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.
The cost (a building, a few thousand books a year, a staff of maybe a dozen) is sufficient to supply a good-sized city with the world's knowledge.
Seems like a reasonable expediture considering the benefits.
Hiya! Clever name BTW. George Lucas would be proud :)
RAH's complete works will never appear online. The copyrights are held by too many people and agencies, some of which are defunct and some of which refuse to relinquish the rights.
E.E. "Doc" Smith's work is under similar constraints.
Both mens' complete works can be found in the LA Public Library.
I for got they used to give us candy too!!
Ahhhhhhhh the memories.....
Hey, sounds good to me...
Me too. Well, okay not really. I smoked pot.
But when I "quit" school, I actually spent more time at the library and learned more on my own than I ever did in school.
That doesn't make any sense. First of all, you can browse at Amazon. Second of all, most people go to the library to find something in particular. Public libraries often don't have what you're looking for.
That neglects to mention that that was the second time the library was sacked and totally destroyed. The first time was in AD 391 when fanatical Christians torched the library and its collection as being heretical. The Library never fully recovered, though much of the collection had been replaced by 642.
However, the major priceless works of antiquity were destroyed by *Christians*, not Muslims. What Omar destroyed was a sad mouldering remnant of what once was.
Islamic Jihad is evil, but Christians were responsible for the major destruction of the library.
The switch to his brain is apparently in the 'On' position. I know, I know, it's terrible.
I can't believe all the half-baked, thoughtless rage on this thread. If the rest of the country's are at all like the ones here in Charlotte, public libraries are a complete waste.
You think everything online is legal and always subject to copyright laws?
I'll bet that despite the measures in place, Revenge of the Sith will be available for download within 12 hours of the first theatrical release.
Again though, I am only playing Devil's Advocate.
No, they are not a waste. There are some absolutely amazing libraries in the United States - some cities have far better ones than others.
As far as I'm concerned, NYC's only possibly redeeming feature is the NY Library.
Library ping.
Libraries and fire departments (almost) always get my vote for funding. About the only "public services" for which I feel I get value received for payment rendered.
NYFD?
"Who ever wrote this is an IDIOT!"
In spades!!
In order for someone to put these works online, they have to have access to the works. RAH's works are mostly long, long out of print, and some of them were never collected anywhere, but they appeared in long vanished magazines like Campbell's "Amazing". LAPL has those in their rare documents section - the only extant copies of them, in some cases.
Putting Revenge Of The Sith online is trivial - it's current, it's already digital, and you could get a take off the monitor in any projection booth. If you want hard, find a paperback second edition copy of "Beyond This Horizon" and put it online complete with the wonderful Golden Age illustrations. I've been looking for that book for a decade now; and the only copies I've seen are in one of two libraries and are in sadly decayed shape. Not available in any store, at any price. I'll wait while you go find one that's in good enough shape to be scanned in. I'm very sure I'm going to be waiting a very long time.
While I understand the negative reaction of most people to this article, my own feelings are not so negative. I only read two kinds of books. Technical books on computers and philosophy. I live in Bradenton, FL and have visited both the Bradenton and Sarasota library. There wasn't a single book in either library that I was interested in. The technical books were all five years out of date and the philosophy section didn't have but a couple of books in it, none of which were worth reading. I know libraries in big cities have a lot to offer, but for most of us in small towns, pickings are slim. As a result, a large amount of my expendable cash goes to Amazon.
" Let your citizens keep their tax money and buy their own books. It's the American way."
I say we dump YOU and keep the books. It's the American way.
What service does the NYFD provide to people who do not live in NYC?
The NY Public Library is a massive archive of historical information, some of which is not available anywhere else.
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