A Country Without Libraries

[metta]

A Country Without Libraries

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/may/18/country-without-libraries/

 

[pat grimshaw]

Most libraries in Australian cities are misused as social centres for poor people who have recently arrivedfrom Hong Kong, Bombay and Shanghai. They eat, excrete and sleep in our libraries.

 

[SLOPPYSECONDS]

Countrys with libarararrreeys twats

so there ya go

cue Internet what hint HA

 

[Spiff]

So sad. Where on earth will I be able to go to for public gay sex with strangers?

 

[Sigma-taylor-E]

libraries are literally the greatest source of Information! and they are free! I love NYC for it's huge library system, which i would probably go crazy without.

 

[looseliam]

Hmm, this reminds me of some book.

A book about life with no books

hmmm...

 

[metta]

^
I will have to go there. Lived here my whole life and I have never been to that one. I have been to the Library Tower, which includes their air space. Looks like a beautiful building.

I have always loved the Pasadena library

 

[chrisrobin]

I heard on the news tonight that at amazon.com, e-books are outselling the old fashioned kind. Scary.

 

[pat grimshaw]

… Looks like a beautiful building. …

I agree but libraries are like hospitals, they have to be functional

 

[LilBit]

As long as there are colleges and universities, there will be libraries. That doesn't help people who don't live near a college campus, unfortunately.

 

[braex27]

Very sad. I love my libraries.

 

[Mrbrightside976]

I wouldn't mind all that much, i prefer to buy my books at Barnes and Nobles. Now if you take away that, then i'll be sad.

 

[star-warrior]

When I heard about Google and other institutions photocopying books to make them available in digitised form, and that many of these were rare out of print ones at that, I was quite pleased from a research point of view having access to many old tomes.

Sadly, they began disappearing as whole books became off limits as private companies began to reprint old books and assign to them ISBN and assert their copyright over books in the public domain. Google just cut us off, as there were too many for them to verify whether or not those companies did have a legitimate right to do so.

I bought a book published by LLC publishers, and it turned out to be worthless. This print-on-demand service was exploiting the above, as well as lifting Wikipedia articles to print, it was nothing more than a big old scam.

Here's an interesting article about this, it's called CopyFraud.

To have a country without books is sad, but to be denied access to public domain material due to some companies exploiting the lack of regulation or Google's handling of it, well, it's extraordinarily shameful, especially when they're profiting and making scholars and students suffer throughout the world.