Local library here is pretty good, you can do almost everything online and get a fairly good selection of books online. For those not online you can have them transferred to your local library for pick up...along with a lot of other stuff.


Their main branch is kind of a pain to go to because it's downtown and the parking situation sucks at times, with fairly expensive parking lots or meters. And it houses some things you can only get see on those premises such as family trees and rare books/etc.

They updated the online catalog software to suit what people wanted just recently.

They run a whole lot of learn-to classes, speakers, etc. I haven't seen any of those I was particularly interested in, but still cool to see them make the effort. I think their primary crowd on these are more in the older age brackets or kids.

I believe they could offer a more robust online selection, but I have this nagging feeling that the book publishers discourage this via pricing and weird restrictions that they may not be able to comply with or unwilling.

Libraries are a pretty big opponent to restriction of freedoms to the individual granted under fair use. Without fair use they probably wouldn't exist....and we know the copyright groups have been actively pushing for more restrictions on fair use. I wouldn't be too surprised if they were behind library budgets being slashed dramatically in many locations. The budget for libraries is probably paltry compared to a lot of other things that didn't get axed.