In Lieu of B&N and HBO…the Library

A woman in her 50s dropped in after work at the East Meadow (Long Island, NY) Public Library and applied for a library card. She confided to a librarian, with a smidgen of embarrassment, that it was her first library card since childhood.

“Now I don’t have to buy my books,” she told the librarian, Jude Schanzer. “This is how I’m cutting back.”

Ms. Schanzer, East Meadow’s director of programming, tells the story to illustrate one upside to the economic downturn: Libraries are booming. New York Times.