Monday, September 13, 2010

Library Woes

After spending some time using the online catalog to search for books at the Chattanooga-Hamilton County library, I am realizing how spoiled I was by the library in Charlotte.

I have a lengthy list of books I would like to read. In Charlotte, I would look up the book I was interested in reading {online}, request it {electronically} and then go pick it up when it was available {after I received an email notification}. In theory, the system works in a similar way in Chattanooga. However, for every 5 books I try to look up in the Chattanooga system, only one or two exist. This is very discouraging to me. 

Even worse is the fact that Daniel just received his official relocation package from TVA and we have decided to go ahead and move to Alabama. We will most likely live in Scottsboro {with a population of less than 15,000} and I have a feeling that the public library there be an even smaller selection of books to choose from.

I suppose my alternatives would be to 1) purchase some type of electronic reading device {like Kindle} in order to download books from the internet {but I think I would miss the tangible nature of reading an actual book}; 2) buy books from a bookstore {not a good option since I rarely reread books and I am generally too frugal to spend money on books}; or 3) join an online book exchange like BookIns {since I don't buy many books, I don't have many to exchange and I don't know that the books I am interested in reading would exist in such an exchange format}.

What's a girl {who loves to read} to do???

4 comments:

  1. Post a list of the books that you want on line, and mabe the book fairy will bring some of them to you for X-mas, your birthday, etc.

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  2. The book fairy would be busy since I try to read at least one book/week. I don't necessarily want to own every book I read {esp since I rarely re-read anything} but there are some books that I wouldn't mind the book fairy bringing me...

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  3. cheree - i have been fighting the kindle movement, too. but...everyone i know that owns a kindle loves it and fought the same battle (physical pages versus digital). mabye daniel just needs to buy you an ipad :-)

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  4. haha! We just spent a pretty penny on a brand new MacBook Pro for me, so I don't think he would agree to anymore technology expenditures right now :)

    I love my books, but I may be forced to go with technology just because of my rural location :(

    ReplyDelete

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