"...The unemployment offices are swamped and people are being sent to the library with little or no guidance.

These former factory workers, some with limited English language skills, and very few computer skills, must use the internet to file for unemployment, get entered in our state’s required database and post a resume....

Many of our patrons do not know how to type and do not understand why they need an email address, much less how to establish one. Taco Bell, McDonald’s and Wal-Mart, as well as the larger employers in our area, all require applications to be filled out online. People who can’t even speak English well are required to make resumes without knowing how to say the word (“my rezoom” is how one patron referred to it), much less fill in the form with properly capitalized names. One man did not know what a capital letter was.

They must locate employer websites, make a user name and password, find a job opening and find the application. They must fill it in, make an email address and resume, and learn to upload, attach or cut and paste it.

Our computer facilities are maxed out. Before this summer, a five or ten minute wait was the most patrons could expect. There are now often 25 people in line with a 30-40 minute wait.

...Meanwhile...the library has had a hiring freeze since May. No one has been laid off, but because of staff losses due to attrition and no replacements hired, most departments are down to bare bones...."

"Other technologies augment our limbs or organs: the plough fortifies our arm, the microscope and telephone extend our eyes and ears. But the book is a tool that allows us to exercise the imagination."

...the pleasure of second-hand bookshops is not only in finding what you want: it is in leafing through many volumes and alighting upon something that you never knew existed, that fascinates you and therefore widens your horizons in a completely unanticipated way, helping you to make the most unexpected connections.

According to the owner of a bookshop that I have now been patronizing for forty years (and who seemed to me to be of the older generation when I first met him, but now seems, mysteriously, to be precisely the same age as I), browsing...is a thing of the past. Young people do not do it any more, as they still did when he started his life in the trade. Instead, they have a purely instrumental or utilitarian attitude to bookshops: they come in, ask whether he has such and such a title, and if he does not they leave at once, usually with visible disgruntlement: for what is the point of a bookshop that does not have the very title that they want here and now?