In a message dated Wed, 5 Jun 2002 8:39:03 PM Eastern Daylight Time, tyan at twcny.rr.com (Thomas Yan) writes: > Interlibrary loan is also something to consider. (But my > experiences with it haven't been happy. A number of > times, it came as microfiche --ok, I probably could have > specified I wanted only dead-tree format-- and I didn't > enjoy working the reader. Also, sometimes the loan > period was rather short. Since I'm finicky about when I > want to read a book, a short loan period + random arrival > time = unhappy me.) Were you asking for periodicals or something? I've never heard of anyone putting books on microfiche. I've had really good experince with interlibrary loans, and I'm usually given about three weeks to read them (longer in some cases). Sure, you never know when it'll show up, but that's a small price to get something you can't find anywhere else. And so far, ILL has always found what I ask for, even Lindholm's _Wizard of the Pigeons_, Erikson's _Gardens of the Moon_ (in the ultra-rare trade paper edition), Lem's _A Perfect Vacuum_, the _Folktales of Hungary_ mentioned in another thread, and Mirrlees' _Lud-in-the-Mist_. AND the library I work for does participate in ILL, and has a copy of Athyra sitting on the shelf right now (well, a couple of hours ago, but it's probably still there). > If you want something to do in the meantime, you can try > to spot more differences between the omnibuses and the > original books. :) I bought the omnibuses for that very reason. Maybe a group read will encourage me to do it. Of course, the Author could save us the trouble by posting his change log. :) --KG