Scrapping fines won’t save humble libraries from rise of the Kindle crowd
WHEN I was a child, no Saturday was complete without a trip to the library, clutching my stack of books and coveted, if frayed, green ticket (oh, the pleasure when I was upgraded to a blue one once I was considered old enough to splurge in the ‘teen’ section).
I loved wandering up and down the aisles daydreaming of a magical land with Lilliputians, wishing I had Julian, Anne and George as friends, or hoping the Secret Seven would come out to play or that Mr Darcy in his best breeches would appear (although now that I think of it, that must have been later on with the hormonally charged blue ticket).
Later, Stephen King and James Herbert would become terrifying roommates and a lifelong addiction to police procedurals with gory body count began.
When my own kids started school, they were brought to our local library each fortnight by their teacher to collect no more than two books.
We joined a bigger library and spent many happy afternoons there, them begging me to get out books under cover for them from the older section. Life is circular, eh?
But the overriding rule was that if they forgot to return them on time, the fines were theirs and theirs alone. Library books are for sharing, and depriving the next reader through your carelessness isn’t on.
But now there are plans to abolish late fines altogether. A proper Government thingy has been set up to examine it and it even made it on to the Cabinet agenda as library membership numbers are on the decline.
The average fine is just 5c per book per day, but it’s not the fines keeping people away, nor should they be done away with as a valuable lesson in personal responsibility. It’s the internet, of course, and screens fighting for attention as the humble paperback sits in a corner begging to be read.
As the owner of a Kindle myself I feel the shame. But I rather like Stephen Fry’s suggestion that “books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators”. Library services are under threat, though. So the solution proposed is by all accounts, increased digital services and (horror) staffless branches. Apparently, this allows them to open longer, and is being trialled in 23 locations, but … but … sigh.
IAs thick as thieves
HAVE been the victim of crime and it hurts. My car was broken into overnight last week and everything in it ransacked in a futile search for … I don’t know what – a sevenyear-old small banger isn’t likely to have an owner with the latest iPhone or Apple Mac lying around. The contents of the glove box were strewn about (they include, inexplicably, actual gloves, my NCT cert, some emergency sanitising hand gel and a pair of sunglasses); the untidy back seat was upended for valuables which included two borrowed books (not library, phew!) on their way to joining my vertiginous ‘to read’ bedside tower and my gym gear (take it, please!). A Lidl bag may have looked promising, but it sadly only held Tupperware belonging to a friend.
The raid was frustrating both for me and the thief. Nothing was taken, but the most galling thing not to have been filched was my CD collection. Thieves who don’t appreciate Abba Gold, Queen and Adele really have no business being in the theft game, do they?
Leo’s bill of fare
MY favourite Government department is easily Public Expenditure and Reform. It produces the most fun reports given the dry subject material. One such lively diversion is the annual spending of the Taoiseach’s department which, when you take out the tea and stationery, offers a collection of eclectic items that you and
I paid for.
More than €1.4m was spent last year on what appeared to be the contents of a garage sale, including a GoPro (perhaps Leo likes to wear it around as he stalks the corridors of Leinster House), a photo (framed) of former Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore (the entire photo bill came to €23,889, which one hopes weren’t all retakes of Eamon), and a hefty €30,000 to keep the taxi industry going.
A further €21,895 was spent on advertising on social media (in fairness Leo updates his Twitter account by himself), and a separate bill for snacks shows a spirited attention to detail: 3,015 purple snack bars were purchased, just the 746 yellow ones and 972 packets of King crisps. Sadly, there were no books … nor library fines listed.