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Comment by fouric | Hacker News Reader

> If I wanted to borrow A Better Man by Louise Penny—the country’s current No. 1 fiction bestseller

> Public libraries are engaged in one of the most valuable series of community services for all ages, for all audiences

> If you think about equitable access to information for everybody, there shouldn’t be discrimination or anything like that

Devil's advocate: the article (and many of the persons mentioned) seem to be discussing primarily works of fiction, not e.g. textbooks or technical reference books. How is this part of "a valuable series of community services"? It seems like they just want the ability to consume more entertainment media for free, and are trying to disguise it as part of the (noble) effort of trying to make access to information egalitarian.

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To play an advocate from a deeper level of Hell: Why should the ideas in fiction be dismissed as uninformative?

Fiction is quite illustrative as well. I don't know how to, or if we need to, draw the line between entertainment and education but I think that it's unfair to say that you cannot be entertained and educated at the same time.

I don't know if that was your point specifically but there are undertones whenever library funding gets brought up. It's also comparable to welfare fraud. There are people who campaign against welfare because of abusers but the amount the fraud amounts to is relatively low.[1]

I'm not learned enough to tell you what percentage of fraud is acceptable but I worry about us treating this the same way. I understand the campaign about how your taxes are spent but I also think we agree that this is a valuable community service, especially for people who do not have access to tools and networks like I do.

A very fair point though fouric!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_fraud#United_States

Librarians are trying to make available materials that their reading communities want. Their bias towards entertainment media is a reflection of librarians doing their job of providing to local communities who read and listen to a lot of fiction.

I have found it nearly impossible to get any non-fiction titles that I'm interested in at my local library (San Mateo County Libraries). I have tried older titles, newer titles, popular titles, etc. The OverDrive app always autocompletes the title in the search bar, and then it tells me there are zero results.

I have tried dozens of books over a decade or so of living here. It is really frustrating, and only very occasionally (once or twice in that period?) have I actually been able to check out a title I was searching for.

So this is not just a fiction problem. It is definitely applicable to non-fiction books as well.

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