The library will be closed Monday, May 25, in observance of Memorial Day. The bookdrop will be open so that you may return materials. Regular hours resume at 9:00 a.m. Tuesday, May 26.

We’ve received some disgruntled communications from some of our patrons in the past few days, inquiring what happened to the audio books they had been able to download through the library’s website. The short story is–we cancelled our subscription. The few people who were taking advantage of this service was not worth the $4,500 per year cost.

One of the reasons it was not being used was that it was not compatible with the ubiquitous Apple iPods—it only worked with MP3 players. Another downside was that you had to keep the book for a month, no matter how soon you were finished with it—so no one else could use it during that time. The only books available were nonfiction and there was no way to place a hold on a book you wanted to borrow.

The service we were subscribing to was really the first generation of this technology. Now we’re looking into services that have fixed most of the issues that made NetLibrary less than desirable. Stay tuned. We are happy to know that some of you used and enjoyed NetLibrary but we hope that we’ll soon have something better to offer. We’ll let you know as soon as a new downloadable audiobook service is available.