The Good Nature of Camden: Interim Report on Library Use
In December I discovered Overdrive and the Libby app and registered there with my Berlin library access. Since then I have borrowed and read about 60 books in this system. The “Association of Berlin Public Libraries” has one of the largest overdrive ranges that I have seen so far – namely around 88,000 e-books – but what I am looking for is often not available. So after a few weeks I start looking for other libraries. I only came up with the idea because you can enter several library cards in the app.
Reddit has debated for years which libraries have the most media and are also willing to issue ID cards to non-residents. I’m trying some libraries. At “London Borough of Camden” I manage to get an ID just like that. But I forgot to check beforehand how many e-books there are actually there, namely only 9,000, and so far I’ve only found one that interests me.
I feel a little shabby about taking advantage of Camden’s good nature, and that feeling moves me the very same day to do what many on Reddit are advising to do: I pay $50 for an annual pass from the Queens Public Library, which includes this one Officially offering service to non-residents. With 106,000 e-books, Queens is even better sorted than Berlin. You can also be put on the waiting list for 20 books and not just for 5 like in Berlin. This is also necessary, because almost all books have many reservations and correspondingly long waiting times. I don’t care, though, because I’ve tagged a long enough list of books “want to read” by now, and most of the time something is available right now. In addition, every few days a book becomes available for which I am on the waiting list. So the wait is painless and even pleasant because it always feels like a little surprise gift when a book becomes available.
Since then I have read almost no books for private pleasure in the Open Library, which is mainly due to the fact that the scanned paper books are inconvenient to read on the mobile phone. However, I continue to use the Open Library a lot for texts that I need for work and would read on my laptop anyway. The Overdrive system, on the other hand, is almost entirely for fun reading, as it only includes publisher-produced e-books. Professionally, however, I often need books from the 20th century, of which there will probably never be e-books. The Open Library lends scanned paper books and does not need publishers’ permission to do so, unless the current lawsuit comes to a different conclusion. Therefore, it contains many more books from the big gap between “author died before 1952” (the decisive year of death for 2023) and “most publishers are starting to offer an e-book version of most books” (from 2010).
So now I pay 10 euros a year in Berlin and $50 in Queens. That’s probably less than 10 percent of what I spent on e-books in previous years. I often think about whether I should have a guilty conscience, because theoretically I could also buy the books (although at my current reading rate of ~ 1 book per day that would be painfully expensive). I haven’t gotten any results yet. On the one hand, authors should be happy to have my money, on the other hand, I find libraries (i.e. since I noticed that they also lend e-books) likeable and forward-looking again. I have no desire to own the books, I probably still buy more books than average (due to gifting reasons, more so lately than I used to), and I recommend many books, maybe to people who then buy them. I know the arguments of all sides, I’m financially involved in the book business myself, and I find it unsatisfactory to sit between opinions like this. But that’s the way it is at the moment, and this state of affairs is now documented here.
(Kathrin Passig)