Library | featured news

On and off in recent years, I’ve written about why the city hasn’t sold off its so-called surplus properties, including old libraries and fire stations that have been replaced by bigger, brighter, shinier models and then left to rot. As Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm said one year ago, “We don’t want to just give them away.” And so they’ve become shadows of shadows of their former selves, canvases for taggers and targets for vandals.

Want to borrow "Fifty Shades of Grey?" It's going to be a long, heart-pounding wait at the local library.

Less than a month after Fifty Shades of Grey was pulled from library shelves, officials plan to put the erotic book back in circulation.

The hot and very popular trilogy is not available everywhere. Brevard County has banned "Fifty Shades of Grey" from the shelves of its public libraries due to its "perceived pornographic nature," a spokesman from the county government said.

Kindles, Nooks and iPads can do many amazing things, but they can’t bump you ahead in line at the Reston Regional Library. In fact, if you want to borrow a book, it may be quicker to put down your sleek new device and head into the stacks.

Amazon announced Thursday that it has launched a Kindle lending library for owners of its e-reader who are also subscribers to its Amazon Prime service. Prime members can borrow one book a month, with no due dates. Users are allowed to have one book out at a time, the company said in a press release. All notes, bookmarks and highlights made on the borrowed book will still be there if the customer later purchases or re-borrows the book.

“Eve’s Diary” was pulled from the shelves of a library in 1906 after trustees objected to illustrations of a naked Eve in Eden.

The Seattle Public Library, a beloved civic trophy in a book-loving city, whose directors are plucked away for plum jobs by presidents and philanthropists and whose buildings are often beacons of design, is closed all week — yet again. The furlough, intended to save about $650,000 from the system’s $50 million budget, has become something of a late-summer tradition in recent years, hardly as welcome as the weather.

State governments across the country are laying off teachers, closing public libraries and parks, and reducing health care services, but there is one place they could get $23 billion if they could only agree how to do it: Internet retailers such as Amazon.com.

I spent Friday night at the New York Public Library's main branch with 499 other people (plus an uncounted slew of librarians, volunteers, security guards, and caterers) to take part in Find the Future, a game of sorts that was thrown to celebrate the library's hundredth birthday.