The Joys and Frustrations of Digital Libraries During a Pandemic

I got sidetracked on my library's website about two hours ago and have just now managed to break free. I initially went to the site hoping to find an audiobook that might appeal to me, but that didn't happen. I've not had much luck with the last three or four audiobooks I've tried, so it's probably me. I'm a little picky and hard to please right now.

I did find a bunch a books that I would love to read, most of them having just been published in the last two or three months. Fifteen of them, in fact. But when I tried to check them out, I found that only one of them was actually available for check-out. The Other Wes Moore was written when its author learned there was another man by the same name in his city who is living a life 180 degrees from the one the author has known. The author is a Rhodes Scholar, a veteran, a businessman, and a White House Fellow. The other Wes Moore is serving a life sentence in prison. Both men are black. 

The other fourteen books are now on hold for anywhere from ten weeks to six months plus, most of them in the latter category. It appears that the Covid-19 pandemic has caused a  mass run on library e-books and audiobooks now that physical books are off-limits for the duration of the outbreak. I'm really, really hoping that the pandemic will be under control before the six-month availability estimates are tested. Surely, we will be able to get back inside a library before  then...please, say you agree. Among the titles I've put on hold are Anne Tyler's brand new one, Readhead by the Side of the Road, This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger, The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, and My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. Not all of the requested books are new, even the older ones have a wait-time of at least four months.

But there's some good news, too, and some of you may want to take a look at your own library systems to see if this works for you. The library is offering dozens, if not a few hundred, relatively current magazines for downloading and reading on various electronic devices. The magazines can be kept for only 14 days, but the best part of this is that the number of copies available is unlimited, so there is no hold-list to suffer through. The magazines are immediately available to you. I downloaded the April 2020 edition of Macworld and can't wait to get into it later this afternoon (so now I have yet another another thing to distract me from my regular reading). 

And, I've mentioned this before, but if your library is part of the Kanopy service, there are dozens and dozens of really good movies available for free on the Kanopy app. Normally, a library system allows something like 4-6 movies per month, per patron, to be streamed, but right now because of the pandemic de jour, there is no limit on how many movies you can watch. So...check it out.

So there you have it. Libraries are very frustrating right now...and very, very rewarding. And, two "verys" are better than one very.