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In the June 2013 issue of Q&Q, Vancouver librarians Shirley Lew and Baharak Yousefi argue that libraries should get into the business of selling books.

It may be sacrilegious and antithetical to everything libraries stand for (and as librarians, we appreciate this more than most), but we ardently believe it nevertheless: libraries should get into the business of selling books. Now.

The crisis in Canada’s once vibrant book industry is negatively affecting our reading lives and communities. Growing evidence suggests that the increasing dominance of big corporations and discount giants is resulting in less diversity of ideas.

Canada’s publishing industry is facing tremendous instability and transition. As Canadian-owned publishers struggle to remain independent, the impending merger of Penguin and Random House will further shift the balance of power into fewer hands.

Similar pressures are affecting booksellers. Discount giant Target is set to become, by some estimates, the second largest book retailer in the country. Target’s strategy is similar to Costco’s: bestsellers stocked in large quantities and deeply discounted. Meanwhile, Canada’s largest bookstore chain, Indigo Books & Music, has rebranded itself as a “lifestyle store for booklovers,” allocating more retail space for home décor and gift items, and less for books. While many independent booksellers withstood the arrival of Amazon in Canada, the rise of ebooks has mostly shut them out of the digital marketplace.

The impact has been swift and harsh. The Canadian Booksellers Association estimates that 300 independents across the country have shut their doors over the last decade. (Earlier this year, the CBA itself surrendered its charter and merged with the Retail Council of Canada, ceasing to exist as an independent organization.) In the past several years the closures have included Collected Works in Ottawa, Duthie’s Books in Vancouver, Nicholas Hoare in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal, and four Book Warehouse locations in B.C. Together they represent a loss of more than 175 years of bookselling experience and service to our communities.

What else has been lost? For some consumers, perhaps very little. Bestsellers are cheaper than ever, and finding almost any book online is simple. If saving time and money were all that mattered, we may never have been better off.

But the actual damage is incalculable. The loss of independent bookstores is accompanied by the loss of diversity, possibility, and sense of place. Publishers, writers, and the readers they serve all lose in a market that rewards blockbusters but ignores alternative voices and ideas.

Instead of being bystanders to this devastation, libraries have compelling reasons to seize the opportunity it presents. We have a mandate to help preserve our literary and cultural landscape; we have the space, often in rent-controlled buildings; we know how to buy and promote books; and we are not constrained by the need to turn a profit. We are uniquely equipped to sell books and support writers, publishers, and reading in Canada.

Ours would not be a traditional business venture, but an extension of the service we already provide. It would operate on a self-sustaining, cost-recovery basis. The inventory would highlight books from Canadian publishers and writers, and reflect a range of voices across social, cultural, political, economic, and artistic spectrums. It would be a dynamic, jumbled, and chaotic collection of books and ideas.

When Target announced it would open in the same mall as McNally Robinson Booksellers in Winnipeg, Paul McNally commented, “Our cultural industries need a zone of protection, certainly more than potash does.” Libraries in Canada can, and should, be that zone.

Shirley Lew and Baharak Yousefi are readers, former booksellers, and librarians in Vancouver

 

 

How do you want to die? Quickly, painlessly, peacefully lying in your own bed?

Most people say that. But then, people seem to cling to their lives, even if that could mean a less peaceful end. When asked whether they would want physicians to perform certain interventions to prolong their lives like CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) or mechanical ventilation (‘breathing machine’), people say ‘yes’.

Interestingly, a study discussed in a Radiolab podcast from earlier this year reveals that contrary to lay people, physicians do not want these life-saving interventions they perform on their patients performed on themselves.

Joseph Gallo, physician and professor for mental health, reports: if physicians are asked whether they would agree to have certain treatments performed on them in case if they were suffering from an irreversible brain injury without terminal illness (a state similar to severe dementia), the vast majority say ‘no’. 90% of physicians don’t want CPR. Around 80% object to mechanical ventilation, dialysis, and the use of a feeding tube. Over 60% even reject the use of antibiotics. The only thing physicians want for themselves is pain medication (over 80%). Lay people, however, generally want all these when presented with the same scenario.

What causes such a big gap between the wishes of lay people and physicians? The simple explanation seems to be: knowledge. Physicians know how these interventions work and how high their success rates are – and what side-effects they can cause. Lay people’s opinion, though, seems to be guided more by the rose-coloured picture medical dramas on TV are painting. A study from the end of the 1990s found that in medical TV dramas like ‘Emergency Room’ and ‘Rescue 911’ when CPR is shown in 75% it leads to the patient walking out of the hospital door cured. In real life, however, only 3% of CPRs lead to a ‘good outcome’, i.e. patients surviving in a healthy condition. A further 3% of patients don’t die, but fall into a chronic vegetative state. An additional 2% of patients are stuck somewhere in between. The remaining 92% die.

But the low success rates of these interventions are not the only fact physicians know better. According to Ken Murray, a retired physician and clinical assistant professor interviewed for the Radiolab podcast, some of these interventions are ‘pretty terrible’. He gives mechanical ventilation as an example: the ventilator enforces a certain breathing rhythm to patients that doesn’t match their own. So patients have the feeling they can’t breathe and unwillingly fight the machine. The only way to get ‘air in and out of them’ is to paralyse them. So they are fully aware of what is happening, but completely helpless because they can’t neither move nor communicate. Murray says that in hospitals ‘a lot of times we are doing things to people that we wouldn’t do to a terrorist’.

Apparently, knowing all that affects the choices of physicians. Murray writes in one of his essays: ‘I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.’

What should we make of that? In many countries, physicians are required to perform life-sustaining treatments on patients – treatments they wouldn’t want for themselves. Isn’t that telling…?

 For the entire four hours I was stuck in the subway train and on the street, I switched between 'here with me' and 'desert rose' -- first on my phone, and then, when my phone was about to die, in my mind. That kept me calm.

In this talk (audio- MP3) , Brian D. Earp argues that the non-therapeutic circumcision of infant males is unethical, whether it is performed for reasons of obtaining possible future health benefits, for reasons of cultural transmission, or for reasons of perceived religious obligation. He begins with the premise that it should be considered morally impermissible to sever healthy, functional genital tissue from another person’s body without first asking for, and then actually receiving, that person’s informed consent—otherwise, this action would qualify as a criminal assault. He then raises a number of possible exceptions to this rule, to see whether they could reasonably serve to justify the practice of infant male circumcision in certain cases.

First, what if it could be established that the risk of contracting certain diseases might be diminished by removing a person’s foreskin in infancy, as is often suggested in the United States? Second, what if circumcision could be shown to reduce the spread of AIDS in African populations with high transmission rates of HIV? Third, what if the infant’s parents believed that they had a cultural or a religious obligation to remove the foreskin from his penis before he was old enough to give his consent?

After discussing the merits of these considerations as possible “exceptions” to the ethical premise with which he began, he concludes that they do not present compelling justifications for circumcision before the boy is old enough to understand what is at stake in such a surgery and to decide for himself whether he would like to part with his own foreskin. He concludes with a discussion of the similarities and differences between male and female forms of genital cutting, andsrgues that anyone who is committed to the view that infant male circumcision is morally permissible must also accept the moral permissibility of some (though not all) forms of female genital cutting. However, as he argues, neither type of cutting should be allowed absent clear consent of the individual and/or strict medical necessity.