Thing 36: Comic Relief

Thing 35: Books 2.0

For me, electronic books in any form will never be as good as a printed book I can curl up on the couch in front of the fireplace with. I can't listen to ebooks because I get way too distracted. I tried that when driving home with my kids from Arkansas and ended up 150 miles too far east. We did have a fun time trying to get back to the interstate we belonged on via country roads, but listening while I drive, or do things around the house just doesn't work for me. I suppose a Kindle might be nice but if it's anything like a computer screen, I would rather not try to read on that. I don't enjoy reading much on the computer either. It's a lot harder on my eyes than a book!

I joined the BookCrossing page and that looks very intriguing, but I'm not sure where I put my books so they will be found... Or where I look for books to find... We have tons of paperbacks at our library without barcodes, kind of for borrow or trade or whatever, so if BookCrossing catches on I can see it happening in our community. I'll have to try leaving a couple there and see what happens, I guess.

Thing 34: Is It Competition? Online Answer Sites

To be honest, I have rarely, except when I was in college, used the library as a reference source... I would order books and use the books as reference material, but not the librarian. Maybe that's because we have such a tiny library it just takes too long to get the materials in? We don't even have a separate reference section - just one lonely librarian who answers all our questions and often points us to the internet! I love having the internet and ready access to answers to any question I might have - and I use the answers with caution when need be (ie: health related) but it's a resource I find invaluable. It does not however, replace the library at all for me. It actually increases my library use because I can find more books on more subjects that I want to check out. I can even find more subjects to find books on, subjects I didn't know existed. Not many people use our library as a reference source, and that could change, but probably won't any time soon.

Thing 33: Travel 2.0

I really enjoy Google maps and use it a lot. I also use the Track Flight Status webpage fairly often and am intrigued by the Green routes site for MN, ND, SD and WI (but I can't seem to find anything in any state other than MN - is that the only state that has listings or am I doing something wrong?) I'm not really much of a traveler; I would really like to be, but finances and reality keep me at home most of the time. I can't see the point in some of the travel blogs - this blog works just fine for me that way. I used it on a really fun trip my dd and I took last year when we flew to Las Vegas and took a shuttle to AZ and then drove a car home to MN. It was such fun, and I'd like to do something like that again, but realistically, how many times in life are you given a car that needs to be picked up in AZ? (AZ is my very favorite state.) I can see where some of these urls would be handy for a few of our library patrons, but most of us around here aren't frequent travelers.