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Public Service Observation
It's our own faults if there are not enough science fiction (or insert pet-genre-of-your-choice) books on the shelves of our local libraries.
I was weeding the stacks the other day, you see. (Twitch. Stacks. Can't get Altered Carbon out of my head, where stacks are personality-storage.) I was weeding for books more than five years old that had not been checked out more than three times in five years.
A lot of what I was weeding was science fiction. My library makes a good-faith effort to stock a variety of SF and Fantasy, which people proceed to not check out. I think this is because we're all book collectors. We have our own personal libraries.
There's a problem with this. I'm a cheapskate. I want to check out a book at least once and preview it before shelling out for it, and frankly, I revisit books infrequently enough that the only books I should sensibly keep on my shelf are the ones that it's very unlikely the library will have, or books that I want to access at least once every six months. (Coincidentally, these are usually the same books.)
But why the hell do I still have David Eddings on my shelf? The library will keep that in stock for a long, long time. Why don't I surf the library for titles I haven't read, instead of surfing Amazon?
Obviously, there are reasons for larger private collections, compulsion not the least of those reasons. I'm just thinking about it more lately. So now I'm trying to check out more books, change my surfing habits, and request a good book be added to the library's collection instead of adding it to my own.
In conclusion, I'm a big crazy socialist freak and I'm high on libraries. But it was just something I was thinking about.
I was weeding the stacks the other day, you see. (Twitch. Stacks. Can't get Altered Carbon out of my head, where stacks are personality-storage.) I was weeding for books more than five years old that had not been checked out more than three times in five years.
A lot of what I was weeding was science fiction. My library makes a good-faith effort to stock a variety of SF and Fantasy, which people proceed to not check out. I think this is because we're all book collectors. We have our own personal libraries.
There's a problem with this. I'm a cheapskate. I want to check out a book at least once and preview it before shelling out for it, and frankly, I revisit books infrequently enough that the only books I should sensibly keep on my shelf are the ones that it's very unlikely the library will have, or books that I want to access at least once every six months. (Coincidentally, these are usually the same books.)
But why the hell do I still have David Eddings on my shelf? The library will keep that in stock for a long, long time. Why don't I surf the library for titles I haven't read, instead of surfing Amazon?
Obviously, there are reasons for larger private collections, compulsion not the least of those reasons. I'm just thinking about it more lately. So now I'm trying to check out more books, change my surfing habits, and request a good book be added to the library's collection instead of adding it to my own.
In conclusion, I'm a big crazy socialist freak and I'm high on libraries. But it was just something I was thinking about.