A Library’s Hidden Cost (& How They Help You Avoid It) #Blaugust2026

(This is my twenty-fourth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

Edsurge has an article by David Weldon on Middle School reading scores and their continued decline. As much as I’m tempted to turn this post into another rant against high stakes testing and its effectiveness, I’m just going to ask you to review your notes for that chapter and move on.

My own love of reading stems in part from my mother. She was a kindergarten teacher and frequently read to us before bed. (Sometimes she sat in the hallway so all of her children could hear the same story at the same time.) On long car trips, SHE was the audio book.

I read my first book without assistance because I’d gotten so tired of my sister asking for the same story over and over again that I just grabbed something else and read it to myself out of spite. Not the best motive, perhaps, but I was a child and that was the memory.

This of course required a lot of books. We had a bunch, sometimes found at yard sales and flea markets, but as someone who’s recently taken up thrifting as a hobby I can tell you that still takes money, and what you save in finances you lose in time and energy.

Fortunately, we had a solution: Our town’s public library.

My mother left the classroom when she had me, so she had the time to bundle us kids up and drive us to the most exciting building in town once a week. We each got books that seemed interesting to us, with the curation mostly limited to “get it from the children’s section” up until I was old enough to walk there after school on my own.

This seems idyllic in part because I’m viewing it through the lens of nostalgia, but also in large part to my mom’s hard work.

… and there’s the cost.

Libraries are free to the public, but if my mom had still been teaching I’m not sure we’d have been able to go once a week, or even once a month, during the school year. My father worked much harder to make ends meet so that we could have the privilege of growing up with a stay-at-home mom.

Finances aside, wrangling children is an adventure of its own. My sister (not the one mentioned earlier) is the most put-together makes-the-right-parental-choices person I’ve ever met, and I’m not saying that lightly. It still takes her a significant amount of time to load her two small children into a vehicle to go on a short trip.

She’s also a stay-at-home mom.

So how do two income families manage library trips?

How do single parent families manage library trips?

There’s an ongoing theme of people below a certain economic threshold having a very hard time to get above it. Everything requires money, it seems, and if you want to save money you either need to already have enough money or have enough time.

Those who are struggling frequently have neither.

Libraries are painfully aware of this, and are here to help.

The last place I lived, I signed up for a library card without ever walking through the door of their local branch. I went to the website and entered some information, then *poof,* I had an identification number that was effectively my card.

(It was faster to go into the library near my current place and get a card, but I’m privileged to live very close to that library.)

At the time, I used it to sign up for Libby. It’s a great service provided by many libraries that offers free books in both text and audio formats. These are still considered loans from your local library so if 4 people want to check out a book and they have authorization for 3 copies, one of them will have to wait, but you’re not paying a monthly Audible subscription or Amazon membership for the privilege of downloading books to your phone or tablet.

I’m not going to say Libby’s a perfect solution because there isn’t any. It still requires you to have an online device and, as ubiquitous as phones tend to be these days, they aren’t always available.

But my love of reading comes from my mother reading to me, with weekly trips to the library.

If Libby or something like it had been around back then (and the internet … this was before then, too), those weekly trips could have been daily.

She wouldn’t have even had to load up the car.