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.
Thank you for the site reference. Very informative.
Well after dropping out of high school and working in all the fast food joints I went to college on a GED. The counselor didn't think I could do it. HEHE. I graduated with a 3.7:') Funny thing is that when I had to pay for my tuition I managed to go to class. Maybe we should get rid of public schools too and make parents pay for their kids early education.
Our local library system has thev unbrideled power to TAX. That is it's raison d'etre. I have more good books than it has, but they have plenty of unreadable goop and do a lot of expensive diversity "activities". Recently however I wanted to access the county propery evaluation file system on the internet. It is only available to us taxpayers at a cost of several hundred dollars per visit or a few grand per year. Not willing to cough this up I, like a good serf stupidly went to the library to check out the information. They don't subscribe. To expensive they told me.
I just read your post. Sarasota County and, I believe Manatee County County too, has access to something called Alley Cat. Using your library card, you can search all the libraries in Florida who have their holdings in that catalog. It also provides access to OCLC, which is the worldwide catalog. If you don't find what you are looking for in your local library, you can use this service and have books ordered from other libraries and sent to your local library. This does take awhile, but it's often a way to get the books you couldn't otherwise get. Ask your reference libray for help. There is no charge for this.
I work for one of the counties that you mentioned and I'm sorry that you couldn't find what you needed. I hope that you filled out a patron request. We are not as speedy as a bookstore, but we do try to honor patron requests as much as possible.
libray = librarian
Yes, actually, you can. A lot of Amazon books let you read through a pdf of the whole first chapter now, not all, but it's becoming more and more common. And there are critiques of the books that are often helpful, too. You can't usually get that at a bookstore or library unless you wanna bug other patrons.
Can you go to look up a book on WWII and instead end up getting a book on Julius Caesar simply because they are shelved in the same aisle and you picked up the Caesar book because its title and spine intrigued you? That won't happen on Amazon.
Sure you can, and sure it will! The Amazon system automatically pushes other books at you that other folks who liked the book you're considering also liked! Have you ever BEEN to Amazon.com, or are you making up the entire post here instead of just the 'Back to the Future' stuff? ; )
Second of all, most people go to the library to find something in particular. Not true. Lots of people go there just to pass the time reading the magazines, surfing the web, or seeing what new gardening books are in.
You can do that online at home, too, often better than you can at the library, because you have it all at your fingertips instead of having to wander from floor to floor to get to subject matter you want to cover. And you don't have to dress in shoes and shirt like you do at the library. And you don't have to deal with the noisy kids in the playroom, or the near-death seniors hacking up a lung, or the sleeping bums stinking up the joint.
Public libraries often don't have what you're looking for. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But often, they will have something close and just as good or better. 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.
The same thing is true of an online visit to Amazon, and 99% of the time, if the book is in print, I'll be able to get it within a day or two. If it's NOT in print, 98% of the time, I'll STILL be able to get it within a day or two. And the only differences are that 1) I'll pay the user fee directly, 2) people who never use Amazon.com will pay nothing...unlike people who never use the library, who'll get stuck with a tax bill for a privilege I enjoy, and 3) I'll end up getting the books, unlike the library, where if I'm lucky the books are not checked out and have actually been purchased to begin with.
Wow I could be reading my own bio, cept I'm a guy. Dropout. GED to college. Homeschooling our 5 (soon to be 6) year old son.
Yes, but government won't pay for my drinking. Unless I get fired and breed a lot more, anyway. Then I could get loads of AFDC and welfare money. Probably free medical care for my liver, too.
Public libraries are just welfare for the intelligent. That you like them doesn't mean they're something government should be taking away other people's money to build `em. I like football, and American cars, and brown sugar on my oatmeal, but I don't think that the government should tax you so I can have them (even though it does tax you so those things are cheaper than other similar products, and as a result, the manufacturers and owners of those items make more money on their products than the average business does on its without corporate welfare, unfortunately).
I would be willing to give up every library if it would end welfare. If you can honestly say that you would willingly give up a government function you like to end another one you don't, neither is probably a necessary and proper function of government.
They probably did need the baths that badly, however.
Huh? Whachu talkin 'bout? Every word was true. ;-)
And you don't have to deal with the noisy kids in the playroom, or the near-death seniors hacking up a lung, or the sleeping bums stinking up the joint.
Hey! Maybe I'm the kid, the near-death senior, or the stinking bum (I did have burritos for lunch today)! Of course me and Marty used to hang out with this old eccentric scientist guy who was kinda stinky and we once were at the library looking up newspapers from the 1950s though I forget exactly why.
So the guy who wrote this may get something like his wish. What troubles a lot of people with libertarians like him is that it's not enough to work for victory in the future, or even to win, he has to come down hard on people who disagree with him, as if doing a little ideological dance were the point, rather than the practical result. Perhaps it is the point for true believers, but it alienates outsiders. It's similar to what one sees on the left: proving one's own moral or intellectual or emotional superiority becomes the point of politics and political debate, rather than achievement.
And this rubs a lot of people the wrong way. If something new is coming, fine. It may be too counterproductive to carry on in the old way, but it doesn't mean that cities and towns that used their revenues to provide public libraries for their citizens were wrong. If you look, for example, at what the New York Public Libraries made possible in their heyday, you would be astonished at all the scientists and scholars who got their start there.
Don't get me wrong. They aren't terrible. It'd just be a waste of resources to keep building more of them.
As a practical matter, it's far easier to bootleg a movie than it is to scan in all the pages of a book.
Well, this is sort of a late post, but I just read this topic. Well, I'm in school to be a librarian, and I've been on Freerepublic for 2 years. I hope that provides people with some hope.
I just wanted to say that I enjoyed your intelligent, thoughtful post. At one point you said:
"We cannot be a free nation if we do not have an educated and informed population."
Maybe I'm wearing tinfoil here, but it would make sense for those who are not particularly interested in personal liberty (particularly for the least financially well off Americans) to want to close down public libraries. Libraries give people who can't afford access to computers (a little more expensive than books) the oportunity to get online and become more informed about their nation and their world.
Hey, if not for computer labs in public libraries, some folks might not be able to access Freerepublic.
:-)
Freemarketeers would call you a socialist as the public libraries are the abomination for them. The only permissible function of the government in their eyes is the taxpayer founded protection/enhancement of private wealth - police, courts, prisons and army (plus corporate welfare).
They would love to privatize roads if they could, with the toll booths on every exit.
Or a worshipper of free market. Or both.
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.