In my experience, most college students really just want a good space to work and study, with a mix of quiet spaces and areas for group work. Undergraduates rarely needed to access the physical books, since they're told to buy almost all the books they need for each class anyway. In 4 years, I think the only books I ever checked out were novels I was reading for pleasure, and I could have easily gotten them from the city library instead.
From an average undergrad's perspective, the ideal "library" is probably something more like a WeWork.
Grad students and researchers have different needs, though.
> From an average undergrad's perspective, the ideal "library" is probably something more like a WeWork.
Ha! Funnily enough I left WeWork because of their incessant need to blast music ALL... THE... TIME. During the times when I needed to really hunker down and grok hard material that required hours of intense focus, I would end up going to the nearby library.
That said, I agree with the sentiment of your comment. The local library is packed with students throughout the day because of the availability of desks/seated areas.
I've never been able to study at home. I don't know what it is. But in libraries I'm totally in the zone.
It's unfortunate because library hours are so limited. I'd love for there to be a 24 hour library that always had enough seating.
I actually had an idea starting a private membership 24hr study space that would serve primarily as a quiet study space for students. Tables, wifi, strict rules on noise...essentially using the gym business model. But I'm broke and know nothing about running a business but we can all dream.
As a college student who mostly reads ebooks, shelves of physical books at my university's libraries are incredibly useful when writing papers. When I find one book that I can use, there's usually several on the same shelf that I wouldn't have known to search for, but turn out to be really useful.
Also, there's no substitute for the feeling you get from working next to a stack of physical books.
> Grad students and researchers have different needs, though.
Yes, access to the more obscure literature like the Springer books for advanced math, or highly specialized history books (such as a history of Ottoman naval warfare) is pretty essential at the graduate or later level.
Nothing beats a physical library for a joyful adventure in browsing through all the disciplines. An experience I found crucial to my personal development in college, despite carrying my laptop everywhere.
Curious undergrads benefit from the books too. I got a lot out of different books' presentations of subjects in undergrad. Read the assigned text first, then look at how the books next to it on the shelf talk about the subject. So much easier than trying to slog through a single version, and you learn more too.
About books, I'd say it is all or nothing. Small libraries books won't be of any use. But when I was in Lyon, the main library is an old institution that contains archives of 100 years of newspapers and scientific publications.
I once had to look for the media impact of a 1987 trial, and behold, they had the microfilm.
Let's take a moment to remember that we could digitize all this but that stupid copyright laws makes it forbidden.
I hope we manage to reform these before these libraries stop getting funded.
> Undergraduates rarely needed to access the physical books, since they're told to buy almost all the books they need for each class anyway.
This was not my experience after the first 18 months. Maybe things are different than they were in the 80s. Or maybe my school was different (we had a lot of cross-functional projects), or maybe my professors were humoring me by letting me design my own upper-level (but under-grad) curriculum ... but I spent a LOT of time in the library. Sometimes to pull textbooks, but mostly to pull journal articles that described similar or adjacent research. (Or maybe I was a weird kid? That's definitely possible - but all the engineers at our school were weird kids, so I wouldn't have picked up on it.)
>Undergraduates rarely needed to access the physical books, since they're told to buy almost all the books they need for each class anyway.
I fell for this trap in my freshman year, but by my second year of undergrad i discovered that even though the syllabus might say i had to buy textbooks, the library actually did have copies of pretty much everything i needed.
I agree! I think this need really shines at universities where housing hasn't kept up with enrollment, so common areas are converted to living space, living space becomes more crowded, etc. Squeezes students out of a lot other spaces they might have otherwise used for working, collaborative or otherwise.
The solution is probably to require all public universities to have enough books on hand in their libraries to satisfy all required books for classes. Once that rule is in place, administrators and professors could argue over resource allocations.
> Undergraduates rarely needed to access the physical books, since they're told to buy almost all the books they need for each class anyway.
Once I found out about the university library reserve system I cut my textbook budget in half. It was something first-gen, broke college students aren't told about that would have saved them from spending on books they only needed occassionally.
I think the needs of grad students and researchers are highly field-dependent. I'm a mathematician, and I still use the library for older books. (Journal papers, even older ones, are mostly on-line now.) But my colleagues in e.g. biology, where things move a lot faster, don't seem to ever set foot in libraries.
>since they're told to buy almost all the books they need for each class anyway
I was successful in not buying a single book throughout all of university - and it wasn't because I used the library. Everything you need is out there. Note: I didn't buy a single book because I could not afford it
> Undergraduates rarely needed to access the physical books
Huge libraries of books may possibly be obsolete at large universities, especially for undergrads. But when I went to school, I found immense value in my schools access to periodicals. I read them voraciously and learned how to quickly read (and later write) technical articles. It quickly became clear they were instrumental with staying up to date with the state of the art.
It’s a pity that most of these academic periodicals are out of reach for everyone outside academia, they are the closest we have to true source material.
I remember spending a lot of time in the library reading non-course work academic books and journals. Definitely loved that we had a well stocked library for a developing country.
As an undergrad in maths, I spent lots and lots of afternoons browsing my university library and picking many interesting books about everything. Yes, there's the internet, but reading maths on paper is really a different experience, and moreover you don't know what you don't know, so it is not easy to replicate the experience online. And no, they were not required for my courses, but you're not there just to pass the courses, you're there to learn
No, grad students and researcher have the exact same need.
Unless you're majoring in classical latin, but then again, what piece of information is not digitized already? If it's not, the first user to come across that in academia should do just that.
All of my information is on my computer, and I didn't need to write down anything for almost a year now.
I think the biggest benefit of physical libraries, often overlooked by students, are the professional reference librarians that staff them. I was a competent researcher in college, but if I had difficulties, if the catalog looked like it didn't hold anything I could use, I went to the reference desk, and never was disappointed.
One particular project involved correlating & comparing prison funding & criminal recidivism with education spending in the state I was in. Books held nothing on this, and the government documents section massive, dense & daunting. The reference librarian saved me many hours of work by getting me directly to what I needed, and suggesting other resources as well.
The internet has made casual research extraordinarily easy, but it's like an 80/20 split. The average person can get 80% of the way there, but these reference librarians are professionals in their field, with all the connotations that being a "professional" comes with.
> “Google can bring you back 100,000 answers,” as the writer Neil Gaiman once said. “A librarian can bring you back the right one.”
I only did one year of law school, but taking this piece of advice (swap in Lexis/WestLaw/Bloomberg for Google) was a massive win. The librarians at the law library were so knowledgeable, and there was no rule against them using prior experience with the exact question to help the student out. They could also understand why you wanted a particular source.
Example: "I'm looking for the most binding precedent for random set of issues, as well as the 10 most recent cases that discuss the issue at hand. Also, are there any other sources or cases you know of that would be particularly relevant to the issues I mentioned?"
Lexis: Can probably find most binding precedent if you're good at navigating/filtering. Can definitely get you the 10 most recent cases, but you'll have to read them all to judge how useful they are . Can definitely get you other sources, but you'll have to do a general search and read through pretty much everything to filter. This will probably take at least a day just to collect everything and filter it to what's useful.
Law librarian: Might know the right precedent off the top of their head. If not, is an expert in Lexis and can find it much faster than you. Same for recent relevant cases. For other sources, not going to be able to get you a comprehensive list, but likely immediately knows of 5-10 places that are highly likely to be relevant. This will probably take 2 hours, max.
I feel like libraries should probably be compartmentalized more. A room for the main catalogue of books, a room filled with outlets and empty tables for studying and working, and a room with computers / empty desks with outlets for those who need them + the printers.
I feel like libraries try to do too much all in the same space. The computer people bug the 'study-ers' with their typing, clicking, and audio. The printers are loud and disruptive. The desks are sprinkled throughout the aisles of books, wherever space could be found -- which makes it harder to navigate around to find the books you need. There's no need to be surrounded by books once you've gotten the one you need.
They're forcing 3 entirely different sets of people into the same space. If people are visiting with 3 different goals just separate the space according to those goals. Have a dedicated and separate computer lab, a dedicated room to rows and rows of books, and a dedicated room for studying -- with side rooms for group studying.
> a library that sometimes looks empty might be a tempting target for administrators trying to maximize the use of space on their campuses,
College Administrators are responsible for much of what is wrong with modern college campuses. Virtually all the growth in expenses go to these dweebs, who sit around dreaming up new ways of feathering their beds while producing a generation of morons.
I used to use the local college business library quite a bit; they sent literally all the books to storage and turned it into a glorified open office plan. One among many reasons they'll never get another nickel from me.
The library at my university had four floors and a basement. The higher the floor the quieter you were supposed to be, so you were welcome to talk on the ground floor but would get glares or carefully chosen words on the top floor. I loved this system. If I wanted to work but didn't mind the chit chat then I was fine on the ground floor, but if I needed to concentrate then I could move.
I recall using a library book for research once. Other than that, I made use of the public computers to work on projects that were stored on Google Drive.
I'm a CS student in the UK and one of my favorite parts of my university is its library. I will sometimes go in there between lectures, just to browse the shelves aimlessly and enjoy the peace and quiet. In the past I have found myself perusing books of haiku and the like - things unrelated to my course which I would be unlikely to encounter online or anywhere else in any non-superficial way. I certainly don't want it to become a trendy makerspace or ideas lab or anything of that nature.
the thing I love most about really big high quality university libraries is the ability to go find a place somewhere in the back of the stacks, and then to walk around finding a collection of a dozen books that sound interesting of themes you like but are not necessarily conversant with.
then browse those books for the next 5+ hours. Really used to get the gears of the brain moving. Of course this was also before the internet and before having any money and after 5 hours I was lightheaded, starving, and not necessarily sure what I was going to eat - but in a good way for me.
Some school libraries don't even have the required course textbooks. A community college I went to did have 1 or 2 copies of required course text books, you just couldn't check them out of the library. 4 year university did not even have them, making sure you paid for a personal copy of your course books from the university book store. It seemed really strange a library wouldn't have the books students needed most.
Textbooks go out of date too quickly to meaningfully contribute to a collection. This is (of course) by the design of publishers to wring as much money out of students as possible.
I used to go and work at our City's Cathedral library: access was free to students, it was in an awesome building about 700 years old and most importantly didn't have WiFi so there was no distraction :)
It was also cold - I find most libraries to be warm and stuffy which makes me drowsy and unable to concentrate.
Originally libraries were cold because fire and books don't mix well, and they needed massive windows because fire was the only other way to light them.
The college I attended has an interesting dynamic in this area. The way the university is laid out, there is a historical "main" campus with a very traditional library, and a much newer "engineering campus" with a very new and modern library. Both buildings are massive and used extensively, but I definitely preferred the modern one - even if some features of it were kinda cheesy (the massive basement with a book-fetching robot being one that was cool in theory - but not often used).
The traditional library had about 10 stories of "book stacks" with quiet areas to study and lots of tables. Unfortunately, each floor only had one conference room and there was a lot of competition for room reservations. The downstairs common area was mostly workstations, and student services, some places to eat too. I liked this library for my first few years of studying, but I felt like it was really hard to collaborate here.
The new library has a ridiculous number of conference rooms which is amazing. Lots of white boards that move around, more variety in seating options, some rooms equipped with specialized stuff (music studios, VR dev spaces, 3d printing), and the layout just feels more optimized (there is a dedicated quiet area upstairs that has beautiful views and tons of space too). The wifi and outlet situation is also better at the new one. The biggest downside is honestly that it's so "different" it becomes a tour destination for random people, which can be a distractions.
All that said, the number one draw for me to both libraries: 24-hour access. Being able to work through the night without interruptions is what made libraries so important to my college experience. I actually really miss that, and I miss that one library in particular.
I'm not a student anymore, and I would love to have access to a decent library where I could actually focus for hours at a time. Anyone have any recommendations in SF? I'm happy to pay.
I've already checked out the private Mechanics' Institute library, and I didn't like it. The best thing I've found so far is just going to fancy hotel lobbies.
If I was a college student I'd just want them to focus their technology spending on eliminating noise. The library for me was just an escape from the constant stimulus of being on campus
"A 2016 survey of students at Webster University in Washington, D.C., also illustrates limited use of digital resources, finding that just 18 percent of students accessed e-books “frequently” or “very frequently,” compared with 42 percent who never used them."
I have lived in Washington, DC, for forty years, and until this had never heard of Webster University. Given the size of Webster (about 2400, it says), and the number of campuses, I wonder exactly how many students were surveyed.
In college, IRC chat rooms with bots serving books from an FTP server were a life saver. I don't think I bought 5 books throughout my entire college career.
Me and my buddies also built a textbook scanner that saved us a ton of money. ( webcam x2 + buttons + easy page turning mechanism )
I always thought the price of college textbooks were ridiculous and put unfair pressure on a broke college kid like me.
One of the essential features of a university library as far as I’m concerned is to actually have on hand a sufficient number of copies of the books required for each course. This was done very well at my university in the UK, but from what I’ve seen in the US, students are expected to buy (oftentimes many) books for each of their courses. I have a problem with that in the days of high tuition and bloated administration. Libraries should not be profit centres.
A university library to me is a place which has access to academic material such as journals and various scholarly databases, a good selection of relevant books, a nice place to study, and very high speed internet.
I didn’t extensively use the library during my studies as most of our CS course materials were available for free, but I did use the space a lot. Additionally, whenever I encountered a book that I might want, the library would process an interlibrary loan, or just buy the book. Purchase requests were easy and fast.
Courses at university in the UK (or at least mine, and at least when I did it) don't really have textbooks. You are advised to read three or four books during the course, but there isn't one single book that you absolutely must have. Lectures had notes, and referred to those three or four books and you could find relevant material in each, in basically any edition.
I think I bought maybe four text books during a four year degree, and those were the ones I really liked and wanted to keep after I graduated. The rest were just checked out of the library.
How come this isn't possible in the US? Why do you need that one particular textbook and a specific edition and nothing else is suitable? There's no undergraduate subject I'm aware of so specific that there is only one book in existence on the topic - many are suitable. What's the blocker?
The biggest problem I always had with the library at my alma matter (ucla), was that thousands of square feet dedicated to books people rarely ever touched while simultaneously failing to have even proportional amount of space dedicated to desks. Furthermore, any furniture frequently doubled as people's bed away from home.
I used to love camping out in my college library. The old computer science books were some of the most fun to leaf through. It may seem comical to a methodologist of today, for whom Agile is the end of history and Object-Oriented Design the pinnacle of human achievement, to read about Jackson Structured Programming, but JSP was the cutting edge of enterprise development in the 1980s and really helped a lot of people deal with tricky data flows in a systematic abstract way.
Of course some notions from back then are still silly. One book described a "software engineer of the 1990s" who sat in a lounge chair and described specs out loud to a HAL-like AI, which transmuted them into flawless code. Kinda like George Jetson and RUDI.
Personally, I want a traditional library with physical books, as well as ample digital access. I did research in college involving attempting to find and summarize every mention of a particular topic by a Congressperson during the 1970s. This meant I grabbed the (massive) books of Congressional minutes, checked the indexes, and paged through them for weeks. I could have done this in days with a digital archive.
At the same time, there was a lot that I preferred to read a physical copy of, and I saved a ton of money by only buying books that weren't on reserve at the library, meaning you could check them out, but only per visit. I also definitely would prefer they remain as a spacious, quiet spaces for study.
[+] [-] alexhutcheson|6 years ago|reply
From an average undergrad's perspective, the ideal "library" is probably something more like a WeWork.
Grad students and researchers have different needs, though.
[+] [-] colmvp|6 years ago|reply
Ha! Funnily enough I left WeWork because of their incessant need to blast music ALL... THE... TIME. During the times when I needed to really hunker down and grok hard material that required hours of intense focus, I would end up going to the nearby library.
That said, I agree with the sentiment of your comment. The local library is packed with students throughout the day because of the availability of desks/seated areas.
[+] [-] bobloblaw45|6 years ago|reply
I've never been able to study at home. I don't know what it is. But in libraries I'm totally in the zone.
It's unfortunate because library hours are so limited. I'd love for there to be a 24 hour library that always had enough seating.
I actually had an idea starting a private membership 24hr study space that would serve primarily as a quiet study space for students. Tables, wifi, strict rules on noise...essentially using the gym business model. But I'm broke and know nothing about running a business but we can all dream.
[+] [-] pgcj_poster|6 years ago|reply
Also, there's no substitute for the feeling you get from working next to a stack of physical books.
[+] [-] danhak|6 years ago|reply
Spoken like someone who never took a humanities course.
[+] [-] jcranmer|6 years ago|reply
Yes, access to the more obscure literature like the Springer books for advanced math, or highly specialized history books (such as a history of Ottoman naval warfare) is pretty essential at the graduate or later level.
[+] [-] justanothersys|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Iv|6 years ago|reply
I once had to look for the media impact of a 1987 trial, and behold, they had the microfilm.
Let's take a moment to remember that we could digitize all this but that stupid copyright laws makes it forbidden.
I hope we manage to reform these before these libraries stop getting funded.
[+] [-] ci5er|6 years ago|reply
This was not my experience after the first 18 months. Maybe things are different than they were in the 80s. Or maybe my school was different (we had a lot of cross-functional projects), or maybe my professors were humoring me by letting me design my own upper-level (but under-grad) curriculum ... but I spent a LOT of time in the library. Sometimes to pull textbooks, but mostly to pull journal articles that described similar or adjacent research. (Or maybe I was a weird kid? That's definitely possible - but all the engineers at our school were weird kids, so I wouldn't have picked up on it.)
[+] [-] notatoad|6 years ago|reply
I fell for this trap in my freshman year, but by my second year of undergrad i discovered that even though the syllabus might say i had to buy textbooks, the library actually did have copies of pretty much everything i needed.
[+] [-] ThemalSpan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtvanhest|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yardie|6 years ago|reply
Once I found out about the university library reserve system I cut my textbook budget in half. It was something first-gen, broke college students aren't told about that would have saved them from spending on books they only needed occassionally.
[+] [-] mschuetz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kkylin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kache_|6 years ago|reply
I was successful in not buying a single book throughout all of university - and it wasn't because I used the library. Everything you need is out there. Note: I didn't buy a single book because I could not afford it
[+] [-] speedplane|6 years ago|reply
Huge libraries of books may possibly be obsolete at large universities, especially for undergrads. But when I went to school, I found immense value in my schools access to periodicals. I read them voraciously and learned how to quickly read (and later write) technical articles. It quickly became clear they were instrumental with staying up to date with the state of the art.
It’s a pity that most of these academic periodicals are out of reach for everyone outside academia, they are the closest we have to true source material.
[+] [-] adamsea|6 years ago|reply
To be honest I pity college students who never have the need - or even worse, the desire - to get books from their college library.
[+] [-] satya71|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pathsjs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aperocky|6 years ago|reply
Unless you're majoring in classical latin, but then again, what piece of information is not digitized already? If it's not, the first user to come across that in academia should do just that.
All of my information is on my computer, and I didn't need to write down anything for almost a year now.
[+] [-] ken|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vondur|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GhettoMaestro|6 years ago|reply
Oh god. Somewhere you probably just spawned a demon idea: WeWork-style partnerships with universities to build "co-working" spaces on-campus.
JK - but probably not!
[+] [-] mattmanser|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ineedasername|6 years ago|reply
One particular project involved correlating & comparing prison funding & criminal recidivism with education spending in the state I was in. Books held nothing on this, and the government documents section massive, dense & daunting. The reference librarian saved me many hours of work by getting me directly to what I needed, and suggesting other resources as well.
The internet has made casual research extraordinarily easy, but it's like an 80/20 split. The average person can get 80% of the way there, but these reference librarians are professionals in their field, with all the connotations that being a "professional" comes with.
[+] [-] the_watcher|6 years ago|reply
I only did one year of law school, but taking this piece of advice (swap in Lexis/WestLaw/Bloomberg for Google) was a massive win. The librarians at the law library were so knowledgeable, and there was no rule against them using prior experience with the exact question to help the student out. They could also understand why you wanted a particular source.
Example: "I'm looking for the most binding precedent for random set of issues, as well as the 10 most recent cases that discuss the issue at hand. Also, are there any other sources or cases you know of that would be particularly relevant to the issues I mentioned?"
Lexis: Can probably find most binding precedent if you're good at navigating/filtering. Can definitely get you the 10 most recent cases, but you'll have to read them all to judge how useful they are . Can definitely get you other sources, but you'll have to do a general search and read through pretty much everything to filter. This will probably take at least a day just to collect everything and filter it to what's useful.
Law librarian: Might know the right precedent off the top of their head. If not, is an expert in Lexis and can find it much faster than you. Same for recent relevant cases. For other sources, not going to be able to get you a comprehensive list, but likely immediately knows of 5-10 places that are highly likely to be relevant. This will probably take 2 hours, max.
[+] [-] Akinato|6 years ago|reply
I feel like libraries try to do too much all in the same space. The computer people bug the 'study-ers' with their typing, clicking, and audio. The printers are loud and disruptive. The desks are sprinkled throughout the aisles of books, wherever space could be found -- which makes it harder to navigate around to find the books you need. There's no need to be surrounded by books once you've gotten the one you need.
They're forcing 3 entirely different sets of people into the same space. If people are visiting with 3 different goals just separate the space according to those goals. Have a dedicated and separate computer lab, a dedicated room to rows and rows of books, and a dedicated room for studying -- with side rooms for group studying.
[+] [-] scottlocklin|6 years ago|reply
College Administrators are responsible for much of what is wrong with modern college campuses. Virtually all the growth in expenses go to these dweebs, who sit around dreaming up new ways of feathering their beds while producing a generation of morons.
I used to use the local college business library quite a bit; they sent literally all the books to storage and turned it into a glorified open office plan. One among many reasons they'll never get another nickel from me.
[+] [-] BlameKaneda|6 years ago|reply
I recall using a library book for research once. Other than that, I made use of the public computers to work on projects that were stored on Google Drive.
[+] [-] DC-3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|6 years ago|reply
then browse those books for the next 5+ hours. Really used to get the gears of the brain moving. Of course this was also before the internet and before having any money and after 5 hours I was lightheaded, starving, and not necessarily sure what I was going to eat - but in a good way for me.
[+] [-] pretendscholar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JimmyRuska|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minikites|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdsnape|6 years ago|reply
It was also cold - I find most libraries to be warm and stuffy which makes me drowsy and unable to concentrate.
[+] [-] mavhc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sudosteph|6 years ago|reply
The traditional library had about 10 stories of "book stacks" with quiet areas to study and lots of tables. Unfortunately, each floor only had one conference room and there was a lot of competition for room reservations. The downstairs common area was mostly workstations, and student services, some places to eat too. I liked this library for my first few years of studying, but I felt like it was really hard to collaborate here.
The new library has a ridiculous number of conference rooms which is amazing. Lots of white boards that move around, more variety in seating options, some rooms equipped with specialized stuff (music studios, VR dev spaces, 3d printing), and the layout just feels more optimized (there is a dedicated quiet area upstairs that has beautiful views and tons of space too). The wifi and outlet situation is also better at the new one. The biggest downside is honestly that it's so "different" it becomes a tour destination for random people, which can be a distractions.
All that said, the number one draw for me to both libraries: 24-hour access. Being able to work through the night without interruptions is what made libraries so important to my college experience. I actually really miss that, and I miss that one library in particular.
[+] [-] uwuhn|6 years ago|reply
I've already checked out the private Mechanics' Institute library, and I didn't like it. The best thing I've found so far is just going to fancy hotel lobbies.
[+] [-] werber|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cafard|6 years ago|reply
I have lived in Washington, DC, for forty years, and until this had never heard of Webster University. Given the size of Webster (about 2400, it says), and the number of campuses, I wonder exactly how many students were surveyed.
[+] [-] honkycat|6 years ago|reply
Me and my buddies also built a textbook scanner that saved us a ton of money. ( webcam x2 + buttons + easy page turning mechanism )
I always thought the price of college textbooks were ridiculous and put unfair pressure on a broke college kid like me.
[+] [-] noodlesUK|6 years ago|reply
A university library to me is a place which has access to academic material such as journals and various scholarly databases, a good selection of relevant books, a nice place to study, and very high speed internet.
I didn’t extensively use the library during my studies as most of our CS course materials were available for free, but I did use the space a lot. Additionally, whenever I encountered a book that I might want, the library would process an interlibrary loan, or just buy the book. Purchase requests were easy and fast.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|6 years ago|reply
I think I bought maybe four text books during a four year degree, and those were the ones I really liked and wanted to keep after I graduated. The rest were just checked out of the library.
How come this isn't possible in the US? Why do you need that one particular textbook and a specific edition and nothing else is suitable? There's no undergraduate subject I'm aware of so specific that there is only one book in existence on the topic - many are suitable. What's the blocker?
[+] [-] blackflame7000|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitwize|6 years ago|reply
Of course some notions from back then are still silly. One book described a "software engineer of the 1990s" who sat in a lounge chair and described specs out loud to a HAL-like AI, which transmuted them into flawless code. Kinda like George Jetson and RUDI.
[+] [-] the_watcher|6 years ago|reply
At the same time, there was a lot that I preferred to read a physical copy of, and I saved a ton of money by only buying books that weren't on reserve at the library, meaning you could check them out, but only per visit. I also definitely would prefer they remain as a spacious, quiet spaces for study.
[+] [-] devxpy|6 years ago|reply
Now I can only envision an ebook reader that's made up of a 1000 paper-thin eink panels bound into a book that's A4 size.