To each his own, though.

And jeez Fred, I get chastised enough by my wife for not using the library. The problem with the library is that in addition to loving the content of the books, I love the physical objects. And all those other people just don’t treat books right. So I’m all for my taxes going to libraries for other people to use–hell, I’d happily pay more than the ridiculous amount I already pay if I knew the money was going directly into libraries across the country–but I reserve the right to collect my fetish objects!

On a more serious note, I’d think that the multi-use nature of library materials would make them much less environmentally offensive than private library materials, on some kind of cost-benefit basis. I mostly collect fiction, which means for the majority of books, I’m not going to read them more than once, and even the ones I come back to don’t get looked at more than once or twice a decade. So that “once through” has the same environmental costs as a library book that might get read tens or hundreds of times–clearly the library one has a better justification for the environmental costs.

It doesn’t take into consideration library books…but then, again judging from your posts here, neither often do you…