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Comment by ZguideZ | Hacker News Reader

It's funny, kids don't get to experience the magic of libraries like we did. I'm a 71 model and I think those that came after the 70s pretty much didn't get to experience it.

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'84 model, and dude, I basically lived at the library - both school and public. It was a ~16km bike ride from my parents farm to the library.

Only one of my ~6 nephews/nieces show interest in libraries, but honestly? That's a pretty good hit-rate. They're not for everyone, and never were.

Glad to hear we weren't the last of the library kids

I'm from '91 and I basically read a book a week during my teens.

There are still great public libraries in many parts of the world (and certainly all over the USA). Why wouldn’t kids get to experience them?

The magic of libraries was discovering a new section of the dewey decimal system, figuring out that other books you liked might be next to the book you looked up in the card catalog, and escaping to worlds you could never see if not for your imagination and the printed word. Now you just google it, find pictures, read everything about it on the wikis, look at a live cam or webcam of the place, use google earth to wander around, read about all the negative things about the hero you just discovered etc. It's not that the libraries aren't there - it's that the lack of other things made them magical.

Plus..and this is true in Hawaii but not positive about other libraries - when I was a kid there weren't homeless people spending all day sleeping in the library and occupying all the available seats. The main people in the libraries around us are homeless using the internet, homeless using the air conditioning, and homeless using the bathrooms. I'm not going to send my kid to hang out in the library for hours without supervision.

Depends on the parents. My kids biggest complaint about the library is that they are only allowed to checkout 100 books at a time.

Out of curiosity, what's the scenario in which one would hit that limit? When I was a kid, the limit was something like five books, and we'd just go to the library often.

When we go to the library (about once a week), the kids haul out at least that many books. They are all voracious readers and can go through 100 books in the blink of an eye.

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