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.

Thanks--I will pass that along to her.

Also, color sensitivity may decrease with age. My maternal grandmother was, by the time she died, was only able to perceive highly saturated colors--everything else was either muddy brown or grey. I've also noticed that my mother, who is an artist now in her 60s, is losing the ability to distinguish subtle shades of various colors. As for color-blindness, my father was red-green colorblind, but while its effects was barely noticeable when he was in his 20s-30s, by the time he was in his 70s it was becoming a serious problem.

I get my eyes tested annually.

Not a clue. Until now, I was unaware that anyone else experienced it. Even my opthamologist was unaware of the condition--I had to fight to get non-tinted lenses a few years back because the tint screwed up my color perception when I was trying to match colors on the job.