Welcome back!
Summer is hitting New England; we keep getting a couple heat spikes a week. Normally, we don’t hit the 80s or 90s into well into July and August. However, I did have my first hot dog of the summer season and it was wonderful. No notes! I foresee more in my future.
We also dropped our latest SBTB Summer Romance Bingo card. Will you be participating?
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Giving a shoutout to Reciprocard, which lets you know what public libraries have reciprocal or partner cards. I put in my local library system and the tool let me know that I was eligible to access seven additional library catalogs. They also show library options that allow for out of state cards for a yearly fee. How cool! The tool is free, but definitely consider kicking them a tip for their work.
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The Wholesome Games Direct was over the weekend. I look forward to this every summer. You can watch the full video on YouTube, or you can browse the games announced in the direct on their website.
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Bi Visibility: Bi Bi Bi, a comic anthology, is currently up on Kickstarter. There are three weeks left and they’re a few thousand short of their goal.
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Hannah Waddingham and Octavia Spencer are going to be in an Amazon series! They play best friends, but Octavia’s character realizes her BFF of decades is actually an assassin. Looks fun!
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Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
Oh wow! I had no idea I could get reciprocal cards in a bunch of library systems!!!
Ride or Die sounds like fun! Octavia Spencer is such a great straight-woman in action films. (Maybe it wasn’t the most popular, but I loved Thunderforce with Octavia Spencer and Melissa McCarthy – just that right level of over-the-top cartoony action in a women-dominated action film.)
I know a number of folks are a fan of HENCH—in a crossover moment, Ask a Manager had an interview with Natalie Zina Walschots: <a href=https://www.askamanager.org/2026/06/ask-a-hench-an-interview-with-natalie-zina-walschots-the-author-of-hench-and-villain.html
Well, dang. That Reciprocard site will come in handy at work, as we often have folks expressing interest in getting cards for ebooks (but then backing that train on up when the card isn’t free – have y’all SEEN the prices for library ebooks?). Will tell all my colleagues about it.
Thank you, I was able to obtain two non resident library cards immediately, and am waiting to receive my card number from the library via e-mail for a third. I enjoy getting audiobooks from Libby, so the more cards, the better!
It’s going to get dusty in here: https://bsky.app/profile/jandersoncoats.bsky.social/post/3mns76pauoc2p
The books are always here for you.
I am philosophically opposed to checking out library ebooks. This is my tiny, one-person objection to the prices charged and circulation constraints placed on libraries by ebook publishers.
@LML: I agree, but the cost of trade paperbacks is egregious & Canadian book prices are even higher. Used books are cheaper, but that’s a matter of time & luck, mostly.
I’m not an American; is it standard practice to charge for a library card?
(In Canada library cards are free within the municipality of your residence; non-residents pay a yearly fee. Replacement for a lost card is $1CAD/70cUSD.)
@hng23-Every community I’ve ever lived in that has a library-as long as you can prove you are a resident you pay no fees. I am a member of two other libraries, I pay a nonresident fee for that. Worth every single penny, since my home library doesn’t have a super wide selection.
It is very rough how much libraries have to pay for ebooks BUT I do everything I can to up circulation numbers. Those are the numbers they take to the Municipality when they have to defend their funding.
@hng23, thank you for sharing. It’s extremely dusty in here, I need to go wipe my eyes.
@Maureen, I forgot about circulation numbers, which I first learned about when I grumbled (once) to a librarian that the movie to book purchase ratio was not to my liking.
I still think I’ll leave the library ebooks for others, though.
I gather that Maryland libraries lobbied for a law in state government a few years ago that would have required that all e-books to (a) have a library version and (b) charge a reasonable price for that library e-book. We need this kind of law! It unfortunately didn’t pass.
I would also like a law mandating compatibility of e-books with multiple devices. It’s ridiculous that an e-book you buy on Amazon can never be read by a Kobo and visa-versa.
I live in Washington, DC which has reciprocity with libraries in Montgomery and Prince Georges counties in Maryland. My oldest son lives just outside Princeton, NJ, and I was unhappily surprised to discover that the Princeton library doesn’t have reciprocity with his local library. I can check books out across state lines, but he can’t check books out from a neighboring township within NJ.
Maryland residents can use Marina to access books in any in-state participating public library.
https://www.slrc.info/library-resources/interlibrary-loan
My local public library system offers free ebooks as part of having a card. And my public library can get books and some other materials from other public libraries within the county.
@hng23 – Public libraries in the US tend to be funded by local taxes to some degree – in my city’s case, property taxes – so anyone who doesn’t live in the area isn’t paying the taxes that fund things like ebooks. Ebooks are stupid expensive for libraries (usually ~$65 per license/copy of a title, and they expire after a certain number of check outs/amount of time, whichever comes first, which means the library has to purchase the license again at that same high cost).
Folks who live in my city/county get a card for free. For a non-resident (someone who lives outside of the city/county) to get a library card at my library, it’s $60 for 3 months or $200 a year – that’s roughly $16 a month, less than what folks pay for a single streaming service, and it gets them access to our full physical collections, our digital collections – including ebooks and downloadable audiobooks through Libby, streaming movies and TV shows via Kanopy, Craftsy, Ground News, and all of our other databases, etc.
@hng23, thanks for sharing that Bluesky thread. So moving. Publishing queer books, especially for teens, has come such a long way in the last 15-20 years. I don’t remember ever reading a queer character in books as a teen. I don’t think my little hometown library really even had any queer books, being deep in the Bible Belt as it is and not near any larger cities. I think “Keeping You a Secret” (by the late, great Julie Anne Peters) was published my senior year of high school, but I can’t even imagine finding it there back then or being able to check it out. I didn’t really find queer books until I was an adult and had moved out of state to a big city.
I live in Montgomery Co. outside Washington DC and have reciprocal cards with DC, Howard and Prince Georges Co. in MD, and Fairfax and Arlington Co. in VA, as well as Falls Church city, VA. All free. How lucky are we?!
I didn’t know ebooks are so stupidly expensive for libraries. I got into them during the pandemic and, since I’m now retired and go through about four books a week, having that access keeps me (marginally) sane.