Re: The Library Rocks!

In reply to:

Alex

DJ Chase

I saw these posts and I wanted to throw in my own hurrah for libraries.

The traditional book loans libraries offer have become uncool. That's something of an exageration, but so many of the praises I see of libraries emphasise that "It's not just books anymore!" I certainly don't think that it's a bad thing that they are expanding their offerings—why shouldn't the ideas of sharing and public access apply to music, movies, video games, etc. But I do enjoy the books.

I like to read. My impression is that's a popular statement here in Geminispace. Computer monitors and eReaders are fine, I've certainly read many millions of words that way, but plain old paper has it's charm. The problem is that most of the books I read, I only read once. A book can be perfectly enjoyable, but just not have any appeal to rereading—at least not for many years. And these books take up an awful lot of space. Whenever I do a round of cleaning I end up with quite a few books that I can sell or give away and never miss. This is even after multiple passes over my shelves.

And so the wonderful thing about the library is that I can get as many books as I want without worrying about where and how I am going to store them. Or how I am going to get rid of them. They come and they go, easy as can be.

There's also the experience of wandering the shelves and seeing what titles catch your eye. Online catalogues and searching are great if you want something specific, but are useless when you don't know what you want. This meshes well with the free aspect of libraries. You can grab a book without risk. If it turns out not as good as you thought that's no matter. Just take it back and try again.

Libraries are great. They've saved me a lot of space and supplied me with a lot of good reading.

Home