The Tucson Festival of Books and libraries in the time of CoVid-19–what’s next?

The annual Tucson Festival of Books is the third largest book fair in America and it was cancelled a couple of weeks ago because over 100 authors dropped out. The primary reason for drop-outs: fear of flying in the time of CoVid-19. During that week I had been going back and forth about whether to attend. I am such a book junkie, as well as the author of one Amazon best seller, that I had almost decided to go to the Book Festival just to see the open air book stalls.

The Festival organizers, however, made the decision for me, even though there had been only one reported positive Covid-19 case in Pima County at the time. (As of March 16th it is up to 4 positive cases in Pima County. Today’s numbers haven’t yet been posted by state officials. And who knows what the real numbers are!)

Meanwhile, Mayor Romero and Governor Ducey have pretty much closed down Tucson and the state of Arizona. Intelligent people, they have moved ahead of that ignorant bozo in the White House to help insure the health and safety of Arizonans. But our local libraries stayed open. And since I read alot –and probably will be spending more time reading now that we are all staying home–I have been depending on the local Woods branch library for books.

But all that changed this morning.

Shortly after I dropped off the one remaining physical book I had checked out, the Pima County Library system posted an announcement that all the libraries will close indefinitely as of the end of today, March 17th. As long as the internet remains up and running, however, it is possible to check out ebooks free from Kindle using the Overdrive service available through the library website. There are also movies from the Acorn service and other digital materials online. Again, free if you have a Pima County Library Card.

In some ways, driven by fear of Covid-19, I managed to be ahead of the game: 2 days ago I went online and reserved ebook copies of all 7 books I had reserved as physical books. The wait time is really long for digital materials, but since America may be staying behind closed doors for months, waiting is going to be a new skill to develop for everyone, including me.