KSL and online texts

really should get away from this thinking that online publishing and pamflet printing is somehow mutually exclusive...

And especially away from this bizarre thinking that selling pamflets on some stalls couple times a year is somehow more democratic or reaches wider set of people that publishing PDF's online.

Comparison: printing pamflets is like having a rant on a megaphone in the corner of a street, and publishing the stuff online is like having that same rant on national radio (well actually international in webs case )

Take a look at zabalaza for instance:

http://www.zabalaza.net/

their PDF's are downloaded by thousands of people all over the world (about 2 gigs of PDF traffic per month). They get people and groups writing to them from Zambia, Kenya etc who have downloaded the PDF's and distributed them locally. If their downloads amount to thousands, who knows how many people they have reached because of local groups printing them off and selling them on.

WOOHOO!

I was wondering, as a mate of mine got it in spanish recently, and i can't speak spanish!

Trying not to derail thread.

I've just remembered Stuart Christie, does that, paying for texts online thing (sorry i don't know what it's called), why don't the KSL have a word with him about impact and more?

Good post JDMF!

We are going to put these particular pamphlets online. We may also experiment with putting up our next pamphlet. It'll be interesting to see what effect this has.

If people aren't prepared to behave in a comradely way, we can't make them.

We look forward to seeing what financial support people offer.

There is a long post to follow covering what the library is, what we do and responding to some of the points in this discussion.

Wahey! 8)

Nice one comrades. Look forward to hearing the rest of what you guys have to say.

‘What’s the point?’ can be a cry of despair, but it’s also a vital question to ask of any project. The aim of the Kate Sharpley Library is twofold: to preserve the history of anarchism (largely, but not exclusively, as it’s recorded in 150+ years of the printed word) and to encourage comrades to study that history. In short: to preserve and promote. The two are connected, of course, but inevitably there’s a certain tension. Operating with very limited resources there are always hard decisions to be made about how best to use them.

There is another central tension which the library collective has to deal with: to run a world-class library, to appear and be a professional operation without raising anyone’s expectations above what an affinity group of a handful of part-time volunteers can deliver. We’re punching above our weight, to be honest.

The library has grown massively and also evolved since the days when it was a collection of material of interest to anarchists. When it left London in the early 1990s it was no longer stored in boxes and could expand and be organized and (to a limited extent) used as a working collection. Since it moved to the States the growth and organizing of the library has continued.

Activities of the library

English-language books, pamphlets and papers have been catalogued. Archive collections, ephemera (fliers, membership cards etc) and manuscripts are in the process of being organized and catalogued. We have no plans to put the catalogue online simply because we have no way to deal with the enquiries which would result. Our current enquiry service is very basic because we don’t have time or resources to deal with them in any depth. The library collective are actively buying material which tends to be old, rare and expensive. Another large expense is to buy preservation material to make sure that old material - which might have cheated the FBI or the cheka - will survive. This is not cheap: thirty dollars for an acid-free archive box (which won't damage the contents).

Publishing

Alongside this, there’s also a publishing program. This is mostly done in the British Isles. The advantage to this is that it can be done without physically being in the library. It also means we can reproduce interesting material from the library, and maintain a certain public profile. This is good in that people know we haven’t given up and gone home, bad in that people can get a distorted idea of how well-resourced the library is.

There’s a quarterly bulletin which reprints interesting articles and gives news from the library. Subscriptions are three pounds a year, but anyone who can’t afford that can read back issues on our website. A large number of articles from the KSL bulletin are also housed in the LibCom history section. The bulletin doesn’t break even but it’s essential to keep in touch with our friends and supporters, and to send to people who want to know more about the KSL.

Approximately every three months we produce a pamphlet. These do a bit better than break even.

We’re currently working on two books: “The assassination attempt on Franco from the air” by Antonio Tellez (this is the volume that’s costing us $1200 to print) and “The Iron Column” by Abel Paz (which is larger, and we don’t yet know what it’ll cost).

We have a website at www.katesharpleylibrary.net - as well as back issues of the bulletin we put up online documents (eg our obituary of Ba Jin). The website is due to be overhauled soon to spread the workload currently carried alone by our webperson.

----

That was a brief introduction to what the KSL and what it does. An attempt to deal with a few of the issues raised during the online debate follows.

The bulk of the discussion concerns the Kate Sharpley Library as a publisher. The problem with this is that publishing is only part of what the library is about. It’s more visible, but it is not as important as finding and preserving these materials on anarchist history. One poster described this (pejoratively) as ‘hoarding away history’. I would have thought it was self-evident that you can’t digitize something that’s been destroyed.

Nor is digitization a magic solution. In the race to obsolescence a computer file will often become unusable before a book will. Also, no matter how you do it, facsimiles and digital editions are only ever versions of the original: you can try and preserve as much information as possible but something is always lost in translation. Some members of the library collective work in one of the world’s leading digital library projects, so thinking that we’re pipe-and-slippers book lovers who are afraid of computers is not accurate.

But, if libraries are good, why do we need a Kate Sharpley Library? The essence of John’s post where he asked why the material would not be better placed in the Bishopsgate Institution, the London School of Economics, Manchester’s Working Class Movement Library or the International Institute of Social History seems to be ‘leave it to the experts’. While all these places have materials on anarchism, they’re interested in anarchism as a subject for research, not in promoting it as an idea. Leaving aside the IISH (who have published something, eg the complete works of Bakunin on CD-ROM), what have they ever done with it? I can’t blame the LSE if their library has mainly been used to produce student essays and academic articles: that’s what they’re there for. But to assume the historical memory of the anarchist movement is safe in their hands is wishful thinking.

We are an anarchist library, and we try to use history as a tool. We exist without state funding (deliberately). We cover the entirety of the anarchist movement.

As far as I remember, the bulk of posters expressed support for the KSL’s continued existence. Which is nice, but we rely on people who support us to give us money one way or another. If you like what we do, but can’t accept that it takes money to buy rare pamphlets or acid-free folders to keep them in, then your support doesn’t help a great deal.

So we come to the question of publishing and money. I’ve put my effort into the KSL publishing programme because I think it’s worthwhile and because it’s been an easy way for me to contribute to the library. Contrary to what JDMF thinks, we don’t merely turn up at the bookfair and then disappear for a year: we sell pamphlets every week by mail order and via the book trade. I think doing pamphlets is a reasonable use of my time.

KSL pamphlets are done for two reasons: to put interesting ideas into circulation and to provide funds for the library. I certainly don’t think it’s worthwhile just to make enough selling one pamphlet to print one more. Nor do I accept the Catch-22 that the pamphlets are either just breaking even, so it would be better to give up hard copy publishing, or making a surplus and somehow wickedly exploiting our readers. That surplus is the only reason that we can think about publishing “The Iron Column”.

Attitudes to print:

The pro-print position

I have been unwilling to post entire pamphlets online for two reasons. Firstly, I’d be reluctant to reduce the library’s income. Secondly, I’m not convinced that a price of one or two pounds is a huge insurmountable barrier to people who are interested reading our pamphlets. Also that posting material on the internet simply has other barriers (like needing computer access).

Print plus

But I may be wrong. Many posters assume that hard copy and electronic publishing can coexist. The only way to know is to try. So far we have yet to see any donations resulting from our material being available online. We’ll look at what happens when our pamphlets go up online before we decide on an online publishing policy (people should remember that our Bulletin always has been posted online).

e-communism

Spending hours reading at a screen is not my idea of fun. Obviously I don’t follow the line that ‘free’ online reading is the answer to all our propaganda needs (though in case people haven’t noticed, we do use the internet for some things).

If somebody wants to sit and type up the complete works of Guy Aldred, I wouldn’t stand in their way. If someone wants to teach themselves Spanish, find, buy and translate the complete works of Ricardo Flores Magon and post them on LibCom, that would be worth some sort of respect. But I can’t help feeling that people who’re only interested in material that already been translated, typed up and corrected for them are somehow lacking in ambition.

The running costs of the library are mainly met out of the pockets of the collective. The comrades in the States have spent time and money on copying and postage, even without any donations to offset those costs. No-one has been turned away. We’ll keep working on the library because it’s a project we’re committed to.

If people aren’t interested in the work the KSL is doing, that’s up to them. If they want to waste their time slagging us off, I’m sure they will. But we have work to do.

John

From the KSL

Thanks very much for your measured and informative post, John. I'll reply to some bits when I have time later.

I've been following the discussion.

I subscribe to the bulletin - well worth three quid of anyone's money!

and get many of the pamphlets (some i even pay for!)

what i would suggest are:

1) putting all KSL pamphlets online after the initial print run has sold out, (ie don't bother reprinting them)

2) have a supporters' subscription that covers cost of pamphlets as well as the bulletin, say £20 a year.

*bump* because I just remembered this with the talk of the new Courier workers union in Chicago.

I was also wondering what happened with this:

?

Again, we would still like to put up Couriers are revolting in particular, because it's great, because the author gave us permission, because we spent a considerable amount of time OCRing it and tidying it up, and because it's already online as a crappy PDF here with no crediting link to the KSL. We would be keen to try out financial options with KSL, with big donate link (I take it anarchoAl would still be happy to help KSL set up paypal or nochex account or whatever?), and possibly links to buy online via Amazon, or perhaps we could work out a deal with Frontline books? We libcom could even possibly pay KSL directly for the ability to put texts online, which we could make up by launching individualised donation appeals?

It seemed like this discussion was going somewhere before, so hopefully we can get the momentum back...

if the author gave you permission I don't see what else you need. Plus Sol Fed gave me a version of theirs at the bookfair for free, it was the button's big print for numpties edition.

We don't want KSL to hate us, basically.

ah right, but if they haven't complained about Sol Fed why would they take issue with youse?

I think KSL are incredible, it is just such a shame that there isn't greater distribution of their work.

I really hope they agree to let us archive their pamphlets- just think how many more people would get to see them.

Computer files never become obsolete - there's always a way to decode a file, however it's stored, and that's always very easy, unless it's been deliberately encrypted. Magnetic storage (hard drives etc.) does decay, but you can always use CDs or DVDs, or other more permanent means of data storage.

Also, for texts, surely the words are the only thing worth preserving? Who cares about the layout and quality of paper - these are the only things that could possibly be "lost in translation".

KSL have just kindly agreed to let us put The Couriers are Revolting online. I'm going to start a thread asking for donations for it.

On that note revol68 has also allowed you to publish his ramblings bout electro clash girls, football, UFC wrestling and the Friends of Durruti, he will be expecting a similar donation link.

The thread is now here. If you want to see more texts online donating here would probably help!

What have you been saying about electroclash girls?