They do hand car washing in the new town centre car park now and as mine has not been cleaned in, errm, an unspecified amount of time , we decided to get it done. They were busy so it would be about an hour and so we decided to wander around to Old Place Yard and take a look at our local library.

Emma remembers using this very same library as a little girl. We didn’t stay for very long but I did find two Sherlock Holmes books to take out. I felt very happy doing so.

They still have the same bles in the front of the book for recording due dates but disappointingly they no longer stamp them. When I was little I always thought the date stamping was the best bit!

I guess though they decide to put them in out of the way locations or on the first floors because libraries do not make any money whilst shops and restaurants do. For the record I do passionately believe in the importance of libraries, but I am also fully aware that I am in part responsible for their decline.

When I was little the library was an integral part of the weekly Saturday trip to town – and was some week’s even the primary objective – and I loved it. I can’t now really remember the last ime I really used a library. Why is this? When I love them so much? Partly it’s because I love books. I love reading them, and I love owning them. It’s also because hisorically I tend to be quite a slow reader. Back then, before the days of online renewals you borrowed your books and you had to return it after x weeks or remember to renew it, and I had never finished it, and…

These are not good excuses, but coupled with my love of owning books I have enjoyed, it is a reason. It has also formed a pattern of life and routine that has been hard to shift. This year though, with my inceased bus use has resulted in increased reading – expidentially – and so I’m today thinking whether I should perhaps dig out my library card and taking myself off down there and seeing what my local library has to offer.

Once again, I found myself caught in a position somewhere between the author/publisher and the reader; between copyright protection and open access. Whilst I can see why publishers are suggesting imposing lending limits on eBooks to mimic the shelf-life of the physical edition, only 24 loans seems a bit extreme, and you have to question where you place that limit. A large factor when it comes to the shelf-life of a physical book before it falls apart is down, not to the number of loans, but the quality of the printing and binding, and if you were to say that eBook had the highest quality to its binding then it would be reasonable to say that it could be lent out an infinite number of times.

What I think would be more reasonable is the suggestion that if you buy 1 copy of an eBook then it can be read by just one person, or at least on one device (no reason to suggest that a device can’t have multiple readers), at a time. So libraries would still have to purchase multiple copies of an eBook just as they copy multiple copies of the latest bestsellers now, but they can continue to loan them out for years to come without fear of expiration.