Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Buy books? Sure, buy lots of the ones I have written. Read books? Go to the library. It works quite well, and you have already paid your part of the cost.

I read yet another blog post the other day about how awful it is that Americans don’t buy and read books. I’m not sure the source of these we-don’t-read-anything-of-any-substance statistics. This story says that 3 billions books were sold in an average year. With 300 millions Americans running about, that comes to ten books bought for every man woman and child in America.

Regardless of how we count books sold, let’s move to books read in a year. I can buy a book, read it, and loan it to a dozen people who then read it. That only counts as one book bought in that year. Hmmm.

And then there is the library. The library is a building full of books. The people who operate the library will loan you a book for a few weeks. If you want the book longer, they will loan it to you for a few more weeks. It is amazing.

When I was a kid, I attended a small private school. This was not a school for rich kids. Most of us attending were charity cases in that we attended for little or no cost (another story for another time). This little poor private school took us to the library often as the little poor private school didn’t have the money to buy many books.

There are public libraries. This is what most of us see on the street. If you pay taxes, you fund the public library. Since you pay for the library to exist, you might as well use it. Funny thing is, when the economy is bad, see for example right now, use of public libraries goes up (see this story and this one as well).

There are libraries at colleges. These are only open to people associated with the college. Well, that isn’t exactly true. Most college libraries are accessible in that a non-college person can walk onto the campus, walk into the library, pull a book from the shelf, and read it while sitting there. Maybe that isn’t always practical, but it is possible. A person could also inquire as to how involved you would have to be to qualify to borrow a book from a college library.

I live in Reston, Virginia. We have a Fairfax County Public Library here. It is a pretty good library in that it has a lot of books, convenient hours and location, and has inter-library loan with all the other libraries in Fairfax County.

Oh, inter-library loan. Some libraries do this. If you want a book that they don’t have, the library staff will check with another library. That library will loan the book to your library who will then loan the book to you. That is pretty nice.

Then there is the big one – the Library of Congress. Lucky for me, I can go to that one in person. It isn’t convenient. They won’t loan me a book to take home. I have to sit in the reading room, an awesome place, to read the book. And it really isn’t that convenient for me. It is at least an hour commute and the Metro costs $5 each way, and all that stuff.

The Library of Congress has an inter-library loan program. Perhaps your local library can borrow a book from the Library of Congress and loan it to you. That means you can read almost any book ever printed.

All this library talk is perhaps bad news for authors (like me) and publishers. It is, however, great news for the vast majority of us.