It is interesting, isn't it, what differing standard there are?

I have some patrons that object to anything dealing with death or other "unpleasant" topics, but at least one parent who sought out Erlbruch's Duck, Death and the Tulip," Tan's Red Tree and The Rabbits or Greder's The City and for her first/second grade kids.

Discretion or Censorship? As a librarian, I try to remember to ask myself that every time I make a purchase decision. Hopefully, it informs my choices--mostly, I try to put interesting and thought-provoking books or into my readers' hands along with the latest Janet Evanovich or C.J Box...

...or books they wouldn't find or think to try on their own.

1984, Brave New World, most of Hemingway and Steinbeck, Dune, Diary of Anne Frank, and the new release of The Autobiography of Mark Twain are all under copyright.

I can assure you, you can find any amount of bad writing in the public domain, as well. To quote Ted Sturgeon, "Ninety percent of everything is [crud]." The difference is, between then (the classics) and now (the current market), the worst of the old has had time to drop out of the reading lists and to be mostly forgotten. We can speed the process along, though, by reading both the bad and the good and then TELLING PEOPLE what we think of them. Bad word of mouth can hurt sales and make a book less likely to stay in print.

As for "shallow entertainment trash novels," they have their purpose--they encourage reading in general; and studies show that the more people read, the more likely they are to become discerning readers. I cringe when I go back and try to re-read some of the books I used to enjoy. And, too, I still enjoy sitting down with a trashy novel, though I don't force myself to finish it if it's too bad.

I do find Stephen King's long form fiction tedious--the short fiction still packs a punch :) --Oh, and you don't have to worry about the political books (both sides, for the most part)--they're ephemeral: demand drops off the moment they stop advertising them, and they disappear without a trace.

I expect she avoids being labeled "sci-fi" for the same reason that Crichton and many others do, and for the same reason Sparks and Evans avoid the "romance" label--once you are in the "genre writer" ghetto, you will not be marketed or distributed outside that genre. Furthermore, many readers refuse to read (or, alternately, to read outside of) certain genres.

I have had library patrons who read and enjoyed certain authors until I mentioned that they were technically science fiction; they stopped reading an author they enjoyed, saying, "I don't like science fiction," and NEVER read the authors again. This happens for sci-fi, fantasy, romance and crime; I can only assume some part of the patrons' identity is tied up in the types of books they choose to read or not read.

OTOH, some older western-reading gentlemen will--if I have salted the westerns with romances featuring cowboys and horses--happily move into the romance section once they have exhausted the westerns.

...and it should come bundled with a trenchcoat and fedora.

I had a patron come into the library with a dash-camera recording of his arrest. I helped him to play the video.

Leaving aside the proprietary format that required download and installation of a proprietary player on the public computers and the fact that the department/court dumped 8 hours of video on him for less than 15 minutes of content;

A) the Sheriff's deputies that arrested him had parked their vehicle so that half of the patron's vehicle was out of the sight lines of their camera;

B) they had seated him (on the fender of his truck) out of sight of the camera; they themselves were out of the range of the camera most of the time, and

C) the recording had multiple blocks of several minutes each where there was NO sound (I checked--there was no audio track in those sections).

The patron had requested the video to see if he had been read his rights, but there was no way to tell, and no way to tell if the foiling of the camera was deliberate.

Oddly enough, as a small rural librarian, (small library, that is--I am over 6' and overweight :) ), I also purchase obscure ex-library books on Amazon or half.com, for myself, for patrons who can't-or-won't-use-the-internet, and for my library's collection. I can't say I've had any interest in your reading list locally (though it sounds fascinating), but we've purchased reprints of obscure pre-colonial religious texts, archaeological texts on the Vikings, the Kievan Rus, and prehistoric Britain, German-language texts on the period of WWII, and a variety of sociological texts (sociology of American military base design, anyone?). most of these have been at the request of patrons.

Ask--you might well have a local librarian who can justify purchasing interesting reading material from Amazon so that others in your community can enjoy them as well.

BTW, have you thought of thought of joining an online book-lending program? You could be someone else's lending library and someone else could be yours, as well...

You might check if your library is considering joining a lending group or partnership. My library is currently a member of a 10-library lending group spread over three counties. We have a volunteer courier system that moves books between libraries fairly efficiently and a shared catalog that allows you to order or borrow from any library in the group. This allows us to specialize in some of the less popular or more obscure materials instead of all having to carry the "popular titles or oft-read items like magazines, romance novels, recent biographies, etc" and to tailor our collections in more interesting ways. My small rural library library has started collecting fiction and non-fiction books published in the UK and Australia, films based on books, and obscure mystery and sci-fi series, while another library in the group collects all the popular political books, thus sparing the rest of us that expense. This last month, almost a fifth of my library's physical checkouts were ordered from other libraries and and we loaned out about two-thirds of that total to other libraries (mostly from the obscure series). It works well enough we are negotiating to join a nearby 7-library system and another 90-something-library system, though that might require us to pay for courier services.

In addition, we offer interlibrary loan services, and have borrowed from as far away as Alaska and Florida. We have ordered academic materials in support of local patrons pursuing graduate degrees and for homeschooling families (we help to cover costs for academic .interlibrary requests, but request return postage for other requests beyond a certain amount). Additionally, many journal articles, some textbook chapters, and similar materials can be provided free as electronic copies through ILL.

I would ask your librarian directly, though. For some inexplicable reason, some libraries don't publicize the the many fine services they offer.

More likely, your library provides e-books through Overdrive or a similar service, but because you have a Kindle or are downloading a Kindle-format book, Amazon requires your library checkouts to go through the Amazon site before you can download, so they can serve you a few ads and offer you the "opportunity" to purchase the book instead of checking it out. Other brands of e-readers may do something similar, or may allow you to check out through the Overdrive site and read if you have the appropriate DRM software installed. The publishers don't trust libraries enough to allow us to check e-books out to you directly or without DRM.

My library's online catalog is scheduled to have a "browse" function--you will be able to see a row of covers in shelf order that you can swipe/scroll along for that kind of discovery. Unfortunately, it won't duplicate the rows above and below, as I would have liked for that shelf-jumping serendipity of discovery, but it will allow a combined browse of all 10 libraries in our user group as if all our books were shelved together.

Of course, Sirsi-Dynix (the company providing the system) has been promising us this new version for, what, three years now? .

"Sometime this year, my arse...".

Agreed-- What would be a redundant engine on an Air Force or Army aircraft could save a Marine or Navy crew's life over water.