Meet the new boss, David Lowery tackles the internet and the past while Ted Lucas gets past around

I once checked out a Fairport Convention Cd from the library of a college I was attending. That's it.

But I am obsessed with libraries, which are awesome. There's a couple small colleges about ten-fifteen miles from where I live, and when I get on huge writing kicks, I'll totally drive to one of their libraries a couple days a week, find a quiet floor and get some work done.

Like, libraries are literally my favorite things about this country right now.

amen

i asked one of my classes of incoming freshman how many of them had physically gone into a library and checked out a book and about 40% said they hadn't.

The university library staff goes "Look, our only customer!" whenever I check out books. All students use it for is to get study rooms and laptops.

Like, libraries are literally my favorite things about this country right now.
This. Amazing to me how many people either take them for granted or don't use them altogether. In Rhode Island, I totally abuse the Interlibrary loan system. There's always a book or a Blu-Ray from the other side of the state waiting for me to pick up at my hometown library. Makes me feel like I'm getting away with something.

The Brooklyn library is always packed with people, many of them looking at porn on the computers

https://encrypted-tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSSyYGyIKHkCFvSvJE9YqQ6yWO2WJNt_mUCCEX7J1O7bSdadcIAzA

xposting myself, obviously with libraries we all contribute $$$. It's the perfect example of how everyone can benefit when everyone ponies up, willingly or no.

it's better than that. rich people (and aspirational people who also think libraries are 'icky') don't go to libraries.

Like, libraries are literally my favorite things about this country right now.

Me too. Though I probably use them differently than most people. The books I check out usually haven't circulated since the 1970s and are the ones getting sent to storage or the bullshit library sales. I mean, really, no one has given a shit about Wendy Walker since 1988? Hang your heads in shame.

Who is Wendy Walker?

do you have fingers? or a keyboard? figure it out alex.

I googled her name and writer and the results seem out of place with what you are talking about.

Unless you are lamenting that no one gives a shit about Chicken Soup for the Soul: Power MOMS since 1988 when it was written in 2009.

power MOMS

really? talking about a great writer published in the late 80s by Sun & Moon press whose books are pretty much unknown seems out of place to a post where I talk about checking out books that haven't been checked out in decades. I'm not sure where the confusion lies.

No I'm saying I used the keyboard and the results were not consistent to what you were talking about.

I guess you found some other author named Wendy Walker. My bad for picking a kind of generic name. No--I'm talking about the awesome weirdo fantasy novelist (married to Tom LaFarge) who wrote "The Sea Rabbit" and should be way way more popular than she is.

Though this misconception pretty much underlines my point that even in the age of Google and whatnot, no one has given a shit about Wendy Walker since 1988 or so. Which is why University libraries are awesome for idiots like me. Because we troll them for neglected books.

No I'm saying I used the keyboard and the results were not consistent to what you were talking about.

Sorry. I was too harsh there, but googling wendy walker and sun & moon gets you here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-Service-Moon-Classics/dp/1557130841

My main point is not "Everyone should know who this obscure author is" but "Libraries put me in contact with a bunch of obscure authors who I now waste my time trying to tell people on a message board about in a hostile and unlucrative way."

You're otm about university libraries being awesome. I have spent some time reading goofy lit crit.

"bullshit library sales"

this is the only time i go to the library.

the sea rabbit! an underwater rabbit squad? awesome.

As as bullshit library sales:

My library in Iowa City had a n awesome collection of Jazz vinyl and Comedy lps. checked out record after record for years. But some idiot decided that vinyl was dinosaur so we should sell off the whole collection for 10 cents an album, first come first served.

Sure that's great for the one jobless prick who showed up first and snagged everything good, and probably sold it online. (I'm still murderous toward some of the swine I witnessed at these sales.) But it screwed everyone like me who actually used the library as a resource.

Fuck library sales.

As far as

and scott if you only go to the library when there's a sale then we are not of the same species.

LPs take up a lot of space and are probably more prone to getting warped and damaged -- it's probably way too burdensome to keep a collection up, and is probably a great argument for piracy as a social good.

i mean i'd sure feel ethically better about stealing some mp3s than having checked out a super-rare record and left it in the sun, ruining it for everyone else.

yeah the whole let's-get-rid-of-all-of-our-vinyl rush was regrettable.

that said, huge academic library i use has literally 10,000s of LPs, still. and you can check them out. BOOM.

x-post then everyone in the community is forced to download rather than check out, because you can't keep your shit out of the sun?

that's essentially what happened. sorry vinyl dudes.

i asked one of my classes of incoming freshman how many of them had physically gone into a library and checked out a book and about 40% said they hadn't.

The university library staff goes "Look, our only customer!" whenever I check out books. All students use it for is to get study rooms and laptops.

it's better than that. rich people (and aspirational people who also think libraries are 'icky') don't go to libraries.

Don't any of you guys have kids? The small branch library near me is full of people all the time, probably 75% parents with little kids, 15% high-school aged kids, 10% old people reading the paper. Plenty of these folks are rich, too.

i'm pretty firmly on the side of vinyl on the 'which sounds better' debate but on 'which format is melt-resistant and seems to be built for the near-sole purpose of pirating to anyone who wants to listen to it' digital wins.

i'd argue that the prevalence of digital helped save the existing vinyl collections because the people who tend to check them out aren't just trying to hear the music, but care about the whole experience, and therefore take better care of the stuff. pre-napster, all the records I ever checked out were scratched up to hell.

yeah it sucks that people went to a sale and...bought stuff.

'Plenty of these folks are rich, too.'
If they were rich they'd just buy the thing they wanted instead of fighting with a family who canceled their blockbuster membership for the latest pixar dvd.

x-post stuff that other people could have checked out and enjoyed

i'm not blaming the buyers but the sellers

"and scott if you only go to the library when there's a sale then we are not of the same species."

oh yeah i know we aren't it's okay i just have a disorder. my disorder involves libraries, schools, and museums. won't go into it here. done that on ilx before and i regret it. i'm not here to bum people out.

how much did you buy the stuff for? ten cents? fifty cents? i'm sure that went a long way towards helping the library buy new shit.

one of my fondest memories in college was listening to phillip glass' "music with changing parts" on vinyl at the library. we weren't allowed to exit with LPs so they had to be listened to in this library. only annoying part is the piece is supposed to be one hour-long track, so this got chopped up into 4 sides of vinyl.

LPs take up a lot of space and are probably more prone to getting warped and damaged -- it's probably way too burdensome to keep a collection up, and is probably a great argument for piracy as a social good.

Seriously dumb shit right here

occasionally i buy a book from abe or thriftbooks or something & it turns out to be an ex-libris copy. it's always really nice, to have, adds another dimension, comes with the imprimatur of ILLINOIS STATE COLLEGE or something & then i remember that whenever you buy a second hand book & find it's from a library collection it means that a small library died, like when you say you don't believe in fairies.

yeah, it's not likecwhenever a library sells off a book or an pl, it offers a digital download of said item to its patrons. the item goes from public to private, which is suck.

re: dumb shit
why is it dumb? you want as many people as possible who want to to listen to this stuff -- that's the point of having the LPs there at a library -- the lower the costs, the more easily that goal is achieved.

pl=lp

i remember that whenever you buy a second hand book & find it's from a library collection it means that a small library died

Naw, it could mean that they just got rid of old stuff to make room or something.

yeah they get rid of old stuff all the time. if they didn't they would have to keep building new buildings or something.

i don't mind libraries selling stuff, just when they sell ALL their stuff (i.e. the entire lp collection.)

Most of the initial article makes some sense, but this seems odd:

The fact that artists are spending much less TIME recording can only mean they have less money or expect to make less money.

Couldn't at least part of the explanation be that artists record on their own equipment, on time that doesn't equal money in such a literal sense?

Full album sharing of in-print music is very weird to me. But I wonder what this guy would think of O.O.P. stuff being shared--or with a track being used in a mix, rather than an entire album being given away. Of the dozens of artists/labels with whom I came in contact with when making/distributing the '1981' box (a few hundred physical copies, probably a few thousand "copies" in equivalent downloads) only one was unsuportive and asked to be removed from the project. It seems like most artists might know the difference between theft and promotion, on the internet. I'm not sure if listeners do, though--I hear young people regularly say things like "who buys music anymore," even people who make music themselves. Whereas I bet a lot of us whose music-geek years straddle the pre- and post-file-sharing eras download stuff--but then go buy it, if it's any good. And probably subconsciously we assume others do the same, which is contrary to all of the evidence Lowery presents.

Which artist was unsupportive? Was it Prince?

same thought i had .