Public libraries: "People can spend hours and hours in these dens of socialism without having to buy so much as a cappuccino."

So the San Francisco Chronicle just ran one of the nuttiest polemics since . . . well, actually, I can't really think of a precedent for it, although the "burn your library card" does remind me a bit of a certain fad that swept through Munich back in '33. (Ok, I'm sure M.C. Blakeman would protest being called a biblioclast, but please -- if public libraries were to close, do you think all those pinko librarians would sell their books? Heavens, no.)

Anyway, the gist of the article is that "Amazon and Barnes & Noble struggle valiantly each day to sell books, these communistic cabals known as libraries undercut the hard work of good corporate citizens by letting people read their books for free." That's the nut in a nutshell, but I'd encourage you to read along -- it's good, O'Reilly-style fun. Unless people actually start believing it, in which case I'm heading to the NYPL Humanities and Social Sciences brance with an arc-welder and a twelve-gauge.


That's an abandoned library in Russia, by the way. Because books and communism are totally compatible and everything.