certainly a beautiful and treasured thing.  It's important cultural icon, the paper book with ink letters on pages is a comfortable and familiar container, but the real value of the book lies in its contents, the words, as we've heard for the last two days, the stories, the ideas, the information that it contains.  The intellectual content of the book is what matters and it's much less than whether it's a paperback, a hard cover, or an ebook or an audio book, a multimedia presentation, or even a computer text file.  If you can open it, access it, read it, understand it, dialog with the author, incorporate its ideas and carry on the dialog, the book has done its job.  We will not be reading 10 years from now the way we're reading today.  Not you and not me.  Some of the changes will be like Braille, very efficient in a niche market but not widely adopted in the general public.  Others, optical character recognition technology, audio books, synthetic speech, and things we don't even dream of today will blossom and change the way we read, the way that we manage the amazing amount of information that comes out us everyday.  The lessons of the past tell us that innovations have come and will continue to come from unexpected places.  So, I challenge you to look around you today.  And when you get back home, look at the people that you don't know, the people on the street, the people in cafes, the people in the libraries, and wonder what imperative drives that person?  And what can that person contribute to the world's conversation?  And how can we help each and every person on the face of the planet to continue that dialogue?  Because as Dr. Billington told us, civilizations rise from the work of creative minorities and we don't know who those minority is necessarily are.  Thank you.
^M01:42:47
[ Applause ]
^M01:43:02
[ Pause ]
^M01:43:05
>> Well, I should say that the only person who wasn't paying wrapped attention was Jimmy the dog.
^M01:43:17
[ Laughter ]
^M01:43:23
>> Hear his name.
^M01:43:25
[ Laughter ]
^M01:43:28
Thank you so much, Karen.  Much to discuss.  Fenella France our next speaker is Chief of the Library of Congress Preservation Research and Testing Division, a world leading heritage preservation scientist.  She has done groundbreaking work on some of our nation's most precious objects.  Among them they draft copy of the Declaration of Independence that we saw yesterday in Mark Dimunation's presentation and the U.S. flag that flew over fort McHenry.  She'll kill me for putting at this way, but prepare yourself for book history CSI.  [Laughter]  Fenella France.
^M01:44:18
[ Applause ]
^M01:44:26
>> Dr. Billington, esteemed colleagues it's been such an amazing privilege over the last two days with all the new knowledge that's been shared and brought together at the summit.  It was discussed yesterday and it seems to be a continuing theme throughout that the libraries of resource acknowledge that leads to new questions.  But it can't be just information.  It must be knowledge.  In the preservation directorate, our mission is to ensure an interrupted access to any of the collections either if their original or reformatted form.  And this ties in very nicely with the use of new technologies and how do we actually access that content.  With spectral imaging and some other noninvasive new technologies we can actually access non-visible information and change this information into content knowledge from our books.  We can create accurate digital rendering of data information and make it more accessible in terms of what I'm coining the digital cultural object.  And I find that very interesting because if we did not have the original materials we could not use these new technologies to pull out the information that's in them.  So, the preservation of these original materials is a critical component of being able to move forward and access this new information that we are.  The type of things that we can do with this new technology is optimized the preservation of books, deferring to Michael here, enable forensic-type analysis of materials.  But I must say, unlike CSI we can't quite do it in the same timeframe.  I wish I could do it in one hour.  [laughter]  It doesn't quite work.  And we can capture lost and hidden information that really is a critical component of so many of these incredible books that we have in our collections.  To do this, we'll integrate a number of different analytical techniques.  The spectral image mapping allows us to find out where different parts of the material is showing different characteristic, and we can link the macro, the large component of the book and the binding, and the leather and everything at that level true to the minute detailed within and pull out some of the information that we didn't know was there.  I got a list of different types of technologies.  There is no Ts.  You don't need to remember the acronyms after this.  So, what do we do with something like the hyperspectral imaging?  Well, we turn all the lights off.  We sit in a dark room and we start thinking lights.  We're actually starting the ultraviolet.  Go right through divisible and infrared.  This means that we have a stack of images and each of these individual wave bends.  So any materials that respond in different ways because of the chemical character will be enhanced or show up in different wave bends been and particularly in later processing.  Why do we do this?  Well, it's essentially looking at taking something from remote sensing, looking at the world to looking at our books.  The archeology of what we're doing is digging into our books, finding out what's there that we didn't know was there, and I'm sorry I'll stop it before you go blind watching it.  So, hopefully you--so with Mark Dimunation, wonderful presentation yesterday on Jefferson's Library what was the formation of the Library of Congress.  And I had the honor of looking at this hand written draft of Jefferson's Declaration of Independents and you can see these very neat cross outs in most places.  If it's not home directly in the margin he signs Dr. Franklin or Mr. Adams.  When I was looking at this in different wave bands of all those blinky lights that we saw earlier, I guess you saw one place which looked unusual.  It was actually a smudge rather than a direct cross out.  In this region here where it says fellow citizens.  When I started looking at this and doing some of the processing, we came with all those different wave bends we have available.  I started to see, look like something coming underneath.  Now, the thing you see here were very similar, so it's quite difficult to separate it out.  But I think towards the end there, look, you can see what sort of looks like a T.  So, after lots of processing and a little bit more work, much more than CSI takes I'm afraid, we found that it originally written fellow subjects in changed it to fellow citizens.  And this is quite a magical change and also for me, 'cause I've also done the subject to citizen personally.  And really I kind of went flying up to the sixth floor to say someone must know about this.  So, I started doing some research to find out where this come from and found a research from Princeton who'd been going through Jefferson's notes and noted that Jefferson had said, I started copying from the Virginia Constitution that was written two months earlier.  As I wrote this word, I realized this was wrong for our country.  This was not right.  So, I expunge it completely to never be found again.  So, some of what we are doing for better or worst is bringing out the thought process of our founding fathers going back into this volume, this knowledge that we have in our libraries as precious knowledge and finding more information that becomes knowledge based on what we have here.  Another two examples of two books that we've worked on and the birth of this that really is a process of digging into it and make--working very collaborative with the group of people from the library----
^M01:50:02 Curatorial, conservation, preservation stuff, other experience, and this is what makes this work so valuable.  Because it's the iterative process of interacting with other professional colleagues that helps us pull out this information and turn it into actual knowledge.  The Verin Noravank Gospels of 1487, this is rare Armenian manuscript.  And you can see when it first came to the library that it wasn't in particularly good shape.  It didn't look that beautiful, it doesn't mean it wasn't fabulous, and we know in fact that it actually came from Armenia on the Silk Road.  We can even track it back to the actual monastery that it was written in.  How do we know that?  Because the scribe in fact notes the he wrote the script at the Verin Noravank, dedicates it to the father.  We also have Gohar [phonetic], the current ruler at the time.  So it gives us a lot more information and allows us to ensure the prominence of this material and also the author who made--who wrote it.  Although I would note his comate undeserving and unskilled scribe is rather erroneous.  So we start to look further through going on the macro of what's the year before we dig down further?  In terms of the book construction or looking at the page preparation, we can actually see the grid of the lines that was scoured but what's interesting is the lines weren't always followed.  They actually were looking that they're going to do two columns, this doesn't always happen right throughout the booktiques that's written.  So we're saying changes and thought from when it was first started to what actually happened as you're going too long into the scribe.  Then let's look at the construction of the illumination.  How would these illuminations--there's four of them in the book are not quite beautiful, how are they actually created?  And so start from the conservation division, I did a wonderful research into the analysis of early Armenian painting techniques.  And you can see here from the color chart that what in fact happened is that if you're going to work with--I'm sorry, with pink, blue or yellow, to make it lighter, you use white.  But in fact, if you're going to do that with green or red, you use the yellow.  So there's differences in the way that we think about how we would change colors to how they were doing it at the time period.  So to take that one step further in really understanding this, one of our staff Tamara [phonetic] actually recreated and reconstructed the gospel of Saint Mark.  And it starts from painting the face and everything goes out from the face.  The next part of the drawing that's drawn is actually the light tones, they are laid down first.  After that, the mid-tones are added and what's interesting is you--we see that it's not a color change, it's just an addition of extra pigment and particularly so at the dark tones, generally moisten.  You would imagine that black would be added but no, this is just a further addition of the intensity of the pigment that's used.  If we compare that with what we actually had in the library, this is the type of colors that you have expected to see on the original and on the right is what we have in the library.  So the next question is, how can we understand what sort of degradation has occurred and stabilize it and be sure we know how to best preserve that as part of our collection?  So we started looking in terms of the technical analysis of this.  What sorts of pigments are being used?  The blues were particularly interesting.  I'm also very intrigued with the reds on the borders because we're seeing quite a lot of differences in both spectral imaging and other analysis that started to pull this all together.  With the spectral imaging and imaging processing, what can we essentially do with this is net across the entire surface of this in pseudo color to actually show very quickly what's the difference between colors that may have actually looked exactly the same.  And we can also look at the changes on the border of this as well.  And so one of my staff, Dr. Lynn Brostoff actually did a lot of x-ray florescence and raman spectroscopy and she found in the blue region with the XRF, the presence of smalt.  Smalt is the blue pigment that's actually used in the glass making and ceramics industry.  So this was really quite exciting, this was an early example of technology transfer from one industry to another that had not being used before.  But what's interesting is that we need to always use more than one technique to really pull out what's happening and so while the smalt could be detected by XRF, there were--there seemed to be something else there and looking at raman spectroscopy, we found ultramarine.  Now, this, lapis lazuli, a very, very expensive pigment found early in Afghanistan and so what--it was clear that what they were doing here was actually using the smalt to extend the very expensive pigment in the blue.  If we'll go then to look further at characterizing this, we can then run spectral curves from the hyperspectral and we get a reasonably good response confirming and leading on from that research that was done with the other analysis.  With the red pigments, it really was quite challenging.  These were quite difficult to separate out but both spectral imaging, micro XRD, x-ray diffraction and XRF show the presence of lead oxide--I'm sorry, with lead and vermillion so both lead and mercury were present in these.  The cause of the degradation we're, seeing they were different levels and so part of what has been--ongoing is trying to understand the interaction between those different levels.  But this did lead the conservation division staff to realize they didn't--could not want to do anymore add anything to it because of the complexity of the layers on these manuscripts.  And I always think there's such a beautiful slide here, it was a recreation of the original pallet of the monk, of the colors that he was using.  So we can now go back to some very, very rare components turn white, which is a very rare example being used.  And you see here the range of mixtures that from first glance, if you just took one analysis, you wouldn't realize the complexity of what's being done and as we're digging down into the information of this.  So, if we go back from digging down and come back up a little bit further, the rebinding of this, you can see the lower level, this is rebound in the original Armenian style using traditional materials like linen and leathers and this is the final product that was created which is really quite, quite gorgeous.  So you can see here that the volume that came in to the library, we retain the content, I mean we housed that container in a very special way.  One more example I want to give you is the Ptolemy Geographia at the Rare Book and Special Collections and this is really an--again, it has a wonderful collaboration with Daniel De Simone and the staff in the conservation division, Sylvia Albro, John Bertonaschi, Lynn Brostoff, myself and others.  And there's been a lot of work and this is also ongoing.  And what this volume, this had--it's quite interesting, it's very interesting, the first section contains Ptolemy's style texture mets and then the second section has nets  that go right through the 16th--early 16th century.  So, there are a number of questions about this.  You can see here that because it was bound quite tightly, there was a challenge with making this accessible to researchers.  So we really needed to actually stabilize it and unbind it because there are constant request to use this volume.  But along with that, there were a number about the questions.  There are inscriptions that have been seen on the front pasted on inside the folder there and we can see the words with some of the hyperspectral imaging, the numbers 735.  And this actually relates to the Bill of Sale which we found from the Rosenbach Museum and library record and also it links back to the Library of Congress caudally.  So I think given some of the numbers that have been banded around in the last few days, this was probably quite a bargain.  And then another section on the front pasted on [inaudible], mended and restored and we'll come back to this a little bit later on, but these were words that are part of that in tool, this is looked at.  They could not be pulled out and extracted.  So why did we take this further?  As I said, this is a volume that is heavily researched and a lot of researchers want to handle it and there were number of issues, seven of the maps were in actually very poor condition.  What you're seeing here it's a lot of transfer through us on this poor condition.  So what was the green?  We needed to know what that was to be able to stabilize it further and looking at that, you can see on the image of right, in the gutter of that image, the green actually looks quite good, it's in good condition.  But further down on the right hand side and then also at the trans [phonetic] view, we're actually seeing some degradation of the green and I'm sorry, I'm not sure if it's that clear for you or not.  So it seemed to be indicating that we have verdigris which is a copper containing pigment and the copper wall actually is a major degrade the paper.  So we really wanted to know what's actually causing the poor degradation of those four--seven maps that we can stop and work hard and make that more available to researches.  So sections on this sheet showed accretions, the surface composite material that you're really wondering what this was.
^M02:00:08 It seemed to be present also in the green of the copper containing pigment.  And looking at the XRF analysis of this, you can see here in the--those XRF spectra that these potash alum in the areas that we see this accretion, now,  that's actually a material like a sizing agent that was quite often used in paper making to size the paper.  We also see in the copper regions, this brush stroke that's showing up in the ultraviolet image so we know that we're brushing this on and this is what we found on the seven sheets that were in poor condition.  So we're now working with the conservation division people to understand how we can remove this alum to prevent any further damage and restore them back to their good condition.  Part of why we need to do this though is because they use in so many different mixtures we need to understand more about the traditional materials.  So we've been recreating with original recipes and I know some interns love this, I think it's the best thing ever.  Recreating original samples of all the types of materials that might have been used and then aging them in various ways.  So part of what we're doing is creating our own scientific reference sample, a little mini reference collection within the library that allows us to scientifically assess the analysis and the content knowledge of the books and collections.  Looking a little bit provenance, to knot these nips into this volume, they actually had a central guard, a piece that was stuck on the back to allow that to open up flat.  These guards were removed when those were being taken apart and disband.  If you look at the central region there, you can see how that guard was actually placed over a piece of arches paper and we could confirm where that paper came from.  So we actually know the time period which is around 1925.  So looking back to the original restoration and those in the front, we now can look at the time period of this second binding occurred.  Further question, looking at the watermarks and the paper quality here is we found three different types of paper, one that was in particularly good condition, the crown watermark, the flour de lis, and then another one that was not watermarked.  What's very interesting is that these quality paper links back to the printer who made the Waldseemuller 1507 world map.  So now, we're starting to make connections between different volumes within our library collections, just really quite fascinating.  So in summary, I just wanted to say the importance of the preservation of the original is really a critical component.  As you've seen, if we didn't have this, we couldn't do the analysis that we've been able to do because if this was digitized, that information which is spectral would not be available to us.  The digital cultural object allows to very uniquely link between the analog original and the new digital form so we are creating new information that adds new content knowledge to the original material.  We can mind this, we can essentially dig right down into the spot to transform information into knowledge and I keep hearing that throughout a few days.  The importance of the knowledge, the content that's created and it also allows us to link the sciences and the humanities which I don't think should be separated but often are, allows us to very visually react and interact with other colleagues and researchers and create very effective, exciting and interesting collaborations.  Thank you.
^M02:03:48
[ Applause ]
^M02:04:00
>> Perhaps very appropriately, the great New Zealand bibliographer Donald Francis McKenzie said, "If you know how to read it, every book is alive with the judgments of its makers.  And the business of bibliography is learning how to read the human presences in every recorded text."  And I think we've seen a single example of how to recover those human judgments, those human presences through a kind of capacious and deeply learned bibliographical literacy so thank you very much indeed.  Our next speaker is Thomas Mallon.  He is the author of 8 novels, of 2 volumes of essays, and of many articles in some of our nation's finest journals, the past deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  He is the recipient of a national book critics circle award, a Guggenheim and even a Rockefeller fellowship.  This last rumor has it when you think about Rockefeller University for his work in cytogenetics although I'm not entirely sure.  I'm sure he'll inform us now about the source of his Rockefeller, the nature of fiction, the book and the future of the book, Thomas Mallon.
^M02:05:41
[ Applause ]
^M02:05:49
>> The kind of Rockefeller fellowship I had, I'm afraid they are long gone.  I had them about 25 years ago, I mind run--they run through different cultural institutions.  Mine run through the 92nd Street Y in New York.  I had one and the other person that had one there is Ann Carson and she was supposed to be writing a book on the classics and I was specifically writing a book about plagiarism and she was actually in her room writing poems and I was trying to become a novelist.  So we've learned very good value for the money that they expended on us but we were grateful for it in any case.  I'm very pleased to have been invited here this afternoon and I confess that I have only some miscellaneous thoughts to offer as an author and a reader.  Most of them are cautionary I guess, that sounds sort of presumptuous to begin with.  A few of them may be cranky and I suppose all of them in their way are nostalgic without trying to be trapped in the past, I hope maybe just appreciative of it.  My father left school when he was 14 in 1928, he had to go to work after the death of his father and it was 50 years after that in 1978 that I had my first article accepted for publication.  I was so excited that I sent him a copy of the proofs and I remember that it was, the tail-end of long alleys and I found that very exciting and he wrote me back a letter.  Again, this man who left school at 14 and this is from that letter.  I wish I could put into words how much I enjoyed seeing the proofs from Biography, which was the magazine I had written this for.  I realized how anxious you must be to see the finished product.  It awoke a lot of memories for me of when I was the exalted office boy for Cosmopolitan books.  My memories are about the excitement I always felt when a finished book arrived from the printer.  They probably did 40 or 50 a year but every one of them was a new adventure, the jacket and the look of the hard cover and then the fun of reading them at home.  Of course now I realize I was stealing them.  [laughter]  Eventually, I had about 100 of them which I sold for 12 bucks down on 13th street.  [laughter]  Even if I was the lowest one on the totem pole and sometimes I have nothing to do except to fill the ice pitcher for Kenzie [phonetic] the publisher, I doubt if any of them got as much of a charge out of the books as I did.  Except of course the authors and somehow, I don't think it ever became old after them.  The company went bust during the depression.  Farrah and Ryan Heart [phonetic] took over some of it.  Kenzie started his own publishing company and lasted quite a few years.  The editor, Sal Flamm [phonetic] who had a contract from Hearst paid my salary out of his own pocket for quite a few weeks and his secretaries too while he still had use of the office.  They were all nice people and one day, I even got a glimpse of Sinclair Lewis.  You'll have memories of your printed word all the days of your life.  When I'm struck by when I read--reread this is how in many ways the publishing world I entered as a writer in the late 1970s were more resemblance to the publishing world of the 20s, what he is describing.  Already then, I have century gone than it does to the one we have now 35 years later.  I remember the editor of my first trade book telling me that I have to be ambitious, I had to want literary success, that I had to imagine the book I was writing being put in the window of Scribner's on Fifth Avenue.  When that actually happened, I learned of it from an excited friend who had seen it and called me up.  We raced back down there so that she could photograph me in front of the store.  Scribner's of course is now a Benetton and the book with these days as likely as not be trying to catch someone's eye through the glass of their iPad rather than a display window.  I'm romanticizing the past of course but I've lately been struck by an unexpected fact about today's very youngest writers say my undergraduate students at George Washington University.
^M02:10:08 They are tremendously tech savvy.  I have never seen one of them with a printed newspaper in his hands.  And their untrained and almost never used penmanship would give a nun a heart attack.  [laughter]  That's the reason most professors have stopped giving final exams, they just can't bear to try to decipher the handwriting.  But when these students who are very secure in their electronic and cyber worlds dream of literary success, these creative writers I teach, they still tend to do it by summoning the very old, imaginative trappings of print, paper and dust jackets.  What I find when I talk to them is that they still want to write a book that someone will eventually put in their hands.  Even when they're queazy about exclusively elect--even they are queazy about exclusively electronic publication, especially online publication which can make even a well-known writer feel like a blogger.  There's that "anyone can do this feeling."  The web, especially where fiction is concerned, has still not much evolved from its so called Wild West days of the 1990s.  Precincts of it in which readers can find fiction that has been competitively selected and rigorously edited are there, but they remain comparatively rare, rarer than you would expect them to be nearly two decades into the web, I would say.  I don't know whether these students will get that chance to have that first book and set of proofs into their hands.  I'm not sure how much longer I'll keep having those tactile moments.  Early this year, my agent, the fearsome Andrew Wylie, sold a proposal for a new novel of mine to my long time Editor Dan Frank at Random House, Pantheon Books being the imprint.  Some months went by and realized I hadn't yet seen a contract so I got in touch with Andrew's office and asked if anything was wrong.  No, said his assistant, just some boilerplate issues.  I asked what they might be and was told that they involve the just adapted standard contract at Random House that would no longer guarantee a print edition.  The publisher had every expectation that there would be one.  But since nobody knows what this industry will look like even three years from now when the book is to be delivered, who could blame them for declining to make such a guarantee?  Nonetheless, Andrew's office was arguing that since we'd had oral agreement before this became the new standard the print guarantee should be grandfathered in.  A week or so later, the assistant got back in touch to tell me "good news, the publisher had agreed to their request."  I couldn't help thinking of the kinds of negotiations that agents and perhaps Andrew Wylie in particular used to have with publishers.  Now, I guess it's come to this, "good news, we've wrestled them to the mat and they've agreed to print the book."  [laughter]  Andrew does, however, still work magic.  And when a recent novel of mine about the Watergate scandal did pretty well, he was able to get Random House to agree to bring back two of my older novels, "Henry and Clara" and "Dewey defeats Truman."  I know that their coming availability in Kindle is what I should be happiest about, at least in a long term economic sense.  But I'd be lying if I told you that the new electronic editions will give me as much pleasure as the prospect of the new paperbacks does.  With their new cover designs to be tweaked, copies to be inscribed, and the shelf to the side of desk, the one with one copy of everything I published being extended by a couple more inches.  But let me give the up to date it's due.  By this point, it may surprise you to know, it still surprises me, that I own and use a Kindle.  And there are things that I like about it.  Because I can't figure out how to annotate what I'm reading on it, I use it only for pure pleasure reading, mostly novels, often old ones.  And last year I found myself contentedly reading Pandanus [phonetic] and Faulkner's Snopes trilogy on my Kindle, sometimes while sitting in a rocking chair.  The electronic lion making peace with the low-tech lamb.  I expect as the years go by that I'll be relying more and more on this electronic box.  I have floaters in my eyes.  Those maddening specks that sometimes dance around when you read.  And I find the light that comes up at me from the Kindle is actually friendlier, makes me less aware of the floaters than I am when looking at a paper page on to which a reading lamp is shining.  But there are downsides too, I think.  There's the awful sameness that Kindle smears over everything.  And the peculiar lack of commitment it seems to foster.  With Kindle, you're not holding a book, you're holding a whole library of books.  And you're not enclosed by the covers of the text you're reading.  As with the Wikipedia entry, you're free to leap from one text and one link to another as if you're chasing a fox, jumping fences and getting distracted by other foxes, other fields, until you don't know where you really are.  I'm happy enough for Kindle and electronic texts to be part of my world.  But I do wish they wouldn't come into it with such aggressive self assertion.  Electronic books seem to be terribly certain about the inevitability of their dominance.  And I've even encountered some librarians who seem almost giddy about the post print era that seems to be of warning.  When I was with, as Michael mentioned, the National Endowment for the Humanities for a while several years ago, I attended a meeting of the Association of Research Libraries, the ARL, in Philadelphia.  And I was astonished by how some of the other speakers at the gathering, librarians, talked with glee about the number of duplicate copies of printed books that they've been able to consign to some offsite limbo or even complete oblivion.  Now, I know they're under pressure to free up space in their libraries in order to accommodate all sorts of new electronic equipment and activity.  But when they talked about those duplicate print copies, you would have thought they were engaged in asbestos removal.  [laughter]  I turned 61 last month and I have a lot of writer friends just about my age.  And when I talk about all these things with them, I find a kind of consensus.  We don't much mind being in our 60s.  We've enjoyed our careers and feel that enough of the old publishing model we grew up with will survive for us to tattle on a little longer.  And we probably wouldn't mind being in our 20s or wouldn't starting over because that generation of writers, those students of mine, will be in on the ground floor of whatever new model is being built now.  It will quickly enough feel natural to them.  What we wouldn't so much want to be is in our 40s and having fully to adapt to a system we never anticipated when starting out.  Tumultuous as the changes of the last 15 years have been, I do have the sense that we're just at the beginning of them, and not all of the signs seem friendly to me.  Simon & Schuster which not long ago was getting into Vooks, does anybody else know this term, V-O-O-K-S?  Video-book combinations.  I think this is a precursor of what Nan was talking about which sounds like a much more developed version of it.  Well, along with that, Simon & Schuster just the other day announced that it was allying itself with a self-publishing venture.  I would suggest that no publishing house, no matter how dire the times and no matter how much Amazon would like to see all editors and all agents go away, should be party to this, because it brings us one step closer to a world without editors, which will be a world with many, many more electronic books in it but very, very few of them that are worth reading.  One can argue that there is nothing inherent in electronic publication that discourages editing and I would agree with that.  But I do believe we have the last 15 years of history to demonstrate that it does.  The internet may already have proved itself a powerful tool against political tyranny.  But the quality of writing and the quality of thought have not been improved by, in effect, giving everyone his own printing press.  We shouldn't overestimate what electronics and the web have brought us, and they brought plenty to me as everyone else.  But even so, I don't think we should ignore what they've taken away.  Nothing I think has suffered more in the past 15 years than reviewing and criticism.  Mostly from the notion that everybody can be a critic now and that customer comments, "I love this book Cindy" can somehow take the place of those regular, deliberate critical voices that one used to find in those now vanishing newspapers.  We now judge things by how many likes and stars and hits they get, and we let all these keystroke grunts turn literally life into a kind of pinball game.  I'm for a republic of letters, not a democracy.  And that means finally [applause] that I'm in favor of the survival of editors, as well the survival of the printed book.
^M02:20:04
And not just as some objet d'art or delicacy consumed by the carriage trade, but as the primary conveyance for literature, which to me has always been more or less indistinguishable from life.  I'll close with one last story from the past.  The very first book I wrote.  An academic monograph that grew out of my doctoral dissertation had for its subject, Edmund Blunden, an English poet of the First World War.  There's an enormous array of Blunden materials now up online, and had this electronic resource existed 35 years ago, I would've had a much easier time of it.  As it was, I had to spend the steamy summer of 1977 in Austin, Texas, going through Blunden's voluminous papers at the Humanities Research Center.  A bookish country boy, Blunden had in his memoirs described himself as "a harmless shepherd in a soldier's coat."  I thought I knew what he meant by that.  But I don't think I really did until one morning in Austin, half a century after his soldiering, I opened the diary he had kept while fighting in the Battle of the Somme.  And out of it, on to the table, fell a dried wildflower that he picked up from the battlefield.  It was at that moment, from out of that very real, one of a kind book, that he became real to me.  Thank you very much.
^M02:21:34
[ Applause ]
^M02:21:50
>> Aren't you so pleased that you stayed?
>> Yes.
>> Good.
^M02:21:55
[ Applause ]
^M02:21:59
We have some time for a few questions, and I'd like to begin by speaking to Karen a little bit.  You talked about holding this 500-year-old book in your hands, and cognitive scientist more and more are talking now about the importance of haptic knowledge, from the Greek word to grasp or to hold.  And this powerful experience of holding something in your hands and taking in the book with all your senses is extremely important.  And I think that more and more we heard today about the one to six category of children and how important it is for them to hold the physical book and to see the pictures and to have that integrated experience between word and image.  But it's also the case that that's, in some environments, being lost.  I wonder if in a disabled community, which are such an important steward, are there attempts to find ways to create--to use technology to create multi-sensory experiences for readers as they consume cultural artifacts?
>> Certainly, the Braille book is a multi-sensory experience in itself.  And that's an old technology comparable to the print book.  Beyond that, I believe that there's not very much work being done in that.  I am very anxious that we should be able to provide refreshable Braille to people in the disabled community who can use it.  And the reason for that goes back, I think, to that haptic sense.  Obviously, Braille is a tactile experience and it is.  But it's also a reading experience.  It's very different from an audio reading experience.  I was trying to describe this to someone.  And a lot of people have come to the conclusion that it's just as good for a blind person to listen to a book as it is for them to read it in Braille.  And I totally disagree with that because listening to a book can be a very satisfying experience if it's the right sort of book, but it's a very difficult way of learning.  And I don't think that it gives--we've raised a generation of functionally illiterate blind kids by telling them just listen to what you heard that synthetic speech, that would be the medium that they would've been urged to use.  And so, I'm not sure I'm answering your question, but I believe that literacy requires reading, and whether that's reading tactilely, haptic experience that I have by haptic, obviously, being a touching thing, or visually seeing and holding your book or your Kindle.  I suppose you could get as fond of your Kindle as you are with your books as some people are.  My daughter puts her Kindle in a baggy and goes in the bathtub with it.  [laughter]  But other--to answer your question, I don't think specifically the way your envisioning it, that there is anything.
>> Right.  But what you say is a classic example of what bibliographers and book historians take as axiomatic that forms affect meanings and forms effect meanings.  And that consuming a book orally is very different than reading it yourself through the instrumentality of Braille.  And that makes perfect sense to me because there are different forms cognition and different learning styles at work.  Book historians and bibliographies--bibliographers talk about this all the time, how forms affect and effect meanings.  And so, to understand the historical object in its surplus of meaning, in its plentitude of meaning, one must always understand that meanings are materially made.  No materiality, no meaning.  And so, learning how to read the material text in history and as part of history is the serious business of bibliographical literacy, which is part of the serious business there, I'd say, of this conference.  So that maybe takes us to Mr. Thomas Turns Elliot who asked the question way back in 1930, where is the knowledge that we have lost in information?  And you adverted a number of times to this whole question of converting information into knowledge.  One might say that the duty of a great cultural institution, such as the Library of Congress, such as many of the institutions that others here represent, is to take data and to turn it into information, to take information and to turn it into knowledge, and ultimately, to take knowledge and to try to help it coalesce into wisdom.  So, since you adverted to this important aspect of your work of turning information into knowledge, I wonder if you could just talk about that, and maybe to ask you, do you feel that as a scientist we're deluged with information and that the business of converting information into knowledge is a complex and difficult task?
>> I think we'll all agree that one of the challenges we have every part of our lives is the volume of information that comes in and how you filter that out and makes the meaning out of it.  I want to go back to the mission of our directorate, which is to make the entire collection of the library in its original reformatted major form available.  And because of that, because as things deteriorate over time, information that's contained within those sometimes becomes lost.  And if we can actually hold that out in ways that make it more accessible, and as you heard, I'm very passionate about the physical book itself because without that, we can't apply any of these technologies.  But we can use technologies to make it more available to people.  The other thing that's a critical component in that transfer is the collaboration with other colleagues, and I referred to this earlier.  I can't be a subject matter expert in maps and rare books and all these different divisions.  So I have to work closely with these incredible people to actually have them inform me what I, as a scientist, might think is interesting, whether it is or not.  So sometimes, I'll process something and I think it looks great.  And they're like, yeah, no, no, not like that.  And if something else is sort of dismissing, they certainly but hey, I like that.  And so, that's why that dialogue is a critical part of them to get engaged with the whole community.  And I think going back to what Karen was saying about someone having a dialogue or what part of the conversation can each person contribute to the world, that that's the way we change the information to knowledge and manage it in some ways.  We've got a lot of technologies now that allow us to filter things out.  The problem is you need to know what you're filtering because if you filter the wrong way, you lose, sometimes, the very useful parts of information.  It's something we still challenge with a lot in terms of how do we filter effectively without losing something that could be a critical component.  But again, I go back to just over the last two days with all the knowledge and the skills and expertise we've heard shared, that that's how we move forward collaborating as a group.  There's so much knowledge here.  We can't do it alone, but together, we can make this transfer change.
^M02:30:03
>> The importance of collaborative communities clearly stood before.  In Tom's story about with the brilliant punch line, we wrestle them to the mat, congratulations, I've got brilliant news, they're going to print the book.  [laughter]  You know, that raises--that raises some troubling questions and some difficult observations.  Remember, the Roman poet so powerfully said, I will make you a monument more lasting than bronze, right?  But Jerome, again, in an article on sustainability, said that if someone could digitally publish her first book with a huge subsidy to put all sorts of bells and whistles in it, and could put it out on the web, or that person could publish 300 copies from a small academic press, and she came to him and said, well, what should I do?  His operative question to make the determination would be, do you want people to read your work 50 or 70 years from now?  Because, if you do, there's no way that you should go for the digital publication, because we don't know that the digital domain is sustainable in its current iterations.  That's--that's not me, that's experts in the field who are wrestling cellulously with problem of digital curation, one of the pressing problems of our time, and something at which this institution is at the forefront of.  So it seems to me that your story and the whole ethos of what you were saying, Tom, makes me wonder, are you, as an author, as a teacher of creative writing, as someone who's helped many others in the world of publication, are you worried that literary history will be foreshortened by the fact that digital publications seem to have a disposability?  Many of the websites that were published in the 1990s no longer exist.  Many of the first ebooks are completely lost to us.  There are no machines that can read them.  Are you worried about the lingerie of literary history and what the digital might do to that?
>> I think, yeah, it's a--
>> Or not.
>> It's kind of a doomsday, no, it's kind of a doomsday scenario, anyway because--you just  [chuckles]  you know, what happens when the electricity goes out?  Even before the formats disappear, you know, what do we do with all of these?  And I--I do think long range, the parishability of these things, you know, and I--like everybody else, I read articles about cyber attacks, and so forth, you know, in the newspapers, and who knows what ways can be used to disable, you know, delivery systems.  I mean, I think, for all of the reservations I'd express of that technology, my instinct tells me that the digitalization of things is more likely to ensure their long, long, long term survival.  And that technology, being what it is, these things will become endlessly more adaptable, and the word is escaping me--migrate--migratable, that's not surely another words or it shouldn't be.  But that can be--they can migrate from one format to the other.  So I think that that's a real, basically, I think a boon to both things, to the distribution of things in the present moment, and probably, to their survival at long range, but it doesn't hurt to have that original copy, that paper copy.  So, you know, so I demonstrated like that.  I think it's more about the reading experience, the immediate reading experience that I was focused on that leaves me a little hesitant about some of the electronic media.  Needless to say, I'm very sympathetic publishers who are up against it and have to do what they got to do.  And I didn't, for a second, think, you know, oh my God, those rapacious barrens at Random House, you know, thinking of not renting a book, I just thought, well, you know, I guess it sort of come to that.  But I hope it doesn't actually come to that.
>> Clearly, the digital domain is here to stay, and it's not the enemy.  Clearly, we live in a both end universe.  The question is always going to be, at least, in my mind, when is the digital both necessary and wholly sufficient as a delivery system?  And when is the digital great for access, but prompting the question, access to what?  In terms of information science and electronics, we might say that the digital is a lossy format because information is lost in the transmediation or remediation from print to digital.  So much is gained, but it's always an environment of loss and gain.  And I think, perhaps, maybe teaching our students and our publics how to be more self-aware about the digital environment as an environment of concomitant loss and gain would make them more knowing readers.  You know, it's an axiom of scholarly research that you must always calibrate the tools that you use for your scholarly interrogations.  You must always be asking in oneself questions about reliability.  And I think that we need to be asking those questions in the publishing world too about, well, what is lost and what is gained?  And how do we countenance them both when we're in conversation with publishers and artists about the digital remediation of our works?  I have been given the difficult task of trying to summarize the conference.  [laughter]  And I've been foolish enough to say yes.  It is true that I was promised a large bottle of Mechalon if I could do it.  [laughter]  So I will get this sign, the culture of the book.  And I think about, perhaps, maybe, more appropriately, the cultures of the book from all the wonderful things we've heard here today, but when I think about the word culture, I can't help but remember that etymologically, the word culture comes from the Latin, colere, which means to till or tend the garden, to cultivate the soil that it might bring forth something nourishing and beautiful.  And I see that we've been at a summit, the heights, the important people, the height of discourse.  But that makes me think also of the Summum Bonum.  And if we put these two together, we ask ourselves, perhaps, at the end of this conference, how can we cultivate the greatest good for the perdurance of the book in the years ahead?  And I come away from the remarks of the last two days, impressive as they have been, with three basic questions that I would like to leave you with.  I'm sure there are many others, and I'm sure you've come a way with a variety of your own.  But these are three that I think seem to summarize the pith, the few and sinew of what we've been about these last couple of days.  The first one is this, how can we best cultivate literacies?  Basic reading, visual literacy, digital literacy of teaching our students how to discriminate between and among websites for their content.  How can we inculcate in humanistic scholars, authentic bibliographical literacy, that understanding of how forms affect and effect meanings, that ability to recognize the human presences in every recorded text.  I must put that in because I am a director of rare books school at the University of Virginia, and this is the business of what the school is about.  But how do we cultivate literacies among a diversity of publics?  And how do we understand that all of those literacies are important to cultivate and to nurture for the multiple futures and multiple cultures of the book as it goes on?  The second question is how can we best tend to our libraries?  How can we make them centers for the creation and the coalescence of communities?
^M02:40:02 And I think that that question about the library as a center of community where people come together around the activity of books and reading and narrativity and story-telling and being together around the consumption of culture, that goes all the way back to the formation of the European universities.  That goes more recently to the noble history in the 20th century of American and Canadian libraries being centers for the service of immigrant populations.  And thirdly, how might we most usefully enlarge upon the notion of curation, a word that of course means to care for.  How can we curate the book?  How can we nurture the culture of the book?  And how can we understand the activities of preservation, of mediation, of intellectual property regimes, of access and of course again, of literacy as a kind of curation?  All of these questions come together for me at least to say how do we create the conditions of possibility to further the culture of the book?  How do we create the conditions of possibility in order to make sure that the values enshrined in the book perdure well into the 21st century?  Perhaps the overweening question that this discussion has inculcated in me is how do we most usefully dedicate our energies and our intelligences to sustaining and nurturing the ever evolving cultures of the book?  Thank you.
^M02:42:10
[ Applause ]
^M02:42:25
>> Before we run out the door to consume adult beverage and to continue the conversation, I have the privilege of offering a few brief thank yous.  And I'd like to begin by asking everybody to thank the members of this panel once again.
^M02:42:43
[ Applause ]
^M02:42:49
Quite a while ago, I was on the initial committee that began recent discussions about having this summit.  And so I'm very pleased to kind of wrap it up a little bit before Dr. Billington by tendering some thanks.  Everyone who is involved in this summit deserves thanks but here a few key people for whom I'm sure we're all grateful.  Representative John Larson of Connecticut for the suggestion to hold the summit in the first place, it was very much his idea.  And for his persistence in pursuing it, doggedly I might add.  To Senator Jack Reed for being John Larson's co-sponsor or as some might say partner in crime.  To the Library of Congress for its persistence and flexibility in responding to Representative Larson led by Librarian of Congress, Jim Billington.  For the sure and steady guidance of Deanna Marcum [phonetic] and especially the recent hard work by the amazing Roberta Shaffer and her team in planning the presentations, the wonderful exhibition and all the special events.
^M02:44:08
[ Applause ]
^M02:44:17
Anybody who's been involved in this knows that John Cole has been a remarkable and tireless worker behind the scenes and we should certainly acknowledge his contribution.
^M02:44:30
[ Applause ]
^M02:44:34
I'm sure we're all grateful to the moderators and the speakers but perhaps most especially to David Rubenstein whose announcement of the creation of the new Library of Congress Literacy Awards Program gives the summit a special edge and significance.
^M02:44:52
[ Applause ]
^M02:44:57
This summit will soon be on the road to Singapore.  Summit organizers have everyone's e-mail and will encourage a continuing dialogue and maybe even a blogger too.  Moreover, the entire two-day conference will be accessible on the Library's website before too long.  And also, the sessions are being filmed by C-Span--thank you, C-Span and will also soon be available.
^M02:45:26
[ Applause ]
^M02:45:29
And last but by no means least, final thanks in some thing of a prolepses to the National Library Board Singapore and to Tommy Koh, Ambassador-At-Large of the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the closing reception and especially for the promise of a continuing worldwide future for this International Summit of the Book.  Thank you.
^M02:46:00
[ Applause ]
^M02:46:10
[ Pause ]
^M02:46:20
>> Well, I think we've had a beautiful summary.  I would just represent maybe at the conclusion two thoughts.  One, this conference has been held following a conference of our international partners in the world digital library and it raises the important and interesting question of which has continuously recurred.  By the way, among the many things we want to thank you, the chairman and this particularly wonderful panel but all of the panels.  Again, I think it's a lifetime of going to a lot of conferences that's been extraordinarily substantive and the same time, punctuated with good humor and civility of a kind that can make the whole thing riveting as well as substantive.  But the two thoughts are one, the presence of this extraordinary revolution in human way knowledge and creativity are both generated and communicated and become important to a civilization.  It's worth mentioning it because we at the Library of Congress, we've got more than 20 million primary doctrines, not so much books but one of a kind things that other people have never had access to before online for educational purposes.  It's important to remember or to think a little bit, we began with Dr. Serageldin's extraordinary figure for the Ancient Alexandria reborn and beautifully represented.  He was talking about words and the importance of words but semiologist call it secondary modeling systems.  Now, the word is not direct visual impressions but turning things into words, communicating them, writing them down and so forth.  Now, you have a dangerous situation where if you look at the rising generation now, people are talking on chat rooms before they've read anything.  If you haven't heard how language is used and how they are wonderfully expensed in absorptive English language in particular is used, you decline into the kind of vocabulary of shorten attention spans, short in texting.  Things generated in terms of human communication which are not informed by language which suddenly destroy the basic human of--unit of human and sequential thought that makes book length discourse and its values so unique in human history so formative of modern intelligence and with the use of knowledge for human purposes.  You really have a terrific problem because the--one of the things that I've noticed and tried to put attention to the times that I'm--is the evaporation of the sentence, the basic punitive human thought and communication which didn't really exist before the first Malayan BC.  Its exact origins in the Eastern Mediterranean are still being argued about.  But until you have a sense and if you are going to lose it in the flood of emotion and you know how people feel in some big sense, but you are using the passes in the human brain for serious thought, you literally don't know what you're talking about in a chat room.
^M02:50:08 You're communicating some feelings, something that's sincere but there is no accumulative power and human knowledge and communication without the basic structures of language.  And the beauty of words in that in turn reminds you of the two ways in which human knowledge and communication affects human life and human history.  One is influence.  I mean you influence people but influence is an external thing.  It's like footprints in the sand.  When the tide changes, it receives those footprints tend to be gone or at least very severely diminished.  The other way you educate and inform people in sorts of creativity, innovation is what I recall affect.  You affect people.  When you affect people, when you influence people, you are imposing something on them from the outside.  And our system was constructed so that people with very different opinions could nevertheless communicate in this biologic way of which our kind in the system and to much extent the human future depends.  But affect means it's a form of communication.  It gets inside people.  It doesn't have dramatic, necessary results immediately but it changes you because it affects you from within and that's why we have fiction.  That's why we have the imaginative uses of literature and that's something that, I don't know, the longer one exist in centers of power, the more you realize that the great changes in human history that are basically generated by what has affected people within.  And as you get from the humanistic heir of each of mankind for the many authors and from the richness of literature that's available to us but we aren't going to be able to read.  We are going to have memory, we will have imagination, and we're difficult to have reason unless both sides of the brain are engaged in the generation of knowledge, creativity and the recording of it.  I think the last thing I would say is that technology has its dangers, it has and it always has.  It opt security beyond the--you're playing with blue chips rather than white chips if that's a--these are metaphor, I don't know if it is.  But you're not going to get innovations that we need, you're not going to get the changes we need.  I don't think unless we are able to have a discourse that is not confined to mathematical, economic consideration which dominate our public discussion even though the problems we face not here unfortunately 'cause there's been a humanistic impulse.  And you're not going to have it just by the nomination of legal decisions and so forth, the importance they are and giving the rules of the game and structure of that human society and hope for the future.  But technology can have wonderful effects in helping us enrich it and I just want to pay attention to say what a humbling experience it is to be entrusted with the administration of people like Karen and Fenella.  Karen has beautifully articulated the way in which over the years our technology has been enabling a whole new category of readers and the 23 million or so items that are not part of the library that it distributes to those blind and physically handicapped.  I know I have a maternal grandmother whose life was electronically extended in her late blind years by being able to listen to those books so it really is--it comes back to the particular things people do.  The last thing I just mentioned is that I said--began by saying we're only world civilization with entire institutions were created in the age of prayer.  Well one thing, we have the capacity now with new technology that you may already have heard of that is to recover the lost oral, entirely oral tradition of the Native Americans who were here before most of us ever came.  In this endless stream of immigration and enrichment that has made America the creative and in many ways just creatively disturbing but always hopeful place that I think we are all lucky, most of us here to be part of [inaudible].  That machine is something which if we have thousands of wax [phonetic] soldiers at the library began recording in 1890 of the elders of the tribe.  And when I was speaking to the Great Lakes Library Association early in my tenure, I used the term that librarians were gatekeepers to knowledge.  But an old Indian chief came up to me who was in fact the librarian.  He said, "Well," he said, "Long before you, all you settlers came moving in and with all your books and all your problems, we have libraries and it was in the memory and the imagination of the elder of the tribe.  But we didn't call him the gatekeeper, we called him the dream keeper."  So of course Australian aboriginal art are the most marvelous forms of abstract lore that existed long before modern abstract art.  They believe that that kind of real art, that kind of creativity is only possible in what they call the dream time and do it out of chronological time.  You get to that world of peace sort that silence and slow time in the midst of all our noisy, hurry up civilization.  If we lose to that or if we lose something that George Kelly [phonetic] once explained to me is that, you know, are we producing a new generation that will never know what it means to have yourself alone reading a good book on a rainy day?  So I think we're all dedicated to that.  We're enormously grateful of the wonderful people who helped make this so important and particularly John and his colleagues, the congress, to make it possible for us to continue this enterprise.  Because I think we all are in some ways and not just the Library of Congress where--and so far as we're doing what Karen is saying is distributing, making it more possible through whatever means are available.  The keepers of the American dream, I think the librarians really are that.  We're talking about them increasing these knowledge navigators who can get through all this material and steal people's standard of quality or standard of aspiration at the heart of it.  And the essential part of the American dream is that if more people can have more access to more knowledge and human creativity, then whatever the problems of today and whatever the worries about the technological things that are more than we know that we have to play with.  Whatever the problems of today, tomorrow can still be with a little hard work, a little vision, better than yesterday.  Thank you all for making this last two days so wonderful.
^M02:58:03
[ Applause ]
^M02:58:11
>> I said in the--our opening remarks the profound respect that the nation and congress as an institution has for Jim Billington.  You see that without a note and his eloquence, what a national treasure that we have not only in the service of a man for 25 years here but all the dedicated individuals at the Library of Congress.  Truly, a fortress of knowledge, a knowledge that as you pointed out through Jim Billington you see transformed into wisdom.  As members of congress and I want to thank Jack Reed and David Dreier and Rob Aderholt who couldn't be here but also a whole institution that does appreciate though it doesn't always seem readily apparent.  What we have here but having something like the Library of Congress here allows us to do something else quite remarkable and extraordinary.  Far too modest, Jim talks about the conference that was convened previously where the whole effort to digitize and preserve has been ongoing.
^M03:00:10 And in fact, he was the inspiration for this and in fact, Dr. Serageldin was, initially, the concept was to have this in Alexandria, one of the great wonders of the world.  So instead, we had it in the ninth wonder of the world, the Library of Congress.  But the fact is was well-summed up that this is going to more on to Singapore not just in terms of physically moving there but also moving on in terms of the ideas that have resonated here.  I couldn't be more appreciative and let me tell you, I know it was probably a persistent pain in the neck with respect to this but this professional staff led by Dr. Billington.  The way that you are able to bring things together seamlessly in a very rich area of discussion but do it flawlessly in a way that you make every citizen of this country proud, in a way that I hope engages all citizens throughout the world and what is our great hope.  The dialectic, the Jim Billington has made much of his life above.  Thank you so much for the attendance, the--all the good words that were exchanged, this has been simply extraordinary and outstanding.  And now, as was pointed out, Roberta, we're going to go upstairs to room 119 where libation will be had.  I don't know if we have a full bottle of Macallan but we'll try to do our very best.  Thank you so much for your attendance here.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.  Visit us at loc.gov.