On Borrowing Digital Books From the Library

By ANN CARRNS

I had resisted the lure of electronic books for as long as I could. But this year I received an e-reader for Mother's Day. I'm happy - but my wallet isn't.

As I quickly learned, e-readers offer instant gratification. Read an intriguing review in The New York Times Book Review on Sunday? A click or two, and there it is on your reader. I recalled a snippet on the radio about “Escape From Camp 14,” about a boy raised in the North Korean gulag. That night, I downloaded it, and devoured it.

The downside, however, is the cumulative cost. E-books may cost less than physical ones, but the spending quickly mounts when you're an avid reader and you download volumes at will. When I got my credit card bill for my Barnes & Noble account, which feeds my Nook reader, it gave me pause - and got me wondering about borrowing e-books from my library.

I found that borrowing digital books isn't as easy as it should be. A study relea sed in June from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 12 percent of adults who read e-books have borrowed from a library. But more than half of e-book borrowers from libraries reported that the library did not carry a book they wanted, and half said that at some point they discovered there was a waiting list to borrow the book.

My experience at my local library mirrors those findings. I logged onto the Web site (using my card number and PIN, established when I got the card). Then I clicked on a tab that said “Download audio books and e-books.” To my disappointment, I wasn't able to download books wirelessly to my Nook, as I do when buying books online. Instead, I was directed to download Adobe's e-reader software, Digital Editions, to my laptop. This took a few minutes and wasn't entirely intuitive, but it has to be done only once.

After downloading the Adobe software, I had to download the e-book to my laptop first , and then transfer it - with a USB cable - to my Nook. (Wireless library downloads are possible with other types of readers, like the Kindle from Amazon, although some publishers still require a transfer with a USB cable anyway, according to an article in The Times that offers helpful tips for navigating e-borrowing.

All a bit of an annoyance. But one I could brush off, if the reward was a meaty selection of e-books, gratis. Unfortunately, the menu is limited. Many publishers are nervous that borrowing e-books from libraries is too easy and will cut into digital sales, so they refuse to sell them to libraries, or restrict the number of times a digital book can be loaned.

I searched for a couple of books that I'd been wanting to read, but hadn't gotten around to yet. One of them - “Townie: A Memoir” by Andre Dubus III - was available only in audio book format. And Anne Patchett's novel “State of Wonder” wasn't available in any electronic format. Sigh.

I stopped searching and browsed available books instead, which yielded some interesting options. I downloaded “Open City” by Teju Cole, a novel about a Nigerian psychiatry student in New York. It took a couple of clicks, and then it appeared, magically, on my Nook.

But because I had wanted to read the other books first, I ended up obtaining them elsewhere. (I actually borrowed a hardcover version of “Townie” from the library). But in the time I was reading the other books, the e-library book on my Nook had disappeared - or, rather, it was unavailable because my checkout period expired.

So much for free, easy reading. For my budget's sake, I can only hope that publishers and libraries find a way to cooperate soon on making electronic books more readily available for borrowing.

Do you borrow electronic books from your library? How's the selection? What was your experience?

Thursday Reading: The Financial Problems of Parents of Olympians

By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD

A variety of consumer-focused articles appears daily in The New York Times and on our blogs. Each weekday morning, we gather them together here so you can quickly scan the news that could hit you in your wallet.

The Breakfast Meeting: At Last, Political Ads 24/7; and a Firing at Oxford American

By NOAM COHEN

With the influx of outside spending on campaign ads this year in many states, it can seem as if TV is wall-to-wall political advertising, but in Hawaii, Adam Nagourney reports, the Republican candidate for United States Senate is turning that vision into reality. Linda Lingle, a former two-term governor, pays $2,500 a week for channel 110 on the digital cable dial for LL12, where she airs speeches, her own ads and endorsements and video issue papers in 10 of the languages spoke on the islands. The channel, while a relatively high number, is ensconced between CNN Headline News and Fox News, so presumably gets a few politically interested channel surfers.

• As the Romney campaign weighs who should speak at the Republican National Committee, the fate of one Donald J. Trump sits in the balance, Jeremy W. Peters writes. So far, the campaign has allowed one opponent - Rick Santorum - to speak, and in granting a slot to Senator Ra nd Paul it has nodded to another opponent, his father, Representative Ron Paul. Newt Gingrich is getting his own “university,” workshops he will host outside of the convention, which begins Aug. 27 in Tampa, Fla. But Mr. Trump? No word yet, though he tells Mr. Peters that he may have a conflict that week, and would not want to overextend himself: “The Republican Party in Sarasota - you've probably heard of this - they're giving me the Statesman of the Year award.”

The loud new agora that is Facebook is getting new scrutiny. Some are attempting to apply the equivalent of earplugs to baby photos, Austin Considine writes, through a Chrome extension unbaby. me that helpfully replaces baby photos posted by oversharing new parents with images of cats, sunsets or bacon. More seriously, the American Civil Liberties Union and Facebook have filed amicus briefs in an appeal of a recent decision by a federal judge that “liking” something on Facebook isn't speech protected by the First Amendment, The Wall Street Journal reported. (The issue, The Journal reports, is whether it was legal for employees of a Virginia sheriff in a re-election campaign to be fired for “liking” the opponent's Web page on Facebook, among other things.)

The founder and longtime editor of The Oxford American - a magazine with quirky, intellectual writing intended to help revive the great Southern literary tradition - has been fired by its board of directors, Julie Bosman reports. The board says that the magazine was rife with sexual harassment under the editor, Marc Smirnoff, with his behavior at a July 4 overnight party at a mountain cabin serving as a catalyst for complaints. Mr. Smirnoff has begun an aggressive public counteroffensive, she writes, lashing out at the magazine and its board even as he acknowledged doing many of the things he was accused of - but being misunderstood - including hugging, patting and kissing interns on top of their hea ds.

Another New York Transplant, Ted Hope, to Lead San Francisco Film Society

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

Yet another leading light in the New York independent film world, Ted Hope, has been named to a position that has been held by two prominent New Yorkers: the executive directorship the San Francisco Film Society.

Mr. Hope, a producer whose credits include “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” “American Splendor” and “The Ice Storm,” will be leaving New York to assume his new post on Sept. 1, the film society announced this week.

He succeeds Bingham Ray, another familiar figure in New York's indie world, who died in January shortly after assuming the society's top job, following the earlier death of Graham Leggat, who left New York to take the post in 2005.

The film society operates a number of film-oriented programs, including its annual San Francisco International Film Festival.

“It's time that the film industry looked not just to Hollywood but instead to the Bay Area and Silicon Valley,” Mr. Hope s aid in statement.

Michael Cieply covers the film industry from the Los Angeles bureau.

For Some Olympians, Physical Appearance Brings Criticism in Media and Online

By BILL CARTER

The American sprinter Lolo Jones may have been speaking for a number of female Olympic athletes on the “Today” show Wednesday morning when she tearfully deplored criticism she had received in American media related to her physical appearance.

Ms. Jones, who finished a close fourth in the 100-meter hurdle final on Tuesday, has been the subject of enormous media focus during her career.

On “Today” she took particular exception to a column in The New York Times that criticized her for marketing her sex appeal and quoted an academic Olympics expert who compared her to the former tennis player and frequent magazine model Anna Kournikova. But Ms. Jones noted that the column, which appeared on Sunday, did not cite her genuine athletic achievements: being the American record holder in her event and a two-time world champion, which far surpass anything on Ms. Kournikova's résumé.

Ms. Jones was among a number of fe male athletes whose appearance became a topic of discussion during these Games. After her gold-medal-winning performance last week, the gymnast Gabby Douglas was written about in blogs and in online media not because of her floor routine, but in reaction to Twitter messages - that appeared to come largely from black women and men - which had labeled her hair unsuitably unkempt.

(Twitter posts included: “Gabby Douglas's hair is ratch” and “Could Desiree Hooker (a star black volleyball player) please help Gabby Douglas with her hair?”)

Ms. Douglas seemed taken aback by the criticism after she had just qualified as the best in the world in her sport. She also had to endure being tagged by a Fox News commentator as being insufficiently patriotic because she wore a pink leotard instead of one featuring more American-themed colors.

The weight lifter Holley Mangold took some lumps on social media for her size - one online commenter said, “She's a beast!â € - prompting an article from the Reuters news agency this week that bore the headline, “Fat? We Are Fit. Get Over It, Say Women Athletes.” (In a more high-profile punch line, Conan O'Brien said: “I predict 350-pound weight lifter Holley Mangold will bring home the gold - and four guys against their will.”)

Ms. Mangold took it in stride, saying, “I'm not saying everyone is an athlete but I am saying an athlete can come in any size.”

Some observers believe the media attention may have affected Ms. Douglas, who failed to medal in any individual events, and said she had been reading about herself online and had not slept well. She was quoted as saying: “Yeah, O.K., I don't know where this is coming from. What's wrong with my hair?”

Ms. Jones had the most direct emotional response, saying the media “just ripped me to shreds.” She added, “I just thought that was crazy because I worked six days a week for four years for a 12-second race an d the fact that they just tore me apart is heartbreaking.”

Not all the sexist sniping has been directed at female athletes.

Swimmer Ryan Lochte has become a target for comments on social media from women inspired by his sex appeal, but turned off by what the critics see as his rampant self-exaltation.

The Web site Jezebel got the most mileage out of the knock-Lochte craze with a post - relying on a vulgar word that has come to define a pompous person - that offered “10 reasons why Ryan Lochte” is the sexiest example of such in America.