Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Download In Progress...


I was telling my young friend Megan about Saturday’s wonderful Book Festival at the Hammond Library. There were hundreds of people milling about, talking to authors, stopping at booths, and eating free hamburgers,
“Really?” Megan replied. “Nobody goes to the library anymore.”
“That’s not so. There were lots of folks there.”
“Most everybody gets their books on Kindle or downloads them from someplace.”
“Now you can download books from the library,” I said. That’s one of the new innovations put in by Barry Bradford, Director, who has done an amazing job, bringing the library into the 21st century. “Do you ever read the classics?”
“Oh, sure. Harry Potter.”
“Captain Ahab?”
“Who is he?”
            I recall my father telling my sister and me on more than one occasion: “If you have the company of a good book, you will never be lonely.”
“So, if you don’t read, how do young people entertain themselves?” I asked.
“We have our tablets and our phones. We can read books, play games, send messages, talk to friends.”
I have to have a book. I like turning the pages, feeling the texture of the paper, dog-earing one corner, underlining a particularly beautiful passage. I like placing favorites in my bookshelves where I can take them down and read them again and again. When I moved from the big country house to the little house in town, I made a conscious decision that since my new space was limited every fifth book had to go, so I donated them. Two days later I was back, retrieving a few that I was crazy to let go.  
At a recent book club, a white-haired member looked through her eye glasses, turned up her hearing aid and asked me where she could get a copy of my latest book, Pohainake Parish.
“It’s at bookstores and libraries,” I replied.
“Oh, honey, I’d have to get in the car and drive to those places. Can I download it from Kindle or Nook?”
“Absolutely,” I replied, thinking libraries have to cope with this new development and the competition is stiff, and even the old people are getting into it.
But for me, who still lives in the dark ages, there’s no substitute. I love the library.



For information on events at the library click here.


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