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Comment by qntmfred | Hacker News Reader

I suggest checking out your public library. Browsing books and then also being able to take them home for free is even more of a thrill imo.

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I love libraries but they don't usually have the latest books. I get my book recommendations from Tyler Cowen's blog and most of the books featured there take a while to show up in library collections or if ever at all. (I know I can put in requests, but they take weeks and I'd have lost interest by that time)

I get more of a thrill from bookstore displays because they give me a sense of the current literary zeitgeist, especially if the owner is a reader and has curated the display carefully. Bookstores have more of an incentive to push new stuff.

If you want to read best sellers from five years ago they are great. If you are willing to work the queue you can get new stuff, just not on your time table. If you are into anything the least bit esoteric and/or aren’t organized with your returns or the waitlist they are frustrating. I have always had a love/hate relationship with libraries.

I have unusual reading interests and don't normally read best sellers, so I use inter-library loan a lot. I can normally get what I want through that, although sometimes I have to wait a couple of weeks for them to find/ship the book to my library.

ILL (or regional equivalents) are useful.

Though LibGen + Gutenberg + Archive.org are increasingly preferable, especially for obscure interests.

If you are looking for esoteric library books and in California, try Link+. It lets you get books from many libraries, including university libraries. My tastes are very, very obscure but Link+ often finds the 1953 computer book that I'm looking for. (Other areas may have similar inter-library loan services.) https://csul.iii.com/

Only tangentially related, but my favorite place to browse during undergrad was the sorting shelves at the university library (which were publicly accessible, though not advertised). When books were returned they were sorted there before being sent out to be reshelved across the library[1], so it was a daily snapshot of what books the university community thought were worth reading. I picked up a number of books there that I never would have seen otherwise.

Unfortunately when I went to graduate school the sorting shelves were hidden behind the circulation desk.

[1] Unless there was a hold on the book, in which case it would be kept at the circulation desk--so the most popular books never made it to the sorting shelves.

The original "engagement" optimizing algorithm.

My public library has a "recently returned" section for this very purpose. I love it.

I've done the same.

And unsorted returns have a "customers who liked this also liked" aspect.

I think bookstores suffer from the current literary zeitgeist. Consider of the best 10,000 books ever printed, what percentage where printed in the last 3 years? Stores need novelty to sell books which seriously compromises quality.

If more people donated newer books to their libraries, this might not be as big an issue.

But bookstores often do not have all the latest books, nor do they always have the best of older ones. There's just no alternative to the web anymore, especially when it comes to user reviews. (Not to mention the universal trend to move away from paper books.)

Vitually any library will take recommendations, and a source such as Cowen (or Gates, or other notable academics/authors) will tend to be well-received.

Few of the best books are recent, as Schopenhauer noted.

Having the latest books does not interest me overly much. Unless I am interested in something relevant to current events, or want the last book of a long series that I started, I find the backlog of good books to be sufficiently gargantuan. The main feeling I get when I go to a library looking for some fiction is the immense number of novels sitting on the shelves that probably have not been checked out from the library in a decade.....and it makes me want to try that dusty tomb with the boring but sturdy hardcover sitting on the bottom shelf.

> when I go to a library looking for some fiction

That's my problem with libraries, other than university ones: they're massively biased towards fiction. Basically printed Netflix.

I don't consider my local library if I need to learn something or research science or history. It doesn't even have the shelf of encyclopedias that it did when I worked there as a student 30 years ago.

That is a fair assessment. For my scholarly activities, I do not go to a public library, but a University library or the internet. I wouldn't denigrate the whole literary genre of fiction as just 'Printed Netflix' though.

This is exactly why I miss my university library. Even though the main branch of my local public library is probably slightly biased towards non-fiction, in terms of total works (though it's drowned out when you add the other branches in), the level of stuff just isn't academic, and it's often almost impossible to find good academic stuff. The local university library sadly isn't much better. I never realized how much I was spoiled by a good university library until I didn't have access to it anymore.

I've noticed that my enjoyment of a book doesn't seem to be related to the age of the book, provided it's not so old that I can't understand the dialect of English it was written in (English Renaissance drama is enjoyable but challenging.)

I think mine is an uncommon opinion, but libraries actually make me kind of sad haha. Most of the books are not well-cared-for. There's tattered pages, ruined hardcover slips, markings, etc. I really hate it, so I never go to the library.

But one of my girlfriend's and my favorite dates is to just find a bookstore and just walk around. (Often we use B&N because of availability, but we try to find local when we can.) We don't usually come away having purchased anything, but just walking around and talking about books you've heard of or read, and leafing through some of the pages to see if anything catches your eye — I love that. I also like that bookstores are often a bit more aesthetic than the local library, plus they frequently have a cafe attached or adjacent where you can sit for a while afterwards, sometimes with some new books to poke through.

Funny, I'd come away with the opposite opinion upon seeing a library book with so much use.

Personally, I'd be happier to see a thriving library and a well-loved book still going strong than see it with perfect, uncracked book-bindings.

Yeah, this seems to be the overwhelmingly common opinion among book-lovers, hence the lead-in that I thought my perspective was unusual. I seem to be unique in hating the appearance of a "well-loved" book like so many people seem to enjoy. My books never end up looking that way haha. At most, the spines break-in a bit, but most of my books look very new despite having been read multiple times. Just how I like them, I suppose.

Collectors (and listeners) of LP records tend to want their items pristine, even if second-hand, as sound quality is easily disturbed. I think books are more the outlier though, where many people are happy for them to be well-loved.

Me too. One of my favorite thrift store finds was an ancient copy of "The Nemesis from Terra" by Leigh Bracket. Inside the front cover was written:

"This Book Belongs to Ken Xxxxx for you see no other human being would read such trash. - Guess Who"

followed by, in another hand:

"your just jelous because you don'T UNDersTaNd IT!"

Best book review ever.

I blame it on quarantine, but for the past week or so I've really been longing to spend an afternoon in a library. They were one of the best parts of my childhood and teenage years: scanning a shelf and picking out something that catches your eye was a more efficient process, yielding more spontaneity and serendipity and quality, than the existing "recommended books" algorithms that exist on my library's online app. Finding books on similar topics was so much easier with the Dewey Decimal system. It's amazing to me that, decades into the information revolution, we still haven't been able to replicate the efficiencies of that manual sorting system online.

> scanning a shelf and picking out something that catches your eye was a more efficient process, yielding more spontaneity and serendipity and quality, than the existing "recommended books" algorithms that exist on my library's online app

So much this.

Have you not noticed that libraries rarely have many books anymore? Most of the space is taken up by computers, 3d printers and various other things, conference rooms and various other things. Not that those things are bad, they're just not books.

My local library is gigantic. But there are hardly any books in it. The shelves are low to the ground, the aisles are wide, and the shelves only occupy about a quarter of the floor space.

I don't even bother looking for scifi there, as there's pretty much nothing. Most of the rest of the books are clearly targeted towards young readers.

Where I browse for books are thrift stores. Some deceased person's books get dumped there, and I've found and bought a ton of cool books there. Being a thrift store, they're cheap as dirt, too. Lots of old scifi, too!

Some friends of mine would buy (by mass[1]) books libraries were getting rid of to make room for their new acquisitions. This strategy is more expensive than it might naively seem, because they were forced to move house every so often as their collection expanded.

(Walter, would you know if Powell's still exists in its original form?)

[1] buying by bulk resulted in many duplicates, which they'd leave in a pile at the front door for guests to take away.

The majority of the people in my local library are (or rather were, before covid-19) immigrants and other low income people camping on the computers to use the free internet

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