 This is a very strange stage set up. I feel like I should be doing a cooking demonstration. And here's something I made earlier. I am a writer. I write novels. I write short stories. But I also write collaborative works of digital media. So that's who I am. And tonight I'm really talking as a writer. I'm not a librarian and I'm not a specialist. So I've just got five little slides here. So we'll start with Library as Utopia. For me, the library was a treasured space as a child. And that continued as I became a student, where I was a student only briefly. I'm a university dropout. But at my brief, my brief sojourn at McGill University in Montreal, I had my first sort of proper boyfriend was a librarian. And I used to go visit him in the library, and we used to go into the stacks. So indeed a treasured space. But I did, like I said, I dropped out of university and then I am a Canadian. You can hear my accent. I came to live in London when I was 20. And the library again was a treasured space to me because I was extremely impoverished. So I will admit I did supplement my library addiction with a brief spell as a book thief. But we'll gloss over that. And once I began publishing, began writing and being paid for it, I indeed became a book buyer. And once you're a parent, you're back into the library again certainly with young children. And more recently I've become, despite my checkered career in universities, I've become a university academic. And in the university, as I discovered when I first began to work in a university six years ago, you do have utopian access to information through university libraries and university library online portals, which was a real revelation for me. So from the library to the internet, when I first started engaging seriously with the internet about 15 years ago, I drank the Californian Kool-Aid and really felt that the internet was going to become a universal library, that it would contain all of human knowledge, all of human endeavor in fact, and that it would give us open access to knowledge, access to knowledge for everyone, that it would be a spacious, uplifting, lofty place that resided in the sky where everything was beautiful. It hasn't quite turned out like that, has it? Borges, the great writer, said, I have always imagined paradise as a kind of library. I sort of imagined the internet as a kind of library paradise myself. And one more sort of utopian note is that in the UK as a writer, I get paid for library loans. Does Sweden have a system like that, public lending rate? Anybody, yeah? And to me this, obviously this is a fantastic thing to be paid for a library loan, even though it's only a few pennies per loan. There's two reasons why public lending rate being paid for library loans is really a fantastic thing for a writer, apart from the check, is that it gives you data about your books. It gives you data about how many people are reading your books. It's not particularly widely discussed, but one of the things that's very difficult for writers is getting any data about your sales. Certainly in the UK and in the US, data about sales is held by Nielsen or Bowker. It's corporate information, and it's almost impossible for writers to get access to that information. So the data that you get through the public lending rate is extremely interesting and very useful, and it also helps demonstrate how some books, some of the time, indeed have a very long life. The way that books continue to live through library loans is something that, as a writer, seems to me a seriously utopian thing. Dystopia, of course. Every utopia has its dystopian sides. And I'll just talk about this briefly, which is that in England, in particular, libraries have spent the last 20 years sort of battling with local authorities who pay for library service over what they are and why they exist. And the idea of the lofty, spacious utopian ideal often seems very, very far from what libraries have to contend with in reality. My nearest library is the place that I go to to pick up a parcel when the mail service hasn't been able to deliver it to me because I'm out. It's also the place that I go and pick up recycling bags. The library itself, in that instance, is not fit for purpose. It's very neglected. It's musty. It's actually not even a space I would be happy to take my children. My other close library is also a typical library story in the UK, which is that it was built by Carnegie, so beautiful, purpose-built library built by the great American entrepreneur, philanthropist, Carnegie. The library was closed a few years ago and the local authority did a deal with a developer who was building a huge shopping mall to put a little tiny library in one corner of the vast shopping mall. To me, this was part of this dystopian environment that libraries, certainly in England, are existing in currently. I think the pressure on libraries is very similar to the pressure on bookshops, retail space. In England in particular, because of this business of libraries being funded by local authorities, it's been very difficult to pull together any national strategy to do with e-lending or indeed really moving forward in the digital age. One more little dystopian example is that at my university, as I teach creative writing and digital media, and as you all know, there's loads of really interesting new forms of literature emerging through the digital technologies, through apps, through all kinds of web-based things, narrative games, story games, et cetera, et cetera, a whole burgeoning world of new forms of literature. But it's impossible for my library to collect and indeed loan those, these new forms, enhanced e-books, et cetera. And that, to me, seems like a very big problem, really, because I want to teach these things, but in order for my students to read them, they will have to buy them. And as students are increasingly under financial pressure themselves, that's a difficult thing. Some of the biggest humiliations in my writer's life have been experienced in libraries, I must say. And anybody who's a writer who's gone on a book tour or done a series of speaking events will probably recognize this scenario. My biggest humiliation in the library was a very long journey through England, from London all the way up to Northern England, to this kind of post-industrial wasteland in a corner of northeast England, which the journey took me about six hours. The library was beside a nuclear reactor. And my audience consisted of three people, two of whom were librarians, the third was the homeless person that you mentioned earlier. And I was given a cold cup of tea for my... Yeah, so there's a downside to library experiences for writers as well. I wanted to talk about possibilities. I think that one thing that is absolutely true at the moment is that readers are fine. Readers are happy. We're in a golden age of reading. Access to books has never been easier. Books are cheaper and more readily available than any time in the whole of human history. And this will continue to be the case. We have problems with e-books, we have problems with formats, with platforms, with catalogs, et cetera. But e-books are here to stay, and indeed more newer forms, more web-friendly forms of content will emerge. As people, we always hear... We're always being told that we love stories, that people love stories, and indeed it's true, of course, telling stories is a big part of what makes us human. But I also believe that we love writing. We love text. From our earliest days, we've been making marks on bits of stone. We've been writing. We love the right words in the right order. And I really do believe that text will find its place in the new and emerging forms that are beginning to come through now. It is true that we live in a visual culture, and it is true that visual forms of communication are really coming to the fore now. But I'll say it again, we do love words, we do love writing. And when we read something that we love, we want to share it. And I think that's a really key concept for librarians and for writers and readers to hold on to the business about sharing, sharing our knowledge, sharing books that we love. Excuse me. I recently did a project in Australia in July with the Queensland State Library, which is in Brisbane, which if you haven't been is an absolutely beautiful, beautiful library. One of the most beautiful libraries I've ever been in. Queensland is subtropical. So the library is designed as both an indoor and an outdoor space. And we did, I was there with If Book Australia, which is a kind of experimental think tank for literature. And we did a project called Memory Makes Us, where we collected people's memories during the day. I had to sit behind a glass wall, like Hannibal Lecter in front of my computer, trying to draw together people's memories, people's stories, and to create a kind of live, written document. But one of the things that we did was, I was there in the glass box, and in front of me there was a table, and it was in one of the central public spaces of the library when you first come into the library. And on this table were three typewriters, and typewriters with paper in them. And people were encouraged to contribute their memories to the writing project through these typewriters, which had a very interesting effect, because older people were full of nostalgia and longing for these objects on the table, whereas younger people were often encountering this old technology for the first time, and it created a very interesting dynamic around the writing project. So a kind of participatory library writing project. And I think participatory culture and our love of text combined is something very, very, very powerful, indeed something for libraries to be trying to grasp. One of the things that I think is very interesting about the current rise in self-publishing, which is a whole other area for libraries to be thinking about, but there is a way in which the rise, the incredible rise of self-publishing is really a new form of participation, a new form of participatory culture has come about through access to publishing. That's arisen over the last three years. There's a Bowker statistic that I think is fascinating, which is that in 1999, in the U.S. only, there was 900,000 books with ISBNs. At the beginning of this year, January 2013, there was 30 million books with ISBNs. And of course, a lot of books that are self-published don't have ISBNs, so the sort of huge amount of publishing that's going on is indeed something for libraries to be building on. So to end, I just really wanted to talk about hybrid book spaces. I think that, you know, I mentioned at the beginning that retail itself, the shopping street, is being transformed by digitization as more and more shopping goes online. So the pressures that libraries and book shops are under with the high cost of retail, indeed, as the high street empties out, that will begin to shift and change. And I think that the whole notion of community space is the whole notion of physical places where we meet and talk about books, talk about ideas, where people can gather and talk and share ideas, will become increasingly important, but also perhaps sort of paradoxically more readily available as digitization transforms our high street. I think that just to end on a fact, I thought the idea of libraries as marketplace was a very interesting concept. It's back to the utopian thing really of the recognition that access to knowledge, access to information, access to books, literature, et cetera is an incredibly important thing for us to fight for. And really the great scourge of the developed world is, of course, inequality. And access to information, access to knowledge is so important to any meaningful fight against inequality. So that's up to all of you who are librarians in the crowd. So thank you very much.