One of the questions that seems to pop up a lot when people talk about blogs is WHY bloggers blog. I know why I blog. Mostly. And I’ve talked about that before.

What I’m more interested is why YOU read blogs. I don’t consider myself an authority on anything. I might be able to scrape together an argument that I’m knowledgeable in my little field of libraries and teen lit, but I’m not any better than countless others. I’m just enthusiastic, or crazy enough to have one day decided to share my thoughts in a public way. So I’m not quite sure why you read me – or the others like me.

Why do you follow the blogs that you follow? What makes each one stand out to you? What makes some blogs stand out from others that have the same general subject matter? How is it that we begin to feel a connection with a person we’ve never seen, let alone met? Yes, if you frequent a blog, you probably share some interests with the blogger, like Leila’s Dr. Who and cheesy horror movies or Sarah Miller’s headcheese. But SOMETHING makes you return again and again.

I realize that I’m asking questions that might not always have clear or easily definable answers.* Perhaps it’s guerilla journalism for the arts & culture section starved - editorialized. Maybe we are just, at least with books, covering things that don’t get the attention they deserve in the mainstream. Perchance it is the decline of society’s need for authoritative sources (you must allow me that - I am a librarian after all)?

Is it our enthusiasm? Our earnestness? That we’re talking about books and issues we care about, and that excitement shines through? Is it that we seem like normal people who aren’t pretending to be anything other than what we are? Because we aren’t claiming to have the answers or the final word? It is the voyeurs that I’m especially interested in, those who read, but never comment. You know who you are. Now’s your chance. Talk to me. Add to a dialog. Tell me why you give us your time. How have we earned your attention?

I don’t know.

Anyone?

*(Ok. Sidebar on the conversation for a second. I’m writing this in a café and there’s a guy behind me who keeps sucking in his snot in snorts so loud I can hear him over my headphones. I really want to turn around and tell him, “Grown-ups use Kleenex.” But I just can’t. My mom wouldn’t approve. Back to the… um, whatever it is I’m writing.)

Posted by: Jackie Parker

Library patrons are a very diverse bunch. Stand any two next to each other, and nine times out of ten the only thing they will have in common is that they both patronize the library. The characteristic that varies the most is age—most libraries profess to serve infants, senior citizens, and every age group in between. In my time as a librarian, however, I have noticed that “Generation Y”, or people between the ages of 18 and 30, make up a very small amount of the people I serve every day.

It’s not that twenty-somethings aren’t using the library. In fact, some research suggests that they are more likely than the older generations to use library services to find solutions for problems they encounter in life. What concerns me is that, while they may drop by for help finding a job or to pick up tax forms, they aren’t using the library for its most basic service: access to free books.

As an eighties-baby myself, I see this in my personal life as well as my professional life. None of my friends get their reading material from the library. My own sisters, avid readers all, buy their books at chain stores and politely refuse when I offer to teach them to use Inter Library Loan! Not only that, but I am convinced that twenty-somethings who read for recreation are in the minority. This is probably because those who are in college view reading as a chore (I know I did), and those who are just entering the work force are too busy submitting resumes and worrying about paying off student loans to spend time on any luxuries, least of all cozying up with the latest NY Times Bestseller.

I like to argue that checking out books from the library not only saves the environment, but it also saves the library user a good chunk of change. I try to keep track of how much I read with GoodReads.com, and recently I thought it would be a fun experiment to add up all the books I had read in the last year and calculate the amount of many it would have cost me if I had bought them at Barnes & Noble instead of checking them out from the library. I would have spent about $1,300 on my reading habit last year alone. Yikes.

My husband thinks this a terrible argument; because as a librarian, I a) am required to read more than the average person, and b) as I work in a library, I have easy access to library services like interlibrary loan and am free of hassles like late fines. I simply have easier access and more incentive to read for fun than the average person my age. While I’ll admit he is right on that point, I won’t back down from my stance that my peers are simply not reading for fun, and when they do they are purchasing books with money that could be better spent elsewhere (i.e. those pesky student loans).

I think it is important for libraries to market more to the twenty-something crowd. Libraries tend to pay a lot of attention to the extremes—early literacy and services to senior citizens. All age groups both need and deserve a daily dose of free reading, and we need to find ways to convince Generation Y to take advantage of what their public library offers!  

Posted by: Eva Mays

In my last entry I addressed the rise of internet bookselling and its effect on brick and mortar used bookstores. This week I would like to look at the nature of the growing online used book marketplace.

What books are selling there? Certainly the same titles that are selling everywhere else. The paperbacks that were piled up at Cosco last month flood the internet today. These books will sell quickly and profitably online for a brief period, then their prices will rapidly drop to pennies a piece as the public finishes them, discards them, and moves on to the next new thing. Over 1,000 copies of "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" are now available on Amazon.com, most at a price of under one dollar. Yet why would anyone want to pay even that when a call to one's aunt or a tour around the block is likely to yield a copy for free?  
      
The intelligent used bookseller soon learns to avoid yesterday's fads and focus instead on obscure and overlooked titles of the past. The surest sellers are books that never appealed to the masses, but remain persistently interesting to a few. Those few have often been searching and will happily purchase when they find.

I can look through my records and find a week last year when the following titles sold:

Alaska's Mushrooms
Forensic Entomology
Sex Toy Tricks
Weaving Contemporary Rag Rugs
Radical Street Performance
Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology
Stick Fighting: Techniques of Self-Defense
The Healthy Bird Cookbook

Some are out-of-print, some are otherwise difficult to acquire. (One, at least, might cause embarrassment at the register.) All are not what one would expect to find at the local Borders, and many were shipped to places where there is no local Borders. I often ship books to soldiers and prisoners, to rural areas and developing nations. These people and places make up a part of the growing market in used books--a market that previously had limited access to any extensive and affordable selection.

Interesting connections can now be made between books and readers that could rarely have happened before.  I recently sold a book on the history of Kentucky place names, acquired in Chicago, to a woman in northern California, and also a book on Chinese cinema, published in France, to a professor in Brazil. I believe that I have sold obscure biographies to the children of their subjects (although I didn't ask), and I know that I have sold signed copies of books to their authors, many years after the fact. Last week I found an interesting book in a basement: a hefty commemoration of the destruction of the Jewish population of the Polish town of Ostrowiec during WWII, that was written by the survivors and their descendants in the 1960s. I look forward to seeing where it will go. Most likely it will cross an ocean.

We cannot see these new connections being made, they are not framed by quaint bookshops, but they represent a change in access to material that affects many lives. Fifteen years ago, the transactions that I have described above would have been lengthy and costly for the customer, in many cases prohibitively so, and perhaps impossible. The customer may not have even known that the titles existed, but can now become aware of them through the many excellent online book databases with subject descriptions and reader reviews.

The future of this industry can, I think, only become more interesting. New online used-book marketplaces continue to develop in all parts of the world and are becoming increasingly interconnected. Every year more books surface on the internet as booksellers continue to list their inventories and as basements and closets are dredged by book scouts around the world. This brings the prices of books down (causing us dealers to grumble), but it also brings in new customers and new readers. It is difficult to predict what long term effects these changes will have on readership, as the advent of e-books and other digital information sources will likely overshadow most developments in used bookselling, but a globally accessible book marketplace is something the world has not yet seen, and is nothing to get depressed about.

Posted by: Adrienne Eaton

I’ve been privileged to visit ForeWord as a guest blogger this month. I’ve written two posts as a reviewer. I’ve written two posts as a librarian. But I haven’t addressed the roles that are nearest and dearest to my heart, the duo of roles that inspires my blog title. I am a Mother and I am a Reader.

Here’s one of my favorite MotherReader stories. When my oldest daughter was five, she asked me to play house. “I’ll be the mommy and you’ll be the little girl,” she said. I agreed and prepared myself for my role. Meanwhile, she sat down on the couch, opened a book to read, and looking over the top said, “Go play with your sister.”

Never have I felt so much angst and pride at the same time. Of course, my mother guilt kicked in. Did she think that all I did was read? Did she feel so neglected? What kind of mom was I? But at the same time, I felt proud of the lesson she had picked up from me, namely that Moms read and reading’s important.

As a mother of two (now) school-aged girls, I get asked occasionally how I find time to read. I can only pat the questioner on the head with an air of pity (well, mentally), and answer that one doesn’t find time to read, one makes time to read. Looking at reading as something that that’s done when everything else is finished, means that you’ll never even crack open a People magazine. (Not that I read this particular journal, understand.) And this goes double, maybe triple for mothers. Every minute I read, I’ve carved that time away from something else. Sometimes I don’t put the laundry away. Sometimes I don’t shower, but I make the time to read.

While I’m taking time for myself in a self-care, Oprah kind of way, I’m also conveying an important message to my kids. Moms read books for fun. I couldn’t talk to them about reading being important and then never open a book myself.  My actions speak louder than my words ever could, and believe me, I can make my words LOUD.

I’ve also been asked by parents that with today’s busy lifestyle, how I find time for my kids to read. For this question, I allow a quick wide-eyed expression of shock so the questioner realizes the very seriousness of the inquiry. For me, it’s as if they’ve asked how I find time for my children to eat dinner. In my family, reading is a necessary and vital part of our day. We formed the habit early, and rarely break it.

Since my daughters were babies, the last part of every evening has been given over to reading. When the girls were younger, my husband or I read to them. Then each child went through a stage where we would alternate fun picture books with the beginning readers series of the month. Now sometimes we read a book to them – a great picture book or chapters from a harder book – and sometimes we all read our own books. Often one daughter and I will recline on the couch, each leaning against the opposite side arms and our legs sharing the space in the middle. It’s comfy. It’s fun. The dishes can wait.

Want to raise a reader? Then read. Read to them, read with them, read beside them. Take it from a MotherReader.

Posted by: Pam Coughlan