Library Selections, Kinda Depressing Commentary on Modern Reading

[Lara Amber]

I belong to two library systems and several times a week I'm on their Overdrive site looking for books I'm interested in reading. The problem I'm coming across is the dearth of recent non-fiction titles as e-books. I don't really blame the library systems, since what they purchase is heavily influenced by what is checked out frequently. As I browse through "new titles" mostly what I see are romances, westerns, spy/action/mystery thrillers, and children's books. The non-fiction titles are generally either talking political heads or some kind of self-help. Good luck with most history or science titles unless it's a huge name. I keep checking back hoping they will appear, and sometimes it happens, but it's pretty infrequent.

It depresses me a little bit. I sit there wondering, do people abandon their education post college? Don't they still have a thirst to learn? Don't they see the warped world view they will get if the only non-fiction book they crack open all year is by a political pundit? I wonder if they even know that Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking are separate people. (Subset question, how many would ask if Stephen Hawking is the guy who writes horror.)

Frak, now I'm sad.

[MrsJoseph *grouchy*]

Lara Amber wrote: "
It depresses me a little bit. I sit there wondering, do people abandon their education post college? Don't they still have a thirst to learn? Don't they see the warped world view they will get if the only non-fiction book they crack open all year is by a political pundit? I wonder if they even know that Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking are separate people. (Subset question, how many would ask if Stephen Hawking is the guy who writes horror.)"


While I haven't tried to check out any educational books from the library lately, I have noticed that I need to use my state-wide inter-library system to get any good non-fiction books currently.

As to education post-college, I get most of my post-collegiate kicks from taking classes with iTunesU. The lectures are free and it is self-paced. Right now I'm doing Dante in Translation with Yale. It's a great class (to me) as my school did not offer a class that focused only on Dante (only Shakespeare). I'm using my own book: The Divine Comedy which is a different translation that the class but they are very close.

iTunesU has a ton of different classes so you can take whatever strikes your fancy. I'm also taking another fascinating class: Hero & Quest with Missouri State.

[[deleted user]]

I believe that you can partly blame the Internet for the poor selection of books being checked out of libraries for educational purpose. Contrary to a printed book, materiel on a specific subject, say the search for extra-solar planets or the latest archaeological finds, is always up to date on the Internet, through online articles and reports. I myself tend to search the Internet instead of looking for a reference book when I need to bone up on a specific subject. While not as visually pleasing as holding a real book, Internet data and info is hard to beat in terms of being up to date with the latest knowledge.

[Lara Amber]

I'd disagree with that assessment Michel. For the lay person wanting to read about something outside their own field you encounter:

1. Research written for other experts in the field with the assumption that you already know the framework, other research, and the technical/field specific meaning of terms
2. Research behind walled gardens requiring membership to professional organizations
3. Poorly written articles by journalists who don't have a degree in that field (and in many cases, not even a science background) who cherry pick what they want to say which may not even be supported by the original research or misunderstood (correlation vs. causation, a survey of existing data vs. fresh research)
4. Not understand if the work being presented is really significant, who funded it, and how it fits into the larger field.

Plus there is the assumption that the "latest" is what is interesting vs. an in depth plunge. Books like What's Going on in There?: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life and Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 lets someone else who is credible in the field do all the work to pull it together for you and knows what's promising/confirmed and what's fool's gold.

[[deleted user]]

Lara Amber wrote: "I'd disagree with that assessment Michel. For the lay person wanting to read about something outside their own field you encounter:

1. Research written for other experts in the field with the ass..."
Your comments may be true for people who have only minimal understanding/qualifications in a specific field, but for the enlightened researcher, the Internet can be a very useful source. I didn't want to disparage books in that sense, but they too often are outdated by the latest scientific finds by the time they are written and published. Geopolitics is a good example of a field where things move very fast, often too fast for published books to follow.

[Hillary]

Lara Amber, does you library have a system by which patrons can make purchase requests?

Many do, and I've been pretty successful in having my requests filled by my local library. (Most recently, they bought hard copies of N.K. Jemisin's Dreamblood books, which were in the system only in e-book, as apparently e-formats are the system's focus for genre books. It only took about 3 weeks from the time I filled out the online request form until the books showed up in the catalog.) It helps if the request is in line with the library's goals for their collection (usually, diverse, high quality, general-public-aimed titles), i.e., I probably wouldn't even try requesting something w/an academic focus, but a history/historical biography/popular science title geared to non-specialist readers would have a good chance.