Posted on 04/24/2005 9:49:51 PM PDT by SmithL
Books are fine, but why do we need taxpayer-funded bookmobiles?
For that matter, why do we even need taxpayer-funded libraries?
Hasn't anybody heard of the bookstore?
I thought government was to put out fires and defend the borders. Not to give us stuff to read. I mean, thanks to the private sector, it's already everywhere you look. If I simply bought one copy of every magazine offered at the corner Mobil station — covering everything from Kawasaki motorcycles to Esquire women we love to Forbes financial advice — I'd be reading for the next year.
Yet, now the poor taxpayers in Orland Park are stuck three times over. First, they paid for an unneeded library. Then, they paid for an unneeded bookmobile. And now, they must pay the $8.5 million bill to settle the lawsuit over the 2001 bookmobile crash that left a man brain-damaged.
All this foolishness could have been avoided if government had just stayed out of the library business in the first place.
But, you might say: "We need a library system so that our neediest citizens can read as much as the well-off! Books are expensive!"
Well, it depends. If you buy hard-cover and full-price, then, yes, books can be expensive. Last Monday I bought "An Incomplete Education," the 1995 edition, by Judy Jones and William Wilson, off the shelf at the Borders bookstore in Evanston.
Later, looking at the receipt, I must admit I felt pretty stupid. List price for the book was $32.50. Adding tax, the total was $35.34. If books were always so expensive, there might be a case for keeping libraries. (Not bookmobiles.)
But, you see, there now exists Amazon.com, where you can order nearly any book you can think of for a bargain price, and in less than a minute. I kid you not. A couple of days after my purchase, I made a sample buy on Amazon to see the alternative price.
I have ordered from Amazon in the past, so they already have my billing (home) address, my work (delivery) address and my credit card number. I typed "Incomplete Education" into the search field. The book popped up as $21.45 new.
Trying to demonstrate thrift, I clicked on "used." I found a copy for $6.25. The seller labeled the condition as "very good." In other words: "crisp/clean/unmarked pages, in firm binding, with straight spine. Minor wear/scuffing to dust jacket. Minor edge wear."
This was good enough for me. I want to read the book, not mount it in a glass case.
Postage was another $3.95, for a total of $10.20. If I had proceeded, I could have had the book delivered to me at work by this coming Tuesday, for a savings from Borders of $22.30.
And you know how much time this order would have taken me? I counted the seconds: 31.
An excellent book (delivered to your desk, no less) for $10.20. Hmm. That sounds like a bargain to me. Let's do some math here. Divided by the 55,000 residents of Orland Park, the $8.5 million bookmobile settlement comes to $155 apiece. By my calculations, with that money a family of four could have bought 61 books from Amazon.
Now, instead, they have to sink it into a boondoggle.
There's another reason citizens should buy books rather than borrow them from a library. In my opinion, the only good books are those worth keeping. Then, in the future, you can return for the pleasure of rereading; or to refresh your memory about a certain quote; or to reprint a compelling passage for a column like this one.
If a book isn't worth keeping, it probably isn't worth reading in the first place.
Consider my new book. "An Incomplete Education" is just the reference for people like me who didn't pay attention in college. It's divided into 12 chapters: American Studies, Art History, Economics, Film, Literature, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Religion, Science and World History.
If you don't know something, you can just dip into the book and fake it. For instance, did you miss the movie "Citizen Kane"? Then read the synopsis here. It tells you what the fuss was back then and what the fuss is today. Now you can utter "Rosebud" with the best of them.
Another example: Suppose you get invited to a royal wedding and quickly have to learn the hierarchy of British peerage. Per my book, the mnemonic to remember is "Do men ever visit Boston?" Take the first letter of each word and you can impress for success: duke, marquis, earl, viscount and baron.
The book also gives you crucial pronunciation information. For example, despite all logic, viscount is pronounced VYE-count. I knew that one. But I didn't know this: Marquis is pronounced MAR-kwiss.
Finally, the book lists some really useful foreign phrases, such as the French "nostalgie de la boue." It means "yearning for the mud."
As the authors explain, the phrase refers to wallowing by a person you would have thought was above such a things — "particularly in a guess-who's-sleeping-with-whom context."
I don't know when, I don't know how, but someday I simply have got to work that delicious phrase into a column. And to think I never would have heard of it if not for "An Incomplete Education." If you can't afford $10.20 to buy such a valuable book, then you've got bigger problems than the price of books.
So, a memo to Orland Park: Dump the bookmobile. And maybe dump the whole library too. Let your citizens keep their tax money and buy their own books. It's the American way.
I don't know what the libraries look like in your hometown, but they're hardly a "refuge of civilization" in any city I've lived in.
As many people here have posted, libraries are mainly daytime homeless shelters that offer free porn on demand.
I really resent that anyone would suggest spending money on them because they're a last refuge of civilization. In the first place, building new libraries usually happens after a bond is issued. People have to vote on a new library now for higher taxes later. They are mislead by mayors and city councilmen who want to build them because they think it's their job to build civilization. Utter nonsense.
Large numbers of classical works are only known because they were copied by Muslim scribes and kept in the Middle East during the so-called "dark ages" of about 600-1100 where they were rediscovered by Europeans during the Crusades.
What a silly proposal.
Libraries are the hallmark of an educated society.
Not bookstores.
Just because you can get a book cheap at Amazon's used place doesn't justify getting rid of libraries. Plopping down even 10 bucks for every book you want to peruse would add up quickly, and it would not be cheap.
The Internet is a great resource, but its difficult to curl up and relax with a computer.
Be serious. Anyone who tries to stop a bum from using "public property" as his own living quarters will get slapped with a lawsuit, as happened in New Jersey recently.
Let a bum try to do the same at Barnes & Noble and see if the same thing happens.
They don't have card catalogs anymore. It is all computer now...
I mean, seriously...if you can't look up the book in the computer and read the numbers on the books, you are an idiot.
I can't tell you how many morons come up to me at the college library asking for help in finding a book. Some real dim bulbs out there.
Forget building new ones. The ones we have are only open part time. There is no liberal or conservative spin on this issue. I live in Ventura County which I grant you is
wealthier than some others. I am also 51 years old, and have been going to libraries since about the age of 10 and have never seen ONE smelly homeless person in a library. If this is an inner city problem, then the people need to solve it, and not by closing all libraries.
I don't doubt it, but keep in mind that the term 'Dark Ages' referes to the fall back of technology (for lack of better word?) due to the collapse of Roman civilization, not some Christian plot to destroy everything they disagreed with.
I will just bet that the citizens of the local community have just bent over backwards to solve the problem. Where I live, the cops take these people, and run them out of town.
You can pretty much be a member of any library you want.
I signed up for membership in Wichita, two counties away.
PLEASE don't give them any more ideas.
Who says being for the dumbing-down of of the public is a conservative value?
some of you liberatarian nuts need a brain check.
No real conservatives of the past would have actually supported abolishing libraries.
[You could go there looking for a copy of "Treason" by Ann Coulter and end up with a copy of "Slander" instead. Or maybe you will come out with something entirely different. Shoot, back in 1985, I went looking for a copy of Jeff Smith's "Frugal Gourmet" at the Hill Valley library while visiting my Aunt and Uncle in California, but they had a waiting list so I checked out a copy of "Grays Sports Almanac 1950-2000" instead. I stupidly loaned it to my dumb cousin Biff, who promptly "lost" it. My friend Marty tried to get it back but it had a nudie magazine stuck in the covers instead.]
LOL. Good one.
Actually this happened to me while trying to find recipes from "The Frugal Gourmet" Jeff Smith. I instead found out about a series of comics called "BONE" that were written and illustrated by an unrelated Jeff Smith.
The books are heroic fantasy with a lot of humor thrown in and are aimed at an adult or teen audience but is very family friendly with no vulgarity, although there is some sword and sorcery violence. The whole series of comic books (I think there are 68 of them in total) are now collected in one volume and it has a huge and growing cult following.
I've just finished the book and loved it, so I let my 12 year old daughter read it. She loved it so much that she has been making all of her friends read it.
http://www.boneville.com/
There is also something called interlibrary loan. If the library doesn't have it, they can get it elsewhere.
Ironically, it is the Muslims who mostly gave the West the knowledge of the Greeks and the Romans (and it was the Catholic Church that tried to keep the knowledge secret...)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.