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I’m still able to find books just by browsing the shelves, both in my little county branch and the two Mecklenburg branches I visit. I even take random books out in the “young adult” section sometimes. Maybe the main, downtown branches have been “updated” to serve the non-reading public, while they haven’t gotten around to it out in the ‘burbs.

I can’t imagine what it would be like having children/teens who didn’t read. Anoreth has so many books in her locker on the cutter that she was having to rent space from other seamen to store her boots! I told her to resell some of the books for cash ;-). She can’t use the library, since she never knows when or for how long she’ll be at sea.

Our browsable shelves are virtually gone. There's nothing left but "popular authors". Even the nonfiction's been stripped bare. It looks like a video store. If you know what you want, you can look it up online, request it, and it'll be in a special section in the front with your name on. So the books ARE somewhere, just not out where you can see them.

I don't know how anybody's ever going to find Elswyth Thane's Williamsburg novels again - I noticed them once on a walkthrough, with their 30's-style covers, and thought they must be pretty good for the library to have kept them so long. They were, and I tracked down a set of my own eventually, but no one will ever see those covers on a walkthrough again, and wonder what's inside. And they're whining for more money so they can have even more computers. Feh. No.