Literation

I had an interesting conversation with a customer the other day. We were killing time waiting for her phone to activate or some such, I can't even remember anymore, but I asked her what I ask most customers when we have down time, "So what are you up to today? Anything fun?"

She told me that she had to run by her work and do a few more errands, nothing particularly interesting.

"Oh? What do you do?" I questioned mildly.

"I work for the library," she replied with a smile.

This launched an avid conversation about sorting books by genre versus author because the Deschutes County Library is the first library that I have encountered that sorts its fiction by author rather than genre and I had a bone of contention with that. She went on to explain to me that apparently they get more complaints when it's sorted by genre than by author because some people are more wont to argue about the validity of one author or book being one genre or the other. For example, some would classify Michael Crichton as science fiction (hello, because he is), but also tests the realms of horror (did you read "Congo"????), drama (he did create ER after all), some mystery, and even just realistic fiction. So rather than argue ten times a day about that, they just make it easy...

...except for people like me who read by genre not by author.

Sigh.

We also had a discussion that brought about a topic that disturbed me greatly.

I mentioned that I would love it if their e-library was bigger. She said it was the biggest in the state, and I agreed, but still.

"Did you know that most publishing houses won't sell e-books to libraries?" she told me. "And the ones that do charge so much that it's not even worth it? Not to mention that there's no good way for patrons to donate e-books because libraries don't have access to Amazon specifically and all the rights surrounding them prevents us from loaning books that way."

This was news to me. Especially since if you're checking out one of their "Kindle"-filetypes you have to go to Amazon to download it.

The specific example she gave me was Fifty Shades of Grey. "The paperback copy of that book costs the library seven dollars apiece. The e-book? That's forty-five dollars per copy."

That's abhorrent.

How does that make sense?

I mean, I know that logistically it sort of does, because it'd be hard to moderate otherwise, and they have to have specific codes built into library copies that cause them to "expire," but I mean really. Forty-five dollars? For Fifty Shades of Grey?

That book just wasn't that good.

Ciao,
kc