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Sadly (at least in my opinion, sadly), as of 1/1/2012, the Hennepin County library system in Minnesota has terminated all non-resident use of the system for obtaining ebooks.......
I liked HC because they had a 15 book request limit instead of a THREE book limit (honestly, THREE? With wait times in the months for popular titles, THREE?) of my local library system.
I called and the librarian with whom I spoke told me it was done because of the "sudden" huge increase in the popularity of e-readers, to only support the taxpayers of Hennepin county.... Reading between the lines, I suspect this really meant some library board members got stuck with long wait times for titles they wanted and shoved through an emergency change to kick out all the unwashed interlopers from other counties...
My guess is that all the other counties will do, or have already done, the same thing so that everybody can be a parochial as possible.
In conversation with one of the local librarians, I was told that their budget for new books has been cut by 25%...
And yes, every library web site I've hit since 12/25 has shown a HUGE performance slowdown... And it's persisting.
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