Support Your Local Library

I went to our local pub­lic library today. Actu­ally the entire fam­ily went to the library. My wife and I signed up for mem­ber­ship mainly so that my sons could start bor­row­ing books to read. Jamie is a vora­cious reader even by my stan­dards and there’s no way I could keep him in new books with­out going broke.

Books

It’s been years since I was a library mem­ber. As a child I was a reg­u­lar vis­i­tor to the library and it was that as much as any­thing else that fed my love of fan­tasy and sci­ence fic­tion. But as an teenager and then adult I moved to buy­ing my own books, and more recently I started con­vert­ing my book col­lec­tion to ebooks (it’s just so nice to have all those books with me on my phone).

There are good rea­sons to encour­age the pur­chase of books, par­tic­u­larly in the USA where the library sys­tem doesn’t pay roy­al­ties on num­ber of check outs of a book. But I think that libraries are the sec­ond most effec­tive method of instill­ing a love of read­ing in chil­dren. The most effec­tive is sim­ply hav­ing books every­where in your house.

It was inter­est­ing to go into this library. In many ways it was just like the library I fre­quented as a child. And that’s not a bad thing. Despite incred­i­ble fund­ing pres­sure, the pub­lic library is a hold out against the ram­pant con­sumerism of almost any other build­ing you go into.

Beyond the sur­face famil­iar­ity though there are changes going on. Libraries are redefin­ing them­selves slowly. Their job now is not purely to pro­vide access to books. It’s to pro­vide access to infor­ma­tion. There were sev­eral com­put­ers avail­able for use; audio books, mag­a­zines and DVDs could be rented. The for­mat is no longer the point. And while this library hasn’t jumped aboard yet, some libraries are already exper­i­ment­ing with e-book lending.

Even though I’m in a posi­tion where I can buy books pretty much when­ever I wish and I think it’s impor­tant to do so to sup­port less pop­u­lar authors, I’ve been reminded how impor­tant it is to also sup­port the library sys­tem.  And by sup­port I don’t just mean mon­e­tary, although that is much needed, but also to ensure that their abil­ity to lend books is not eroded by greedy companies.

Related arti­cles

• These eBooks Will Self-Destruct After Read­ing: Harper­Collins to Libraries (fast​com​pany​.com)
• Sup­port your local library (hope​seguin2011​.word​press​.com)
• Pub­lic Libraries ~ A Trove of Bar­gains (jus​tasked​.word​press​.com)
• Library eBook Rev­o­lu­tion, Begin | Librar­ian in Black Blog — Sarah Houghton-Jan (librar​i​an​in​black​.net)
• About SaveThe​Li​braries​.com (savethe​li​braries​.com)
• What should become of libraries? — Quora (quora​.com)