New Way to Borrow Books

Checking out a book at four area hotels is now as easy as checking into your room.

The Muskingum County Library System and the Visitors Bureau have joined together to give books to hotels for guests to enjoy during their stay in Muskingum County. Assistant Director of the Library System, Blair Tom, explained how this works.

“They will make them available to interested customers,” Tom said. “We encourage them to leave one and take one. But there is no concern about the book being returned to the library because these are from the Friends Book Store and donations that can’t be added to the public library collection.”

It’s the give a penny take a penny of books. While Tom said the library system is happy to be apart of this new effort. He said it wasn’t the library that initially came up with this idea.

“As the case with many of our best ideas, it came from library customers,” Tom said. “A library customer let us know that when she and her husband were traveling, they discovered some hotels and motels that had copies of books available for their guests to use, read, leave a book that they had already read and take a book with them that they found at that hotel.”

Currently around a dozen books are at the participating hotels. Tom has hopes the program will grow not only with hotels but also with the number of books at each hotel.