Here’s a pithy little commentary on the CD price-fixing settlement from NPR commentator, poet, and renaissance man Andrei Codrescu.
Libraries are bad off as it is, with budget cuts and republicanism gone rampant, they don’t need another choke-hold on their services. Surplus cheese was bad enough, but at least you could eat the stuff (gag, gag)….
None of this crap is free
Remember every CD, even if it is not one of 300 copies of the same thing, has costs to process, costs for a durable CD case – 88 cents for the cheapest we can find, cost for a tattle tape, cost for the cataloger’s time.
I don’t recall anyone ever asking the librarians if they wanted this. It seems that lawyers just decided it would be a good thing. And the BS about a computer snafu sending hundreds of Whitney singles is nonsense, they simply cleared the warehouses out. It is similar to people who dump junky old books on the library to get a receipt for income tax purposes. Come on these CD’s are mostly like the 1987 PDR – I don’t want or need them.
If librarians had a choice between 600 CD’s that they must sort through or 6 that they wanted I would have taken the six.
Now that I have to do collection development, and wade through all the crap people give us it steams me the way the settlement was crafted. At two or three bucks per CD to process and catalog free ain’t free no matter how you look at it.
How were the lawyers paid.
I bet the lawyers were not paid in CDs. I bet they got cash.
I protest
As someone who grew up on goverment cheese I find the analogy offensive. There is no better cheese then a giant 5lb block of cut-a-slab-yourself goverment cheese.
Re:I protest
Wasn’t it more like “cheese food product?” I threw a party a very long time ago, and a classmate volunteered to bring cheese. Swiss? Gouda? Brie? I wondered what she would surprise us with. Suprised I was when she pulled an oblong cardboard box filled with 3 lbs. of sub-Velveeta gubmint cheese. And actually, it was a more suitable companion to our jugs o’ wine and Old Style keg than anything with a waxy rind or pungent odor.
Re:I protest
That’s not how I remember it but maybe. As a child of 8-10 my palette wasn’t that developed. I do know there were some that were actually pre-sliced which I remember to be the real thing. You still had to cut off 6 inch blocks otherwise you had a slice that was 1.4 inch thick and a foot and a half long.
Re:I protest
I didn’t know that Velveeta wasn’t really cheese until I was in my late teens. I’ve been a cheesehead ever since.
no, I protest
I’m not so sure greg and I are offtopic, since Codrescu equates the CD settlement with government cheese. I’d prefer to call our discussion “meandering.” Sheesh.
Re:no, I protest 😉
It was probably moderated by someone who grew up on those indivdually wrapped slices