Babble About the Library
A little while back, Jim Henley cited a bizarre rant against the idea of public libraries. At the time, I sort of wrote it off as an obscure joke that I wasn't getting, but Avram Grumer and Diana Moon seem to have taken it seriously.
I don't have much to add to Avram's thorough demolition of the original argument, such as it was, but lest people think decent libraries are a New York City thing, I'll chime in to say that I don't think it's inarguable that "the selection at your average public library compares poorly with the selection at your average Borders," as Jim says. And while I'm technically a New Yorker, Schenectady is not remotely part of The City.
Yeah, your odds of laying hands on a recently released book are better at Borders than at the Schenectady County Public Library-- it takes them at least a couple of weeks to acquire and process new books, and get them on the shelves, and anything popular tends to get checked out pretty quickly. But then again, there are a lot of older books (for example, Blunt Darts, which even Amazon lists as out of print) that you just wouldn't expect to find in a Borders, or any other new book store. For another example, Kate and I managed to read most of the Nero Wolfe series out of various libraries (Tewksbury, MA, New Haven, CT, Brooklyn, NY), and most of those are still out of print, even with the TV series dragging some of them back in. And, far from the total absence of religious books that Lew Rockwell complains about, I've actually been mildly annoyed by the number of religious books in the "New Non-fiction" section (they take up valuable shelf space that could be used for science books...).
It's mostly a question of what you're looking for-- book stores tend to have a very good selection of new books, because, well, that's what they do. They stock what will sell best and make them money, and with the exceptions of a few perennial classics, what sells best is relatively new stuff. On top of that, new copies of books aren't available forever, because publishers print what sells best for them, which, again, is mostly new stuff.
Half the point of a library, on the other hand, is that they keep everything (to first order, anyway-- they eventually do weed out unpopular or damaged books, but they keep an older and more varied stock than any new bookstore I've been in). They won't have a dozen copies of the new Harry Potter on hand, but they will have older stuff that's out of print, which Borders or even Amazon won't. Public libraries, at least the ones I've been to, are good at what they do-- it doesn't happen to be the same thing that for-profit book stores do, but that's a feature, not a bug.
Despite Kate's best efforts to convince me otherwise, I'm still not a library fanatic. I prefer to own the books I read, even if I'm only going to read them once. Still, Rockwell's rant is bizarre, and Jim's linking to it even stranger-- maybe it's possible for private for-profit libraries to work (Blockbuster does do a pretty good business...), but I can't see a reason other than dogmatic libertarianism (coupled with a severe misunderstanding of what libraries do) to change the current system. To paraphrase the title of another post, it ain't broke, so why fix it?
Posted at 8:46 AM | link | follow-ups |