WorldCat Library Network
WorldCat is the world’s largest library network, allowing you to search for books, music, videos, and articles from its extensive international database of libraries. Enter your postal code, state, province, or country, and the search engine narrows down your results by location. (If what you’re looking for isn’t within a convenient distance, don’t forget that wonderful invention known as the interlibrary loan.)
[via The Little Professor]
Nine times out of 10 (or eight when I’m weak), I prefer to get my book fix through the well-stocked and up-to-date New York Public Library. The first time we decided to dust off our library cards, it was out of sheer necessity, because, as is the case whenever two bibliophiles marry both their hearts and libraries, we had books balanced precariously in crooked piles, and books falling out of every conceivable nook and crevice in our tiny, overstuffed apartment. We had big books and little books. Hardback books and pliable paper-wrapped books. Comic books, poetry books, prose books, and book books. Books which had well-thumbed pages and books whose spines had barely been cracked. (Not that we’d do something so barbaric, of course. Perish the thought!)
Now, going to the library also makes ecological sense because we’re not using up new resources. Imagine how many less books would be printed, forests leveled, or fuel burned, if we did not have to absolutely own every single book we read. The hub still has a problem leaving a used-book store empty-handed, however, especially after I told him second-hand goods weren’t contributing anything new to the waste-stream and so had close-to-zero environmental footprints. He has standards, though—anything over $2 for a paperback is cutting it close, $5 is just crazy talk, and anything pricier means the bookseller has gone mad with the power and needs to be restrained in a straitjacket, shot on sight, or both. (When I told him all Cory Doctorow’s books were available online for free, he nearly crapped his pants.)
