Quote:
Originally Posted by Alisa
If your mental image when you speak of paper books is the lovely embossed leather-bound volume of yesteryear, ...
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Wrong.
My mental image is a hardback, in a very tattered cover made from strong polyethylene foil and adhesive tape, with spine broken in many places, covers askew and half the pages dislodged and tacked back by a clear adhesive tape. Pages are yellow and musty smelling. On the first page there is a rubber stamp "Property of County Library of ...".
I live in a large town, so there are quite a few libraries here. For many, many years I have been coming to the library at least once a week. The first place to look in was the "just returned" pile waiting to be sorted and placed back to shelves. The most popular books were usually those in the worst shape. Sometimes, very rarely, I scored a book that was recently purchased, but there was usually very long waiting queue for those. And there was no Internet, so we were not informed about all those new books that were being published. So you just went to library and checked out whatever you have found.
This is why I very seldom complain that the XY books is not available as an e-book. I grew up to be an opportunist, so I look at the e-books available at the moment and usually enjoy what I grab. There are wast amounts of free stuff and some of those are surprisingly good. If I do not like it, there are at least a dozen more waiting to be read on my Reader.