Mo Lasses Blues

[captainsblog]

Books are such a clumsy way of reading.

It's going on a month since a couple of different people tipped me off to an intriguing sounding new novel called Ready Player One.

The library, at first, had not heard of it.  By Labor Day, however, it was showing up in the online catalog as ORDERED.

Then, toward the end of last week, RECEIVED.  This was the magic status that enabled me to put a request out for one.

Since Saturday, all almost-30 copies of the book have moved from that backroom Purgatory to the Limbo-land of BEING TRANSFERRED BETWEEN LIBRARIES.

On the back of a 14-year-old pack mule, apparently.

Eventually, they will hit their shelves and, I suspect, all instantly morph into ON HOLD FOR SOMEONE. The only way I'll know whether I'm among the first round of SOMEONEs is if I get a call and/or email saying, yeah, do stop by and bring your quarter.

(For, yeah. I have 25 whole cents of skin in this game now. But if I never pick it up, they charge me 50 cents.  I think I saw this in a Marx Brothers movie once.)

Let's see what NEWS the rest of today brings.

----

Forgot to mention yesterday's attempted Good Deed of the Day™:

As we headed out to our car to take Emily to church with us, I saw a bunch of envelopes in the middle of the parking lot in front of her apartment. Unopened, banky-wanky looking envelopes addressed to Some Kid at a nearby (but not exactly that precise) address.

They were the kind of thing that an identity thief could have a field day with, opening accounts, stealing personal information and such, so I resolved to google the dude and mail them back to him, with a friendly if anonymous note about the importance of protecting personal information.

His name produced only one likely suspect in terms of age and location- a twitter feed to a guy. He works as a dispatcher for a home security company.

Oops.

Comments

[firynze.livejournal.com]

If nothing else, I've been reliably informed that it's an awesome book, so at least the wait will be worthwhile?

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

A lot of what you describe is the difference between requesting that a large municipal library system buy a copy of a book for you to read, which has just come out, and process it along with all the other thousands of books they handle, and then get it in circulation to people who have requested it.... and just buying your own copy, for somewhat more than that quarter.

Yes, it does sound like their transmittal system operates via pack mule, though. And now I totally want a book mule!

Edit: is it available electronically, to you if not in whichever ebook platform your library has signed on for? No, I'm not looking it up right now, I'm a librarian but I'm kinda busy being a librarian for the people who pay me, at the moment.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

In many ways, online tracking of buys is just as frustrating. It's harder than it probably should be to know just where something can be bought and when you can get it. I know, for a public library system there's less incentive for what Wegmans calls Incredible Customer Service, but considering that these books all now get RFID-tagged before they leave central processing, there ought to be some way of telling the reserving party whether they've actually succeeded at reserving one and, if so, when they're likely to see it. It makes it an informed decision whether to go for the more expensive form of instant gratification.

(Best as I can tell, this one isn't available as an e-book, and the library uses a DRM-filled app for that which is quite clumsy. And no, I would never ask you to do any librarianing outside your jurisdiction.)