Lea Shaver: Ending Book Hunger: Access to Print Across Barriers of Class and Culture
- PDF / 418,250 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 55 Downloads / 200 Views
Lea Shaver: Ending Book Hunger: Access to Print Across Barriers of Class and Culture Yale University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2020, 224 pp., $35.00 (Hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-300-22600-3 Karen Holt1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Imagine having nothing to read. No shelves overflowing with books you mean to get to; no well-stocked Kindle; no public library down the street. Lea Shaver opens Ending Book Hunger: Access to Print Across Barriers of Class and Culture by drawing parallels between book scarcity and the global food crisis: while a privileged minority have an overabundance, most of the world—including one billion children—are starving. She acknowledges on the first page that, almost by definition, she’s writing to the overfed, readers who struggle to decide among an endless buffet of literary choices. Shaver expends little energy convincing readers that book hunger matters, and even less trying to evoke sympathy for those experiencing it. She trusts readers to get it. Those who do will find her bold, comprehensive, and systematic prescription for combating the inequality compelling—if at times controversial. Like most kinds of deprivation, book hunger is not just one problem, but the result of many. As such, it requires multiple solutions, from streamlining distribution, to funding translations, to changing copyright laws. Underlying all of these solutions is the recognition that the market alone will not solve book hunger. “We must begin to think about books in the same way we think of education and health care.” Shaver writes. “Market, charitable, and government efforts are all needed, or too many people will be left out.” Shaver, a professor at Indiana University’s McKinney School of Law who has written and spoken extensively on the social justice implications of copyright law, devotes four of the book’s twelve chapters to intellectual property rights issues. She calls for a mix of legislative and legal action—such as carving out copyright exceptions and clarifying what constitutes “fair use” under existing law—that * Karen Holt [email protected] 1
Pace University, 551 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10176, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Publishing Research Quarterly
would reduce the cost of translating books for underserved populations. She also encourages commercial publishers to adopt a more permissive stance toward granting rights without cost to charitable organizations. Taking it further, she urges authors, illustrators, and publishers to consider experimenting with open licenses. That aligns with her suggestion that “Rather than focus narrowly on creating financial incentives for potential authors, we should think more broadly about motivating them.” Her message is consistent, though it’s hard to imagine many authors think there’s currently too much financial incentive to write. On the distribution side, Shaver sees great potential in digital books, as the internet becomes increasingly reliable in developing nations and the price of e-reading devices co
Data Loading...
