Fergus Cassidy

Virtual shelf

IT was always funny. The peculiar version. To stand for a while in Eason's bookshop in Dublin engrossed in some book or other to escape from the rain. Or just to escape.

Not for long though, as there was a man whose job appeared to consist of walking the floor reminding lingerers that there was "no reading" allowed. This in a bookshop!

He had an uncanny way of appearing just as you got interested in something. Always polite, but commanding nonetheless. Seasoned sifters got used to him and took evasive action when he was spotted. But the newbies always got flustered and embarrassed.

The man was fearless in making his point and braver still when met with resistance. There was no reasoning with a man whose mind was a closed book. Regular readers gave him a pet name - Exclamation Mark.

I doubt he's still there or that anyone has filled his well-worn shoes. Dawdling is very much encouraged these times and the floorwalkers are replaced with coffee, relaxing chairs and Habitat tables.

Like so many other businesses, bookshops responded a few years ago to the 'threat' to their livelihoods from the internet and the web. Out went 'no reading' and in came 'take the weight of your feet, have a coffee'.

Other than that it's hard to tell how much the net has changed the book business. The predictions of collapse have disappeared but there has been change. There are few pure internet giants and the fact that Amazon is one of them is the beginning of a new chapter.

Buying books online is a very different experience from stores. Electronic books are still in the gadget phase, which gives books a massive head start. Even when ebooks become household, there will still be those who prefer 'the real thing'.

Books are here to stay but the way information about them is changing in unpredictable ways. Online stores have created vast databases of information about books. They are like latter-day libraries except you can't borrow. On the plus side, you can make as much noise as you like while you're there.

No 'Quiet Please' signs and no shushing. Sometimes it's quite the opposite as the web takes book-buying off on new adventures led by the pioneers at Amazon. Recently there was an almighty rucus when some authors were 'outed' having posted fulsome reviews of their own books using pseudonyms. Amazon responded with a 'No Spoofing' warning.

These review forums have been a boon to online buyers, who not being able to judge a book by its cover, can do so by its critics.

But the spoofing incident was nothing compared to a current row concerning the contents of a recently-published book called Opening Skinner's Box by Dr Lauren Slater. The review section of the book's page on Amazon.com has turned into outright stone throwing. And this in the section called Health, Mind and Body!

Slater is a psychologist with a master's degree from Harvard and a doctorate from Boston University. According to the publisher, Opening Skinner's Box is Slater's "attempt to understand the 20th century through its great neurological and psychological experiments". The book was BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in February and received good reviews, mainly lauding its ability to bridge the gap between academic and popular psychology.

That was before members of her own profession began to speak their minds. On the US Amazon site, reviewer Michael B Miller, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, didn't mince his words.

"Slater interviewed several scientists in researching her book, but she has misquoted them and fabricated conversations... . Slater's accounts of Rosenhan's and Milgram's studies are rife with errors... . Her book is worthless. Don't waste your time or money on it". Miller ended his comments with: "If you have questions for me, please Google for 'Michael B Miller' and you'll find me".

Greater damage has been done to sales of the book and Slater's credibility, however, by her story about the behavioural psychologist BF Skinner, from whom the book takes its title.

Skinner was a psychologist based at Harvard from the 1950s to the 1990s. He investigated animal behaviour by putting rats and pigeons in experimental boxes. But on the birth of his second daughter Deborah, he developed an alternative to the baby crib, which he called the Baby Tender. It was a glass-fronted, climate-controlled cabinet, similar to hospital incubator units. The device was later unsuccessfully marketed as the 'Heir Conditioner' and 'Aircrib'.

This was Deborah's sleeping space for the first two and a half years of her life but following an article in Ladies Home Journal in 1945 there was outrage amid rumours that Skinner was experimenting on his own daughter.

Deborah Skinner Buzan now accuses Slater of rekindling these old rumours in her book. Skinner Buzan wrote to The Guardian recently and under the heading 'I was not a lab rat' she said: "It's not true. My father did nothing of the sort. ...Then there's the story that after my father 'let me out', I became psychotic. Well, I didn't. That I sued him in a court of law is also untrue. And contrary to hearsay, I didn't shoot myself in a bowling alley in Billings, Montana. I have never even been to Billings, Montana".

..."The plain reality is that Lauren Slater never bothered to check... . Instead, she chose to do me and my family a disservice and, at the same time, to debase the intellectual history of psychology". ..."Well here I am, telling it like it is. I'm not crazy or dead, but I'm very angry".

Buying books from online shops now has a new twist: 'Quiet Please' is optional.