I have always loved\u00a0public libraries.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The library was always a little like church, wasn't it?\u00a0 You had to be quiet and you had to respect the fellow patrons.\u00a0 But you could stroll through the library on any weekend day and find tables of people with books spread out around them.\u00a0 They were clearly working on some research paper or project.\u00a0 You could walk the aisles and find a couple of friends chuckling quietly over the pages of some slightly scandalous book they were checking out on the sly.\u00a0 Or you could have real fun and take a tour through the kid's section.\u00a0 There you'll see the little boy tearing down the aisle back to Mom, excited to share his newly discovered book.<\/p>\n
The public library has always been everyman's temple of knowledge.\u00a0 And I was always every(wo)man.\u00a0 Oh, I know that out there somewhere are folks who grew up rich or at least well off.\u00a0 They rarely visited a library.\u00a0 If they wanted to read a new book, they'd go to a bookstore and buy it.\u00a0 Why borrow when you could buy?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Well, I borrowed because I couldn't buy.\u00a0 I grew up POOR - very, very poor.\u00a0\u00a0Can't buy groceries, holes in the floor kind of poor.\u00a0\u00a0Bill collectors calling kind of poor. There were many things that got sacrificed out of necessity - but books were never amongst those things.\u00a0 Thanks to the public library, the wonderful world of books was always\u00a0something I didn't have to sacrifice.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then life moved on and despite our poverty, my Mama (God Bless Her Soul) worked very hard to be sure I got an education.\u00a0 I did college and law school.\u00a0 If I ended up as a writing kind of \"scholarly\" lawyer instead of a rich ole' trial lawyer, well that surely wasn't my Mama's fault.\u00a0 She gave me the world and even though driving terrified her, at least once a week she'd load me in the car and drive me to the library.\u00a0 She never checked out a book that I recall, likely because her life was too full of\u00a0taking care of 2 houses and her sick parents.\u00a0 But she made sure I worked at my schoolwork and she made those weekly trips to the library for me to make sure that the world of books would be my world.<\/p>\n
Things went\u00a0pretty well after law school.\u00a0 I was never rich but for many years I\u00a0met one of my most important goals - I was never poor either.\u00a0 That was true for most folks for a lot of years, I think.\u00a0 We became a country of folks who could afford to go to the bookstore and buy.\u00a0 During all those years the library was still there and I'd pass one and remember when.\u00a0 But you know, it really is true - everything old becomes new again.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Because the road to the future took an unexpected detour - it looped around and ran back through the past.\u00a0\u00a0Many people, like me, became poor again.\u00a0 And I find myself in my Mama's shoes - pushing and doing and helping to make it possible for my eldest to get his college education. (My youngest has his last year of middle school and then high school ahead before it's his turn.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
Books were one of the luxuries it became tough to afford.\u00a0 But my hubby made it so much easier -\u00a0the wonderful man got me a Sony Pocket\u00a0e-reader<\/a> for Christmas and\u00a0I found bunches of great free ebooks<\/a> all around the internet.\u00a0 Then he and my eldest got me\u00a0gift cards\u00a0to the Sony store for Mother's Day.\u00a0 I've been hoarding\u00a0those e-dollars like a miser.\u00a0 Back in the olden, golden days, I'd have plunked down $40 at a bookstore without batting an eye and a couple of weeks later I'd have gone back and done it again.\u00a0 But not now.\u00a0 Now I've been holding onto those gift dollars.\u00a0\u00a0But I always go to the Sony Store to check out what books they're offering for free each week (and to see how my books\u00a0are selling at Sony\u00a0through Smashwords<\/a>).\u00a0<\/p>\n That's how I re-discovered the library.\u00a0 Last week, when I checked the Sony Store<\/a> they had a link to a new program<\/a> that connects Sony Ereaders\u00a0directly to the owner's local public library. If you own an ereader and it handles Epub or Adobe books, I invite you to check out the new future for our old friend.\u00a0 \u00a0If you're just now looking to buy an ereader, don't be lured by the\u00a0false incentives of Wi-Fi or 3G.\u00a0 Remember, the basic goal of the device is to give you access to the most books from the most places.\u00a0 I don't know how Kindle or Nook does at that, but I know that Sony is da\u00a0bomb.\u00a0\u00a0Sony's use of open source epub\u00a0gives me a magic carpet I can ride right back to the library.<\/p>\n I went to Chapin Memorial Library<\/a> in Myrtle Beach last Monday and got a new library card. I was so tickled by the whole process that I made the librarians do more than smile - they grinned.\u00a0 I work in the city limits of Myrtle but my home is not in the city, so it cost me $20.00.\u00a0 But boy howdy, that was money well spent.\u00a0 Then I went home Monday night and logged onto the library website, plugged in my account number and my pin and a\u00a0splendiferous thing happened.\u00a0 The world of books came to me, on my schedule.\u00a0 No more car rides required.\u00a0<\/p>\n I logged onto the site and snagged\u00a0one of Jayne Anne Krentz's Arcane Society books<\/a>.\u00a0 I love the series but have missed most of them because yeah, that's right.\u00a0\u00a0 Reality bites.\u00a0 I also snagged one of Nora Roberts Bride quartet<\/a>.\u00a0 You can\u00a0have 5 ebooks checked out at any one time, but I started with 2.\u00a0 I'm reading the Krentz book now and it is - like all of the author's work - simply fabulous.\u00a0<\/p>\n To get the books, I plugged in my Sony Pocket to the USB socket of my laptop, clicked the download button and then the open button.\u00a0 I had some trouble getting the books to download at first.\u00a0 I think that was caused by some security settings.\u00a0 I believe that\u00a0an update had somehow\u00a0turned the pesky XP firewall back on.\u00a0 Once I turned it off, went back and tried again, the books transferred right from the library to my Sony Reader.\u00a0<\/p>\n Any ebooks I\u00a0check out will stay on my ereader for 14 days.\u00a0 I can return them earlier (and I think I can check them out again).\u00a0 If I forget to return them, they'll check themselves back in at the 14 day mark.\u00a0 And Eureka - no more overdue fees.\u00a0That was always one of the hardest parts of checking books out of the library, especially in a big reading family like mine.\u00a0 Inevitably, in gathering the books together to return, we'd forget one or two and then - the overdue fees would commence.<\/p>\n In the efuture, it'd be easy for\u00a0public libraries\u00a0to become museums of sorts. They could have so very easily become places parents would drive their kids to see, just for the experience.\u00a0 I can imagine a father\u00a0explaining library cards to a son; saying\u00a0that once upon a time,\u00a0you had to go to this big place, act like you were in church, locate\u00a0the\u00a0books, lug them home and remember to lug them back or pay the penalty.\u00a0<\/p>\n I can imagine the little boys eyes getting big and wide. He'd say, \"Wow!\u00a0 Life in the olden days sure was tough.\"<\/p>\n But in a lot of really great ways, I think librarians are just like my Mama.\u00a0 They are tough, caring folks who are bound and damned determined to make it possible for everyone to ride the magic carpet.\u00a0 The new elibrary system gives my old friend a new future, and I think that's grand.<\/p>\n I also think it's a very hopeful sign to people, like me, who are anxious to carve out new futures, different futures, better futures.\u00a0<\/p>\n As always, the library will show us the way.\u00a0 If we pay attention, we might learn a lesson that'll help us out in life more than anything we'll ever find in the pages of a book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have always loved\u00a0public libraries.\u00a0 The library was always a little like church, wasn't it?\u00a0 You had to be quiet and you had to respect the fellow patrons.\u00a0 But you could stroll through the library on any weekend day and find tables of people with books spread out around them.\u00a0 They were clearly working on ...continue reading \"HOLLA At Chapin Library – A New Future For An Old Friend\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1158"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1169,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158\/revisions\/1169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}