I'm sorry, but the local libraries are there for a reason: to USE them.

Anyone who says that people shouldn't use them is just being greedy.

I've always wondered who the people are who buy hardcover novels. Why pay that premium for something you can get for free by waiting?

When I was 17 and had just gotten my first job I bought a first release Grisham novel in hardback for $25. I will never do that again!!

There are a few authors whose books I know I will read many times, over many years, and will therefore buy in hardcover. Although usually I end up getting them from a $10 book club.

But mostly I use the library. Now, with Barnes & Noble's free wifi, I can browse books at the store, log into my library account on my netbook, and place holds on the books I want to reserve right on the spot.

I buy hardcover novels. I buy paperback novels. I also go to the library almost every week.

I don't think the Sun is taking into account that not everyone has the same tastes or interests. Me? I love books, not just novels, but all kinds of books. (Except Jodi Picoult, I do agree with them there.) I have a fairly extensive library because of it. I don't care about getting drunk, car detailing or lotto tickets.

Should you scale things back when times are tough? Sure. The Library, used book stores, it's all good. But, in general, scaling back in tough times is sensible.

I also think the Sun is pretty glib with their advice. They say pets are expensive (and they can be.) However, that's a reason not to get new ones, but it's not a reason to simply dump the ones you've already chosen to be responsible for. Of course, the Sun doesn't make any effort to be specific about that.

Why is the library advice the controversial item instead of the pet one?

I can't believe it's "absurd" to go to the library. When the Hell did that happen?

Why is the library advice the controversial item instead of the pet one?
I can't believe it's "absurd" to go to the library. When the Hell did that happen?

That's fine if, you know, local libraries haven't ALSO been hit by the economy. They're often first to have their budgets slashed when municipal budgets are cut. I know around here the 6 or 7 county libraries have each lost a day or two per week. They were already dividing up new books between them (that is, each library got a small but different selection of new books rather than each getting a large pile of overlapping titles) so if the library that has the book you want is closed you may have to wait a while even for interlibrary loan transfers.

It's also great advice if you read books libraries are likely to carry. If you have more esoteric tastes or if your local library doesn't have a huge selection of new books, you may be out of luck there, too. And since library budgets have been cut, that means that if you aren't into best-sellers they may not ever have the books you want to read.

But, if they DO, libraries are great! It's a shame they've been hit so hard. I love local independent booksellers (I hardly ever go to chain bookstores unless I'm traveling and there's nothing else around), but I'd rather see a local bookstore fail than see libraries close. (Before local independent booksellers get mad at me, keep in mind that I have thousands and thousands of books at home and don't want to see bookstores fail either. It's like, if I had to choose between having my fingers cut off or my feet. Neither is a good choice.)

Libraries are a fantastic and often-overlooked resource. They let people who might never read books read all they can, and that's nothing to sneer at.

@Rectilinear Propagation: Gah, sorry for the double post!

@rdclark: Most new hardcovers end up in the bargain section at B&N within 18 months. A $25 hardcover will sell for $6-$8 in the bargain section, so it can pay off to wait for it to appear in the bargain section.

@perruptor: some people - like me - really appreciate hardcover books. I collect them, in fact. I have several signed first editions that are worth many times what I payed for them. Not that I treat them as investment pieces - I just like books. And I've always wanted to have a library someday.

paperbackswap.com FTW.

Anyone with half a brain knows the things on that list are money wasters. Duh. One they failed to mention is that a lot of people have canceled their newspaper subscriptions to save money.

So newspapers just discovered the local library, huh?

Here's another tip: you can get the Baltimore Sun there for free too and not have to pay for that either.

Libraries are great, but not all libraries are equally great. Some aren't good for anything but the latest trendy novels, others aren't able to offer much to anyone interested in reading anything printed recently.

I know my private collection has areas that are far superior to the same sections in my local library, and I rarely buy any new books; 95% of my library was acquired secondhand. Thrift shops, used book shops, auctions, flea markets, used book sales -- I rarely spend more than a dollar a book, and while I collect older books I see plenty of new ones in the same places. Most of what I have isn't available in my local library system, and a good portion of it isn't available in any library system. Sorry, Baltimore Sun -- I believe I'll keep trading my pocket change for books.

I am suprised that the Sun didn't mention it but for those who live in Maryland or the D.C. metro area, take a look at book thing: [www.bookthing.org]

Free books people!

@solipsistnation:

I get around my libraries shortages by buying the books I want used on Amazon, then donating them to the library when I'm done. That way, the library grows to accommodate others.

I'm not very pleased with the approach that they took to pets. A living creature isn't like a magazine subscription; you can't just cancel your obligation to it with minimal thought and be done with it.
Times are getting tough (I'm looking for a second job to cover some bills incurred with a family emergency) but we will not give up our pets. Right now, the happiness that we get from them is more than worth the price we pay for cat and snake food.

@h3llc4t: I wasn't too thrilled with that entry either.

However, it is a fact that shelters are seeing more and more people getting rid of a cat or dog because they don't feel they can afford it anymore. That's pretty sad, if you ask me. A proper pet is a member of your family.

Besides which, isn't there a lot of evidence about the psychological benefits of having a pet?

Haha, okay. You try telling a devout Jodi Picoult fan to wait on buying a new book of hers. See how that goes.

/bookstore experience

@amuro98: And turning it over to a shelter is better than the alternative -- rural dumping. Cheap salve for an underdeveloped conscience. Apparently they can PRETEND pets dumped in rural areas don't die in horrible ways, while the fact that most shelters euthanize when overfull is too hard for them to cope with.

(All three of my cats were outdoor dumped and all three, fortunately, rescued and taken to vets/shelters for adoption.)

@amuro98: But that photo was adorable.

This is about the fourth or fifth time that this site has eaten my comment.

You can always buy books used, even new ones. You have to wait a few weeks or a month. If you don't have any attachment to the author's works, and don't intend to keep your purchase, you can donate it to the library or sell it somewhere else.

New releases at libraries often have huge wait lists. Even non-new release books, like "Outliers" have lots of people waiting (I'm 346th in line). Is your $15 saved really worth waiting up to six months for a book?

I use paperbackswap.com and while it ends up costing me money in postage to mail books, it's a great moneysaver for a bookaholic like myself.

Honestly, there are three or four authors that I will always pay full price to have their books the very day that they are released to the public. I think that everyone knows that the story will be the same whether or not you read it the first day it is released or much later when you finally get to see it on the shelves at the library or a used bookstore. When you have fans that are willing to pay full price for the book when it is first out, I think that is where the most money is made so the authors and publishers can keep going. So hurray for the people who wait in line and are the first ones to tell everyone else how great the latest releases are - I think it is great to have those kind of readers who can afford to be first, it fuels the rest of the trickle down industry of used bookstores, etc. And I am also thankful for the libraries and used bookstores for the other authors that I follow that I can wait to see what they have written.

On a related note, I work in a library. Try us for cd's and dvd's too. You would be surprised at how wide the selection is now at the local library systems.

@h3llc4t: yeah, the rescue i volunteer with is overrun with people who don't want to keep their cats right now. not just kittens, but more than usual adult cats.

granted some of them are because the people have lost their homes. but not all the vast majority of them by any means.

so much overrun actually that there's a special on the adoption fee for the summer at less than half the cost it actually takes to vet and feed all the cats because the head of the rescue would rather find the cats homes than have them crowded into any foster care we can find for months on end

[alleycatsandangels.blogspot.com]

@perruptor: I guess it's the same as going to the movie theater or renting a DVD. You can wait and see it a little smaller and without the frills or go to the theater on release night...

@solipsistnation: "If you have more esoteric tastes or if your local library doesn't have a huge selection of new books, you may be out of luck there, too."

Yep, I know how that is. The local library here caters almost exclusively to three groups of people: summer residents (mostly retired folks who have moved here from Florida), middle-aged and older women, and young children. That means they have loads of certain types of books, such as mystery and romance novels, cookbooks, best-selling fiction, and children's books and not a whole lot of everything else. Sure they have a pretty large selection of books, but let's say you're into science fiction (like me). If you're looking for a specific book that is not a best-seller, they won't have it. They allow you to make purchase requests, but out of 8 requests I've made in the past year, they only actually purchased one.

My local library has also cut days and hours. One branch is closed on Saturdays now and the main branch closes earlier on certain days. I'm sure they are buying less stuff now too, so to read ANY of the books that I want to read, I have to either buy them or do without.

@JuliB:
I love paperbackswap.com. It's great. The postage you spend sending out a book is not much if you send media mail, even if it's a hardback.

@clementine: "On a related note, I work in a library. Try us for cd's and dvd's too. You would be surprised at how wide the selection is now at the local library systems."

I've read that many library systems do have very good selections of DVDs and CDs. I just wish my local library was one of them. They get in a lot of very, very obscure titles that appear to never get checked out. At least they're always there on the shelf when I browse through them. I often wonder if the people who purchase things for this particular library system are buying what the people in the county actually read and watch or if they're buying based on their own personal interests.

I have a wonderful local library that thankfully hasn't been visibly impacted by budget cuts. In addition, for $25 per year, I can check materials out of a library in a neighboring township; I do that for materials my local library doesn't stock. And the dollar section at Half Price Books is a treasure hunt sometimes.

I avoid new releases at the library since so many people want to read them; I just add titles to an ongoing list of books to read and check out older books in the meantime.

I seldom read books more than once, especially fiction, so buying books is nonsensical. The library's where it's at (and has been so since I was a kid).

@perruptor: We use the library for most stuff, but occasionally there's something we know we'll read/use multiple times (ie some beloved recipe books, or favourite authors with books in a series where you might re-read them as new ones come out, or just to re-read later because of being so awesome), and we might not want to wait months for to then have to read quickly. So we buy those ones.

Also, my husband is a mathematician/computer programmer, so he's got tons of academic books to which he frequently refers. Many of those are hardcover and he needs them soon after release and can't wait for paperback.

So there are valid reasons to buy new hardcover. But yeah, most of the time, the library is plenty good for us.

@ospreyguy: These days you get better frills if you wait for the loaded DVD set. If you care about the movie enough for that stuff, that is.

@pecan 3.14159265: Not if you want it right away, but there are plenty of books where the wait isn't so bad. Also, I've found that with the Austin library at least, if the hold queue gets insane, all of a sudden a bunch more copies will appear and the wait time goes from months to weeks overnight.

Mind you, waiting six months to see the second season of Dexter when Costco had it for $25 was a bit annoying. Still...I'm sitting on the "on order" page for season 3 so I can get in the queue fast once it's up. Did that with "Dark Knight" and was fourth in line, forgot with Slumdog Millionaire and was 39th, but there they bought more so I got it in a few weeks.

@clementine: I don't need to ever sign up with Netflix, because Austin's library is so awesome with DVDs. I haven't even had to go to the interlibrary loan thing yet. The only problem is the wait times for popular things...took me six months to get season 2 of Dexter. I've learned to search more often to get in early when things come into the system.

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): Ah, rural dumping. Growing up, I lived across the road from a picturesque red barn, which is prime kitten-dump property. We never had fewer than three cats.

@Hil-fish: Not most. Most of the books that end up in the bargain section are books that didn't sell that well. I used to work in a book store and the hardcover books that we sold 10+ copies of a day - those ones never, ever ended up in the bargain bin.

@dru_zod: Or else they're buying the closeouts from the dollar store that no one wanted.

@Trae:

i use my library not for entertainment but for educational purposes. i go there for the books i dont care to buy, and buy the ones i do. its worked out great for me in the past, and generally i have no problems donating books to the library. I love owning books, and the trick is to know what is worth owning and what isn't.

I love buying fiction whenever i can, but i have no desire to keep recent Tax law volumes in my home...

@kaceetheconsumer:

the frills may be there, but who doesn't like watching something in a giant screen with (usually) decent and proper surround sound? theres something great about going to theaters, but the movie has to be worth watching...

@ephdel: Actually, I prefer the comfort of home more often than not. I get motion sick easily, so I can watch a lot of stuff at home that I simply can't watch on a huge screen.

Plus, nobody talks on their friggin' cell phone in my living room during the movie, which was a HUGE problem when we lived in Las Vegas, enough that we stopped going after being threatened with bodily harm after asking people to stop it, or to stop shouting out spoilers at the screen.

And if I did get interrupted at home, I could pause and rewind.

The only movie I saw in a theatre in the last few years was Wolverine because I could not wait for my hot-man-kicking-ass goodness. But really, I'm living for the DVD so I can pause and drooooooooool.

But I will admit I enjoyed Trilogy Tuesday...but that's because only other hardcore LotR fans came out, so nobody was being a jerk on a phone.

Growing up, I spent my allowance solely on new books for about three years straight. I had the BEST collection of Baby Sitter's Club books on the block.

I do occasionally buy books but I mostly buy them used from my fantastic local library. Unfortunately it feeds my book addiction but I feel less guilty about it because the money goes to a good cause.

I'm all for saving money by using the library, but don't cut out buying new books all together. After all, the authors that write these books you all enjoy actually live off the royalties. Granted, the publisher makes most of the money, but that's all the more reason to support the authors you enjoy by purchasing their books.

I love how we're okay with the RIAA arresting children to save their precious dollar but we act like it's insane to consider actually buying the reading material that you enjoy.

And I can tell you, there are a lot fewer 6 figure authors out there than there are 6 figure rock stars.

Think about it.

@bwcbwc: They actually do have several discs that I have seen at dollar stores, and I mean stores like the Dollar Tree...as in the library paid a whole $1 for the DVD. You know the kind...those very, very cheap DVDs that usually have awful picture and sound quality and come in a little cardboard sleeve.

Don't have children. It takes a few years until you can use them as slave labor.