Please hold

My local library has a really bad website--the most annoying thing about is that every time you do anything you have to log in again with your library card number and password. Like, say you do a search, find a book you want, click "hold" and you have to sign in so they can hold the book for you. So, fine.

Then you want to search for another book, so you plug in an author's name, find another book you want to request a hold on, click "hold," and you have to sign in again.

Oooookay.

Then, having completed your requests, you want to see what you have checked out. Click "review my account." Yup. Sign in again. Oh, wait--I see that a couple of my books are really close to their due dates. I'd probably better click "renew my materials" to renew them. Sigh. Sign in again.

Really bad development, I think. I can see, I guess, that they don't want to have a session hang around a long time, since people also use this system from on-site terminals, but you would think they could come up with a better system than that. I wrote them an email about it, but no one ever responded to me.

Oh well. I'm sure it's better than a lot of library systems (and I assume worse than some, and actually worse than what they used to have, which worked beautifully). I guess I shouldn't complain. It's better than nothing, and certainly better than having to telephone the library to request holds. Still, it's irksome.

But anyway. I use the system to, as I said, check due dates (although I also record them in my Visor, so I seldom miss one) of books I've already checked out, and to request holds on ones that I want to read. I can't remember when I figured this out, but it works great. When I hear about a book that I want to read, I just go to the library website and request it. I do sometimes feel bad about borrowing books from the library rather than buying them and supporting authors, but I figure I buy enough books that I don't need to feel guilty about it, and I could never buy all the books I read, or at least I couldn't read them as soon as I do--I'd have to wait for them to come out in paperback.

A lot of other people have apparently figured that out, too.

I used to get books really fast, but now, more often than not, I end up waiting a few weeks for recent books. It depends on how popular they are, of course. I just requested a fairly new Christopher Moore book the other day (Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings) and I got an email this morning that it's waiting for me. The same for a book called Judgment Calls, by Alafair Burke. That name will be familiar to anyone who reads James Lee Burke's novels--it's the name of his protagonist Dave Robicheaux's daughter in the books. Well, "Alafair," not the last name.

I do remember reading someplace that Burke's real life daughter was named Alafair, but I'd forgotten. And frankly, it would never have occurred to me that she was a real live grown-up capable of writing a book. In fact, she is (or was) a district attorney in Portland, Oregon, and her female protagonist is a D.A. as well.

But I digress.

Back to my point: a lot of other people seem to have figured out the whole reservation thing. I've had Sherman Alexie's book of short stories, Ten Little Indians (Hah! "Reservation." "Indians.") on hold for what seems like months, ever since I heard him read one from this book on NPR one morning.

And while I'm only number 3 for High Country, Nevada Barr's latest, and number 4 for Donald Westlake's newest, Road to Ruin, I'm number 33 for the latest James Lee Burke, Last Car to Elysian Fields, number 84 for John Sandford's most recent Kidd novel, The Hanged Man's Song, and number 443 for John Grisham's The Last Juror.

But that's okay. I figure sometime in a couple of years I'll get an email that it's ready for me, and I'll be glad, because I will have probably run out of stuff to read by then.

My friend Eugene has a new website: Digital Epiphany. He does web design and development, and also has some wonderful photography in his gallery, along with some cell phone themes, which I can't use on my phone, alas. Check it out!