If not a troll... He / she probably never knew that before GPS, there were printed road maps that one could get for free.

Not surprised at all. I get patients every day in the 18-25 year old range who:

1. Never heard 'there's no cure for the common cold.'

2. Don't' know that Ibuprofen can be taken for pain.

3. Don't know Immodium can be bought over the counter.

4. Think PhD/MD is the same thing.

Seems like it could be legit, depending on the age of the poster.  This isn't even all that idiotic...are kids in elementary school still required to use public libraries for anything?  If not, it's easy to imagine someone never having any experience with one.

13 hours ago, Hardspoon said:

Seems like it could be legit, depending on the age of the poster.  This isn't even all that idiotic...are kids in elementary school still required to use public libraries for anything?  If not, it's easy to imagine someone never having any experience with one.

 

Good point.. the University I used to work at built a huge 5 story library to to replace the smaller 3 story one.

It turns out starting well before I retired in 2015 the library was being "down sized" in relation to printed material. They had numerous bins full of printed books that were heading to the dump and being replaced by digital material.

I was odd seeing is this big library which now had a lot of empty floor space. Talk about poor planning and a waste of taxpayer money. They could have simply remodeled the old library.

Maybe @Gilberg can weigh in?

This is funny.  My son is 12 and he has a card and we go every time he needs a book for reading class.

I wonder if the OP is in the 18 - 30 year range or a Troll as mentioned above.

Is that his username at the bottom? I'm going with troll.

He’s a troll.

If not, he’s unable to express his thoughts clearly, because he stillseems to be unable to distinguish between “books,”  (“led to a respectable book shelf”) and e-books (reddit, Amazon). Even so, he’s unable to understand that libraries don’t charge “rent” for e-books either.  

All things considered, too many misconceptions here to be credible, so I vote “troll.”

On 10/14/2017 at 7:39 PM, Hardspoon said:

Seems like it could be legit, depending on the age of the poster.  This isn't even all that idiotic...are kids in elementary school still required to use public libraries for anything?  If not, it's easy to imagine someone never having any experience with one.

 

They're not required to use public libraries for anything, but the schools also have libraries with the exact same concept.  Our kids, starting in first grade, visit the library once a week and check out a new book.  So, given that, it seems hard to imagine that an American adult wouldn't know how a library worked.  But it's not a given, so if there are schools out there that don't have their own library or do but don't require kids to use it, I can see how this would be a serious post.

On a related note, how many young people nowadays would know what a card catalog is or how they worked?   Also, I wonder if they still use the Dewey Decimal system?

On 10/15/2017 at 9:53 AM, CT207 said:

Good point.. the University I used to work at built a huge 5 story library to to replace the smaller 3 story one.

It turns out starting well before I retired in 2015 the library was being "down sized" in relation to printed material. They had numerous bins full of printed books that were heading to the dump and being replaced by digital material.

I was odd seeing is this big library which now had a lot of empty floor space. Talk about poor planning and a waste of taxpayer money. They could have simply remodeled the old library.

Sounds like the problems were even bigger than the decision to rebuild.  Sounds like they had no idea what their needs were.

Academic libraries have gone through a tremendous transformation recently.  On some campuses, they are acting as a sort of magnetic center with not only research, but studying, tutorial services, social hub and content creation.  In addition, with the rise of multi-disciplinary fields, the "library" is often the place that makes sense to locate facilities to serve these fields (GIS, music/video...).  Printed material?  Not going away completely anytime soon.  You would be shocked to know what is actually in these collections and quite a bit of it can indeed be culled.  And students still like bound periodicals very much.

Public libraries have also gone through changes as significant.  It's not the old Carnegie Library anymore where you show up, get your book and take it home for two weeks.  New public libraries serve a Civic function.  Community meetings, reading rooms with current newspapers, books (yes books) and a well designed children's area is common.

Well designed new libraries today are very exciting places.

Agreed about “new” public libraries, not only lending books (and DVD’s, Blu-ray, music CD’s, etc.), as well as ebooks, and serving community functions, etc., but these changes are designed to keep libraries “up to date” for today’s users. So, getting back to the original question, isn’t that even more reason to suspect it’s a troll?