The Malaysian Insider :: Books
The Malaysian Insider :: Books |
| Latvians pass books along human chain to kick off culture capital year Posted: 19 Jan 2014 01:55 AM PST Some 14,000 people, including children and the elderly, stood in temperatures of minus 12 degrees C yesterday to pass some 2,000 books hand to hand to a new library designed by Latvian-born US architect Gunnar Birkerts. The remainder of the library's more than 4 million books and printed items will be moved by motorised transport. The concrete building, clad with glass panels and stainless-steel plates and resembling a mountain with a crown atop, sits on a bank of the Daugava River near the capital's Old Town and has been dubbed the Castle of Light. Formerly a medieval outpost of the Hanseatic League of trading nations, Riga's art nouveau buildings have earned its historical centre a place on the Unesco list of world heritage sites. As Europe's rotating culture capital this year in conjunction with Umea in northern Sweden, Riga will host more than 200 concerts, exhibitions, festivals, conferences and performances. The number of tourists to the city is expected to rise by 25% from 2013 to 2.1 million people, mayor Nils Usakovs said. The arts programme was kicked off with the Latvian National Opera's production of Richard Wagner's early opera "Rienzi" on Friday. Wagner once lived in Riga, to escape his creditors back in Germany, and it is where he started working on "Rienzi". In July, a series of concerts, "Born in Riga", will bring together world-renowned Latvian performers, including violinist Gidon Kremer and opera singers Maija Kovalevska, Inese Galante and Aleksandrs Antonenko. The same month the "world choir games" will bring together around 20,000 singers from 70 countries in Latvia, which is famous for its choral-singing tradition. Contemporary art works of Latvian-born American artist Vija Celmina will be on display from April to June. The Baltic state suffered the worst economic downturn in the European Union in 2009, but after several years of austerity has become one of the fastest growing economies in the bloc. The country of 2 million adopted the euro on January 1. Initiated in 1985, the European Capital of Cultures programme is intended to highlight the richness and diversity of culture in Europe, according to the EU's website. – Reuters, January 19, 2014. |
| Literature goes online for free in Norway Posted: 18 Jan 2014 07:40 PM PST At a time when the publishing world is torn over its relationship to the Internet – which has massively expanded access to books but also threatens royalty revenues – the National Library of Norway is digitising tens of thousands of titles, from masterworks by Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun to the first detective novels by Nordic noir king Jo Nesboe. The copyright-protected books are available free online – with the consent of the copyright holders – at the website bokhylla.no ("bookshelf" in Norwegian). The site currently features 135,000 works and will eventually reach 250,000, including Norwegian translations of foreign books. National Library head Vigdis Moe Skarstein said the project is the first of its kind to offer free online access to books still under copyright, which in Norway expires 70 years after the author's death. "Many national libraries digitise their collections for conservation reasons or even to grant access to them, but those are (older) books that are already in the public domain," she said. "We thought that, since we had to digitise all our collection in order to preserve it for the next 1,000 years, it was also important to broaden access to it as much as possible." The National Library has signed an agreement with Kopinor, an umbrella group representing major authors and publishers through 22 member organisations. For every digitised page that goes online, the library pays a predetermined sum to Kopinor, which will be responsible for distributing the royalties among its members under a system that is still being worked out. The per-page amount decreases gradually as the collection expands – from 0.36 kroner (RM0.19) last year to 0.33 (RM0.17) kroner next year. "A bestseller is treated on an equal footing with a regional almanac from the 1930s," said Yngve Slettholm, head of Kopinor. A second life Some measures have been implemented to protect the authors: "Bokhylla" does not feature works published after 2000, access is limited to Internet users in Norway and foreign researchers, and the books cannot be downloaded. An author or publishing house that objects can also request the removal of a book, but relatively few have done so. Only 3,500 books have been removed from the list, and most of them are not bestselling novels, but rather school and children's books – two very profitable genres for publishers. Among all the works eligible to appear on "Bokhylla" by household names Stephen King, Ken Follett, John Steinbeck, Jo Nesboe and Kari Fossum, only a few are missing. So far, sales do not appear to have been affected by the project. Instead, "Bokhylla" often gives a second life to works that are still under copyright but sold out at bookshops, said National Library head Moe Skarstein. "Books are increasingly becoming perishable goods," she said. "When the novelty effect fades out, they sink into oblivion." 85% of all books available on the site have been accessed by users at some point, proving that digitising does not only benefit major works. While many countries' attempts at digital libraries have gotten stuck in complex copyright discussions, Norway has been successful partly due to the limited number of stakeholders – the library and Kopinor – and the near-universal coverage of their agreement, which even includes authors who are not Kopinor members. "In other countries, you need an agreement among all the copyright holders," said Slettholm, the head of Kopinor. "But it's hard to find all of them: old authors that nobody knows, publishing houses that closed in the 1960s, every illustrator, every photographer." "Instead of spending our money on trying to find the copyright holders, we prefer to give it to them," Moe Skarstein said. - AFP, January 19, 2014. |
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