Libraries, and How They Work

For the average person: Library use is simple. Once a week, or maybe once every two weeks if you’re a remarkably slow reader, you go to the library and get the next poorly written, ½ inch thick novel of your chosen genre. Perhaps a slimy romance, action flick or sci-fi, it really doesn’t matter. You read it (amazingly enough, since an American who doesn’t watch TV in every spare moment is rare) and return it in a timely manner. No pesky announcements about how much money you currently owe to the poor library system when you try to check out your next cheap novel masquerading as literature. No sheepish feeling as you realize that you kept a copy of one of the most ridiculously over-used plot-lines past your allotted three weeks and probably deprived 2 other people of the mind-numbing blandness contained in those tortured pages. Lighthearted and carefree, you skip home to enjoy your next piece of cotton-candy reading.


For the serious reader: Library use is difficult. First of all, they don’t have half of the books you want to read at your branch, and you have to request them. Once your book of real literature written before the days of TV and dumbed down Americans arrives, you take it home and dive in. The only problem is, no matter how fast a reader you are, you really can’t finish an unabridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo in less than three weeks, unless you have absolutely nothing better to do than read all day long. So the appointed due date arrives, and you try to take advantage of this convenience called “renewal.”


Can I side track for a moment? Why do they give you a due date and fines if you’re also allowed to just renew the book? Think about that as I proceed.


So you’re trying to renew your book. Since you can do that from the comfort of your own home on the internet, you take a moment from reading your wonderful piece of intelligent literature to utilize the library website. But once you click the “renew” button, you get a little red sentence announcing that you can’t renew your book because someone else has requested it! Unlike the average reader of average intelligence might, you don’t sigh and resign yourself to going to the library to return the book before you finish reading it. You resolve to finish as soon as possible, but fines or no fines, you will finish the book. After all, you can’t give up what must be the only library copy of this great work of fiction before you’ve devoured every well-phrased sentence and breathed a sigh of contentment at the satisfactory ending. Somewhere around a dollar into your fine, you start wondering how much you’re going to have to pay. So you get back onto the library website and look up the book in the handy-dandy library catalog. When you check the number of requests, and how many copies of the book are available in the system, you see that there are actually 5 checked in copies of THE EXACT SAME BOOK available to be shipped anywhere that’s desired, and you call the library to complain. “Oh, yes,” the librarian calmly informs you, “the computer program does that for some reason. If you try to renew it now, it will work.” “Great,” you say, “then can you forgive my fine?” “No, I’m sorry,” the librarian says, “I can’t do that.” You bite your tongue, hang up politely and decide that it’s worth it to buy every single piece of literature that you ever want to read in the future. And when you finally finish The Count of Monte Cristo, you go buy a copy of it, because it was just that good.