4 ms·
My wife is a librarian and I do think there are some points that have been glossed over. Book are still super important. In fact not everyone can afford to buy
by STHayden 16y ago
My wife is a librarian and I do think there are some points that have been glossed over.
Book are still super important. In fact not everyone can afford to buy books. Esp in large metropolitan area where there is any sort of impoverish population. They can't afford book let alone a kindle.
That neuroscience journal might not have been on the racks but I'll bet there is a good chance it was in one of the online databases that libraries pay good money to have access to. Feel free to check out the prices online and I'll bet most will pass on paying for it your self.
Also illustrated Children's Books are something even parents in Suburbia take advantage of as children go through them quickly and they are very expensive to buy.
That said many libraries hold on to books long past their relevance. And more space and time should be devoted to public events, like video games, and education, like the class my wife teaches "how to sigh up for email" and "learning to use the mouse".
- barrkel 16y agoIndeed. I feel offended when I have to spend (usually) over 5 GBP for a Kindle edition of a 20-year old book, and get a poorly formatted, poorly indexed piece of text that someone at a publisher has spent perhaps 20 minutes looking over, judging from the quality of the product, when I can go to a library and borrow it for free, or go to a second-hand bookstore and buy it for 50p. The prices of books on Kindle are simply scandalous for the quality of the product and the lack of a secondary market. You're lucky if you get both a table of contents with hyperlinks and chapter markers that work; if you're unlucky, you end up with something the length of a Dostoyevsky that you have to binary search through with page number gotos.