Book 2.0 - Volume 5, Issue 1-2, 2015

This article seeks to delve more closely into the debate that took place in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century surrounding the introduction of open access shelving in London’s public libraries. Described by The Sun as ‘the battle of the books’, Charles Goss, librarian of the Bishopsgate Institute in east London, took a clear stance against open access in favour of the Cotgreave Indicator (closed access). Scholars have focused on James Duff Brown, the pioneer of open access in the United Kingdom, but it is the focus of this article to explore the thoughts and findings of Charles Goss and his opposition to a system that was eventually welcomed by every public library up and down the country, something that has direct relevance to our library circuit as it exists today.

The literary marketplace underwent considerable changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as industrialization, new readership and wars shaped and influenced the publishing industry. The attempts made by publishers to approach this new market with cheap books and high-quality literature varied. This article examines Reclam, a German publisher, as a case study for marketing between the late nineteenth century and 1930 in order to demonstrate that there was money to be made with revolutionary ideas such as the book-automat or an export library. Reclam tried to find gaps and use movements for their own profit, which was a successful and trend-setting endeavour.

This companion piece to ‘Bespoke Bookselling for the twenty-first century: John Smith’s and current UK higher education’ (also in this issue of Book 2.0) provides a historical narrative of the bookshop chain John Smith’s. From its emergence in Glasgow in the 1750s, through its negotiation of the Net Book Agreement around 1900 and its strategies for survival and growth after the agreement’s collapse in the digital era, the article provides the only comprehensive history of this unique book retail business up to the present day. What is apparent is that its current diverse business model has a clear historical precedence. Their business involvements have included publishing, circulating libraries, library and learning material supply, creation of cultural events, transitioning from local to global and, especially, cooperation with higher education. John Smith’s is a perfect example of how bookselling was and is far more than simply the activity of selling books.

The JS Group is the business home to the prize-winning chain of booksellers for higher education institutions, John Smith’s. Under the deceptively simple term ‘bookseller’, however, lies a shift in thinking about books published by John Smith’s, which deserves articulation. This shift moves from regarding books as a source of knowledge conveyed through the book’s text to books as an agency capable of producing a range of notably different outcomes, of which knowledge is one, for each of the actors involved in its book-retail network. Through their aggregated engagement with what Darnton calls the communications circuit, John Smith’s manages to deliver different outcomes for students, lecturers, parents, student support services, for university executive management and for the state. These outcomes are only heightened when combined with Smith’s smart card system, sometimes called ASPIRE. In conjunction with a Samsung tablet, ASPIRE is then able to deliver ‘free’ digitized learning, funded through the UK fair access bursaries. The article examines John Smith’s model and questions the trade-off between effectiveness and freedom, finding the alternatives to be wanting. The research emerges from ongoing work into reading within the frame of commodity culture and, as such, the disciplinary fields supporting it are sociologies of literature, economics and book history studies, expressed in terms of cultural and critical discourse. The combination, it is hoped, will provide a fresh perspective.

This article takes a comparative look at the annotative models and devices that readers have used historically to organize the information in texts, in order to better understand the needs that readers bring to the digital environment. Based on what we can discover about the factors that brought about major changes in models and devices of note-taking in the past, what can we learn – as we design new forms of note-taking and annotation for the digital age – about the approaches to design that seem likely to have the most lasting impact? As this tour d’horizon shows, even in the gadget-driven digital environment, social activity plays a determining role in shaping the forms that annotation tools adopt and even the definition of what a reader is and needs.