Back Talk

Column Editor: Ann Okerson (Advisor on Electronic Resources Strategy, Center for Research Libraries) <aokerson@gmail.com>

I got my library card!

Those are beautiful words, aren’t they? Didn’t many of us exclaim them with delight when we were children? When most of us were little, that was probably the first card with our name on it that we ever got for ourselves, giving us new power we had not known before. Checking a book out, writing our name on the card in the back of the book, seeing the date stamp — and then being allowed to walk right out the door with a precious book (our local library had a maximum of ten for children, so I needed my father to help me carry them home): that was a high point of our lives.

Well, I hit that high point again yesterday.

You know how life goes nowadays. We move a few times, we get busy, we may not live where there’s a public library on our natural daily routes, and the old habit slips away. And in our nowadays, we’ve probably acquired a “device” that lets us buy eBooks (or maybe I should say “buy” eBooks) and read them anywhere. That’s me. My Kindle account is full of oodles of books, and I long ago lost the ability to organize and manage them effectively, even though I read the latest acquisitions all the time. (Don’t get me started on how bad Amazon’s metadata are and how weak the interface on Kindle pages and devices is for “shelving” one’s books.) But my general reading life is much like it was in the days when I had to stack the print books I had bought two or three deep on bookshelves and wonder what I would do with them, only now the stacks are muddled together on my computer.

Of course, I think that if I can’t truly own a book, a book to do with as I wish — for example, I can’t really share it with others — the prices charged for buying eBooks are outrageous. So I subscribe to a free daily alerting service called BookBub (http://www.bookbub.com) that lets me know what titles fitting my profile (think “approval plan”) are on sale right now for $1.99 or $2.99, and I “buy” and read a lot of those. And I will pay full price for an author whose book I really want.

So when I decided lately that I wanted to read that Jonathan Kellerman mystery from a few years ago (it never went on sale with Amazon or anywhere else), I finally got stubborn and decided to take another approach. I got my library card!

This time it was at the Tempe Public Library, a huge and handsome building here in Arizona. I marched boldly in, presented my driver’s license, and in under five minutes I was handed a handsome plastic card with an Arizona bald eagle on it. (Wait a minute: how did I get that first card when I was a child without showing photo ID? Hmmm. I guess my father signed for me.) And there I was, feeling the same rush of pride and power that I had felt so long ago.

I immediately walked out of the building, drove directly home, fired up my laptop, and went to the library’s website. Ten minutes later, I had checked out my first book (that Kellerman I was looking for!) and figured out how to download it. (Pro tip for Tempe residents: go with the Kindle option for download. The EPUB option leads one into a tangled world of Adobe Digital Editions that I just couldn’t figure out.) While I was at it, I put myself on the waiting list for several more books, some in hardcover, some as eBooks. Now I felt the happiness of a reader’s power for real. (Already this morning, I cleared the waiting list for one of my “hold” books!)

Why do library books make us so happy? Well, for one thing, they extend our financial reach to more books than we’d ever afford ourselves. We can browse and sample easily, taking home (or checking out electronically) several titles to sniff around in and see what we really want to read or what’s a keeper for purchasing. Books are beautiful things and being surrounded by more of them is always a good thing.

And yes, things have changed. I’ve been struck, as my new wealth pours down upon me, by a nagging question. If I don’t really own the eBooks I “buy” (and I’ve bought many hundreds), what have I gotten myself into here? I have all the same persistent annoyance and frustration of being surrounded by mountains of books, but at least in the old days I could bundle them up and take them off to give to others. When I lived in New Haven CT, the good people at New Haven Reads (https:// newhavenreads.org/) were only too happy to help find good new homes for such books, and I did notice that the Tempe Public library has a library bookshop just inside the front door that doubtless helps in the same way. Those Amazon eBooks that make me so cranky — well, they sit there on my tablet, in a heap more confusing than ever my old bookshelves were, and they can’t go anywhere (also, I do have to delete some of them when I reach the limits of my storage space). Since the first Kindle book came into our house in 2009 (Jerome K. Jerome’s hilarious Three Men in a Boat), Amazon thinks we’ve bought about 1,200 eBooks. A few are the kind you’ll go back to for reference or rereading, but the vast majority of them are collections of 1s and 0s that have lost all their usefulness to me and can’t be useful to anybody else. How did we get to this place?