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By David Rothman

image The Maltese Falcon, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird and Fahrenheit 451 are among the books that the Big Read program is promoting. Not the very most startling choices but good ones just the same.

Isn’t it time for the Big Read, an NEA initiative that encourages communities to read together, to go the next step? Couldn’t it work with publishers and writers to get copyrighted books online for free for the entire U.S.—with extra multimedia and other resources added for readers, teachers and librarians?  The experiment could begin with just a few free e-titles and take it from there.

Not just for the U.S.

Yes, the same concepts would apply outside the States. I’d love to hear from TeleBlog readers elsewhere about existing efforts to get copyrighted works on the Net through a library-style model at the national level—providing for fair compensation for publishers and authors.

In the place of publishers, here and abroad, I’d worry less about copyright lobbying and more about a systematic system of payments that would jibe with the public’s love of "free." The public lending right concept used by many countries is a place to start. The U.S., too, needs to examine it if we’re to go beyond the today’s Big Read.

Toward a full-fledged TeleRead approach

What I like about the current Big Read is that it presents the books in context and uses a social approach for those susceptible to it—although I believe that a variety of books should also be online for individual readers, not just those in participating communities. Perhaps this could lead to a full-fledged TeleRead-style approach in partnership with local library systems, involving the Library of Congress, the NEA and other agencies. This larger effort could offer titles of all kinds, from algebra texts to classics, and obviously include multimedia as well. The demand would be there with the right promotion. As reported by the Associated Press, an Oprah Winfrey site handled more than 1.1 million downloads of a financial book in a 33-hour period. Mind you, this is pre-Kindle for most of America. Just wait until prices drop.

One way or another, we should be reaching young people via E, not just P, and along the way helping the elderly and others learn to adapt to e-books, which could be a godsend to them as their eyes age and as they lose mobility. See Older adults and e-books—and how E could be the new large print, by Isabelle Fetherston, a librarian in Florida. Imagine an OLPC-style machine adapted for elderly readers. Meanwhile the existing One Laptop per Child hardware is being made available to thousands of schoolchildren in Birmingham, ALA, and that’s significant since the XO-1 is a terrific e-reading machine, not just a general-purpose computer.

Sam Spade as a lit-promoter

No, we’re not talking about preemption of local bookstores. In fact, one of the Big Read’s success stories was passed on by the owner of an Oregon bookstore. As described in the Big Read‘s blog—lively, though it could use more explanatory-links—"a woman came into her shop the other day, raving about what The Big Read was doing to her son. The mother simply couldn’t get over what a change The Maltese Falcon had wrought in the boy. Improvising from a homework assignment out of the NEA’s The Big Read Teachers Guide, he’d worked up entire case files from different characters’ perspectives. He’d even borrowed a red ‘Top Secret; stamp off his father, an FBI agent, and festooned his report with ‘eyes only’ warnings for his teacher."

"My son is so grateful for this," the mother said. "He loves this book." Will every reader? No. And that’s exactly why we should get many books online—and I don’t just mean public domain and Creative Common ones. A mechanism needs to be found to fund writers and publishers, which is what TeleRead the cause is all about.

How the Big Read works

But back to the Big Read blog. "Here’s how it works. A resourceful librarian, like St. Helens’s Rick Samuelson, applies for The Big Read grant and wins it. He successfully encourages two local schools to assign The Maltese Falcon—no mean feat with a book full of gunplay, to say nothing of the scene where Sam makes Brigid strip, to prove she hasn’t palmed a grand off the fat man. (Maybe if Warner Brothers had had Rick on staff to run interference, John Huston could have snuck that one past the Hays Code.) Anyway, before you know it Hammett is on the syllabus, and now it’s all you can do to keep some hitherto uninspired teenage reader from running away to join the Pinkertons."

I know. Some will object to any book or any government involvement with local libraries or even the foundation variety. Regardless, it’s already happening through the the Big Read, other NEA efforts, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and so on. So why not go all the way with TeleRead, while starting slowly to avoid a boondoggle? None other than the late William F. Buckley, Jr., my political opposite, was an early supporter of the TeleRead idea. The key is for the program to avoid preempting the private sector and also to be a partnership with local libraries rather than simply apply a tops-down-approach. Currently the Big Read relies on "a Readers Circle—a distinguished group of 22 writers, scholars, librarians, critics, artists, and publishing professionals—who suggest the next books for American communities to share." I think they’ve done an excellent job. But for a full-fledged TeleRead, local participation is essential.

The Internet Archive angle: The archive already has a good relationship with the Library of Congress. Might there be some contracting opportunities? At the same time I hope that the archive and similar efforts will not simply become part of the government. For freedom of expression purposes, it’s important for different business models to flourish.

Related: Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America and To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence. The original report was a justification for the Big Read program.

 
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