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IN The age newspaper, Dennis Pryor writes: ‘Booksellers remainder them, publishers pulp them, churches and wowsers ban them, dictators burn them, students photocopy them. Marshall Mcluhan wrote them to prove they were finished.’

THE regular search for the good book for the child will continue so long as there are children's libraries. A recent report on an enquiry has reached us from Bethnal Green and follows the familiar lines of getting the children to vote on what they like; with the result that the “William” books, which should be making all concerned in their production a fortune, head the list, and the simple “small”‐child books, the Milly‐Molly, Mandy series, come next. The field surveyed was small, for “William” polled only 34 votes; only 800 of the 6,000 children registered as borrowers participated. It is questionable if such enquiries, however much they interest us as librarians, can effectively help to improve child reading, unless some method of finding and providing high literature in the type the youngsters prefer can be devised. Mr. George F. Vale prefaces his brief list of books chosen with a really interesting discussion on the subject, but a quotation from it indicates part of the problem. He writes, speaking of Tom Sawyer, Alice and The Wafer Babies, “What elements go to make a permanent children's book is one of the mysteries of literature, but evidently these books possess some quality which overrides all the chances and changes of time. It is not merely the appeal of a good story; there are many better stories than The Water Babies. The secret seems to be some mysterious rapport between the author's mind and that of the readers, an ability to see and to think upon the level of the child mind.” All this is true, but it is more than that, we think; it is the power of recording what is, has been or may be, within the child's own range of experience; that is, it is true in that it realises the conditions of the world of childhood. It is curious, and possibly significant, that a book for children in these enquiries means a story. An enquiry is overdue into the type and quality of non‐fiction read by them, the sort of child who reads and in what circumstances: Real information here might reveal gaps and surpluses in book provision that are not now widely recognized!

The purpose of this paper is to show how individual law is defined in Islam. Individual law includes a set of human rights that the government is bound to vindicate by duty. Islamic law approach is how human beings transcendence, and freedom may be formed wisely.

Spiritual flourishing is the goal of Islamic Sufism. The main topics of individual freedom are discussed here are freedom of opinion, will, religion, speech, meeting, minorities, rule of law, equality before law, rights resulted from implementing justice, ownership and self-determination of destiny and jobs, which are explained through the Islamic Sufism viewpoint.

By comparing individual law in Islamic law with the other law schools, transcendence of the former is more clarified.

Comparative research of the other religions’ gnosticism will develop the paradigm.

The principles highlighted in this study can be used for applied debates in the field to promote individual law for understanding and recompilation.

Delicateness, truthfulness and righteousness of Islamic Sufism may turn the attentions of scholars and researchers to this rich viewpoint.

Individual law scholars have not touched the topic from this viewpoint. This paper opens new challenging area.

The island of Arran is situated in the Firth of Clyde astride the Highland Boundary fault zone. It is 19 miles long by 10 miles wide. Although similar in size to the Isle of Wight it has only a twenty‐fifth of that island's population. The number of inhabitants in 1981 (4743) is almost the same as in 1755 (4600). The island's population reached its highest level in 1821 (6541) and fell steadily for the rest of the century, reaching a figure similar to its present level in 1911.

This study, a part of JISC‐funded UK National E‐Books Observatory, aims to find out about the perspective of students and academics, the main e‐book users, on e‐books.

The paper provides an analysis of two open‐ended questions about e‐books, contained in a UK national survey conducted between 18 January and 1 March 2008. The survey obtained a response from more than 20,000 academic staff and students; 16,000 free‐text responses were obtained to these two questions.

The study discloses that convenience associated with online access along with searchability was the biggest advantage of e‐books. The study shows a potential market for e‐textbooks; however, e‐books have yet to become more student‐friendly by improving features such as printing and screenreading.

This is the biggest survey of its kind ever conducted and it improves one's knowledge of what the academic community thinks of e‐books.

WITH this issue we are commencing the twenty‐seventh year of our career as an independent Library Journal and trust that we shall carry on the tradition of our illustrious founder and continue to criticise or praise without fear or favour. During the past twelve months our editorial staff has successfully produced special numbers dealing with Bookbinding, Book Selection, Children's Departments, Classification, and Colonial Libraries. Judging by the correspondence we have received, our efforts have been greatly appreciated by the majority of our readers. Naturally we have not pleased everybody and we have even been dubbed the “little contemporary” in some quarters. However, we can point to an unbroken record of twenty‐six years' endeavour to serve the library profession and we ourselves are justly proud of the contemptible “little contemporary” that did not cease to appear even during the darkest hours of the dread war period.