Rain, rain, rain...

[altivo]

Well, there were occasional sun showers, but mostly wet.

Highlight of the day: homemade cookies brought in by a library user. They were made with butter, and very tasty.

Would have been the low point if not so amusing: A different library user who wanted to "borrow" books to read on a Kindle. Obviously she hadn't read the terms of service for her gadget. Even if we were to buy Kindle e-texts, there would be no way for us to load them to user-owned devices. The files are tied to a particular account ID and can't be read by another. I guess she became rather irate about it, though it's hard for me to understand someone willing to spend $400 for a gadget but not willing to pay $5 or $6 for the book to read on it.

Gary is re-reading an old favorite book on computer programming tonight. He just found a scribbled note to himself in the pages. It reminds him to go to Gladstone Park Bakery and Kalinowsky's Deli in Chicago (both are now closed, the bakery recently and the deli years ago,) and to remember to get smoked sausage for our friend Paul (who passed away ten years ago) and to give a bath to his golden retriever, Sasha (who has been gone even longer, about 15 years now.) Not the happiest sort of time capsule to find, I guess. He doesn't know if he did those things, though I imagine he did.

Digging through some very old files at the library, looking for stuff to put in various displays commemorating the 100th anniversary this year. Among other things, we discovered the library director's original application for her first job there, back in 1982. Her comment on seeing it was "Look at that. We still used real typewriters then."

Better than that though, I have squirreled away in my desk drawer a handful of catalog cards that were written by hand with a fountain pen. These survived because some thrifty employee reused them years later by typing on the back sides.

Made me think of my own first full time library job. That would have been in 1972, at Michigan State University. And yes, we definitely used real typewriters, not even the electric kind, back then.

Comments

[equusmaximus.livejournal.com]

1972? Guess I've never paid attention to your Bday before... Back in 1972 I was... eep... I was still in diapers, I guess. For some reason I was thinking 1982, when I'd have been 12, and teaching myself to type on a Commodore Vic-20.

I started learning to type on a manual typewriter that you had to "hunt-and-peck" on, because you had to slam the keys really hard to make them work. That was around age 10, and later my mom allowed me to use her fancy electric typewriter once she was convinced I wouldn't jam all the keys together at once.

Congratultions on the little time-capsule there. :) For me, I think that's one of the reasons I love old computers (old, for me, is a computer from the late 70's or early-to-mid 80's) and the like; They bring back happy memories of my childhood. :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

1982 was indeed when my boss started in library work, but she was a teacher before that. Libraries were my first full time job out of college, though I didn't get my master's degree until much later.

I learned to type in high school. Manual typewriters were what we had, because they were more durable. No hunt and peck, because the keytops were all blank so you had no choice but to learn touch.

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

Actually, not all books are tied to a particular Kindle; only recent books bought from Amazon.

In case you'd like an answer to give folks:

There are a good number of books available in the public domain (expired copyright) or under Creative Commons licensing. ManyBooks is one source of these materials, mostly converted from the work of the Project Gutenberg. Many of the classics of literature are available this way. They're available in many e-formats including Amazon .azw files.

For instance, Wuthering Heights is a new arrival at ManyBooks.

All your patron has to do is download the book, plug the Kindle into the computer with the USB cable, and drop the book file into the "documents" folder on the Kindle.

Now it remains to see what libraries become in the era of technology. I've been reading your posts with interest. I've watched the evolution in the library here: there were books and magazines, then references on CD-ROM, the arrival of computerized catalog, CDs and Movies, computer labs. My library runs computer literacy programs for children. What's going to happen when there's more information on the web than in books?

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

I was just about to suggest ManyBooks myself. I think I've only actually paid for two or three books out of the 100+ I've got on my Kindle.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

This person was only interested in current trendy books on finance and business. Those are not public domain and someone has to pay. She seemed to think that we should just buy the Kindle version for her sole use.

Libraries are, I daresay, a socialist concept that simply escapes the mindset certain people have. "Sharing" is outside their comprehension, so the best they can do to understand our function is that we give things away for free. Literally "free" as in the sense that they shouldn't have to even pay taxes to support our operation and are quite hostile about that aspect. They don't care who pays as long as it isn't their job.

This is the sort of person who likes to say things like, "I don't like your attitude. My taxes pay your salary." A colleague used to offer them a dime and say "Here, you can have your share back."

[equusmaximus.livejournal.com]

I love the way your colleague handled people like that! I just hope he (she?) didn't get in any trouble for it. As a former public servant (transit driver) I used to get that sort of attitude at times, and the rules were we just had to nod and smile.

For what it's worth, I've always loved libraries. While many kids (back in the day) were hanging out in malls or video-arcades, I'd be in the library. So many books, so much knowledge available, and only one lifetime to try to absorb it. 'tain't fair... :)

I always supported my local library, and once I've got things settled out here I intend to get a membership at the local town library as well. :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It's good to hear something positive about libraries. Believe me, such statements are getting very scarce now. We are considered a "waste of tax dollars" and "antiquated rubbish" by many people. (Including, no doubt, that woman who was here with her Kindle yesterday.)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I was aware of this and pointed it out. The user was not interested in "old junk," though, as she put it. She wanted the latest stuff from the best seller lists, and the non-fiction at that. Just an unreasonable expectation generated by a shallow mind, I guess.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

At the present time I still say there is far less information on the web than there is in books. The web has become largely a medium for entertainment and advertising, buying and selling. Utterly commercialized, using it as a sole source of concrete information for research (unless you're studying the web itself) is a bad idea, rather like trying to base a dissertation only on what you could glean from watching television.

Take Google Books, for instance. A lot of people think that it means the end of libraries. All this shows is that they never read a book all the way through from front to back. Most of the books in Google's "digital library" are incomplete, with only selected chapters available. And the reason? Copyright. While technology gives the appearance of moving toward openly available information, lawyers and politicians keep moving in the opposite direction, toward information ONLY for those who pay for it by the paragraph. Want to read it again? Sure, just pay again. That's the goal of some.

The web is a useful tool, but in order to actually use it well, you have to be able to sort DISinformation from real information. That isn't always easy. I'm appalled to see school children being told to use the web as their exclusive source for schoolwork. These kids are completely unable to distinguish between a web site created by someone with a political axe to grind and one that offers sound facts and commentary. Most adults seem not to be much better at that. The attitude of a century ago was "They wouldn't let them print that if it weren't true" and now it's "They wouldn't let them put that on the web if it weren't true." There is no "they" and anyone can say anything on the web and make it look polished, professional, and somehow, "official."

Assuming you didn't understand a controversial topic such as evolution or gay rights, could you use the web to arrive at an unbiased comprehension? It would be very difficult to do so, I think, just as you couldn't rely solely on big newspapers (mostly liberal in their views) or talk radio (mostly right wing populist,) likewise you'd have difficulty in sifting the gold from the pyrite on the web.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

Doncha' just love DRM? ;)

My preferred ebook format would be a basic palm PC, which just read PDFs. But then I am such a minimalist. The trend in computing in the late 90s was interoperability. Now we're seemingly going back to proprietary, which to my mind is a step backwards.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Palm is too tiny for comfortable reading. I have an Ebookwise and like it better than the Kindles I've seen. Ebookwise has been around longer by several years but has a similar arrangement to what Amazon offers. The concept behind DRM doesn't bother me so much as the stupidity of people who think it actually works.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

I'm just barely old enough to still have seen "real" typewriters in use as a kid, myself. *s* Funny how quickly things have changed since then.

And yay, cookies. ^_^

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We still have one typewriter in the library. It's an electric and hasn't been turned on for months, probably. Multipart forms are getting rare, and that was the only thing it got used for any more.

Though the decline of that particular industry must have put people out of work, we never heard much about it. I'm more concerned about the sudden decline in publishing here, affecting newspapers, magazines, and even books. The earlier decline in general literacy was a warning that this was coming of course, but it's still worrying.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

*noddles* I think my parents still have got an electric typewriter, but it's a late model that's almost a small word processor in itself already, with a multi-row LCD display etc.; needless to say, it doesn't get used anymore at all really.

The decline in literacy is a cause for concern, yes, although newspapers in particular seem to be suffering mostly due to other factors as far as I can tell; it seems that there's been a move towards getting your news online, and that in turn has led to an "instant gratification" culture where there's little (or at least less) room anymore for actual research, much less investigative reporting. It's a trend that's visible over here as well; perhaps to a lesser extent (newspapers aren't outright dying yet), but it's there.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That trend is really scary. What I see is people making political, financial, and business decisions based on snippets grabbed out of context from the web. They have no understanding of the overall picture, and are shaping their entire world view based just on whatever sound or text clip happens to hit their brain first or grab their attention. It's like basing your education entirely on tabloid newspapers. You know, those screaming headlines: "Garlic and Honey Cures Cancer" and "Hillary Clinton adopts Space Alien Baby."

[schnee.livejournal.com]

*noddles* The latter of those I actually have no problem with - that'd be pretty much straight out of the Weekly World News or so, and people would know that it's, well, satire. (Right? Please say "yes"...)

The former, though, is a good example; the readiness with which (some) people jump on claims about various foods and their supposed beneficial or detrimental properties never ceases to astound me. I don't want to deny that certain foods (or substances contained therein) *can* have beneficial or detrimental effects, obviously, but the way that people always just follow the latest trends there, flip-flopping freely, and the way they invariably always see this as a black-and-white issue, where everything is either a miracle cure for just about anything that might ail you or a concoction so vile the devil himself couldn't come up with anything worse... that's worrying, not so much because fawning over or dismissing specific foods it itself a huge deal in the end but because it's symptomatic of a certain way of thinking (or, rather, not thinking), a shallowness of thought, if you will.

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

During my childhood, I could never understand that those articles were satire. I thought there must be enough crazy people for them to run a newspaper.
The idea that it's satire still feels weird to me. Maybe it's just far too blatant -- I've always enjoyed the subtle stuff.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

No, I'm afraid most readers of the Weekly Word News believed every word of it. "After all, they wouldn't let them print it unless it was true."

I've watched and listened to people as they examined and purchased those "news" papers. They want that stuff to be true because they live on drama and extremes. Anything less is just too boring.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

No, I'm afraid most readers of the Weekly Word News believed every word of it. "After all, they wouldn't let them print it unless it was true."

You're pulling my tail, aren't you? (I mean... do people think that MAD Magazine is all real, too?)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

These are people who couldn't read MAD magazine. The words are too big for them. What they "know" about the real world mostly comes from television, gossip, and talk radio.

No, I'm not pulling your tail or any other part. ;p

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Wow. I'm not sure whether I should laugh or cry, then...

[alaskawolf.livejournal.com]

cookies always make things better :) i could go for some and hot cocoa too :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

There are probably still cookies left. They were pretty rich. You can have the cocoa. I've never cared much for chocolate in any form.

[heavens-steed.livejournal.com]

I want to get one of those Kindles. I can't imagine why someone would come into a library looking to borrow e-books on it though. I thought you had to purchase books from Amazon.com but then again I don't know everything about the Kindle. Did she really not know that you had to buy the books to download onto it?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

She knew, but she thought "libraries are free" (not true) and "libraries have everything" (also not true.) The truth did not please her.

I know that right now you aren't ready to drop money on a Kindle. However, before you do, be sure to compare the competition. Ebookwise has been in the business for years now, and (I think) offers a much better device and better prices. Sony also has a competitor, though I know less about it. Unfortunately, like Microsoft, Amazon will probably win the war in the end by sheer marketing power rather than on the merits of its product.

[hgryphon.livejournal.com]

Sun showers? I didn't hear about nuclear plasma raining down on the planet... ;)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Standard meteorologist jargon around here. You have "partly-cloudy" and "partly-sunny" but if there are a lot of clouds with occasional little bursts of sunlight, those are "sun-showers."

[hgryphon.livejournal.com]

I figured as much. I thought I'd make a funny. :)

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

I had an old Royal Manual Magic Margin Touch Typewriter when I was a wee kitten, I wrote my kiddy stories on it :) I loved that old cast iron behemoth. The wrinkle paint finish was still good even back in the early 80's It was built in 1940 I think. Then my parents gave it as a present to a friend of theirs that liked antiques, I guess they thought I didn't appreciate it as much an antique collector. I miss it though.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The last real typewriter I owned was a Royal too. It was a Royal McBee portable that was given to me for Christmas my senior year in high school. It followed me around from 1967 until 1983. By then I had a computer and printer, and when I moved that year I donated the typewriter to a resale shop. I've regretted it a few times, and actually bought a daisy wheel typewriter (electric) a few years later but ended up mostly using that as a printer (it had a parallel interface built in.) Gave that one away once I had a decent inkjet printer, and haven't had a typewriter since. Now it's almost impossible to get ribbons for them. Finding an actual typewriter anywhere outside a resale shop or antique dealer is unheard of.