i bought a used copy of "dragnet nation: a quest for , privacy, security, and freedom in a world of relentless surveillance" by julia angwin ( a pretty good read so far coming as it does from someone who was a staff writer for the yellow rag called the wall street journal )from better world books for about eight bucks...published in 2014, this particular copy was " withdrawn" form the boulder public library ( why? multiple copies? dead wight on the shelf? too hot a topic for a public library? ) after about a year there...it has the official "withdrawn" stamp in it and a heavy duty binding and an institutional dust jacket..a superior product...anyway i was skimming through the book and ran across the patch-like device in the back cover...i took it for some sort of magnetic device used to trip a sensor if someone was trying to swipe the book from the library...it's my book now so i figured i could remove it if i wanted and i was curious to see just what was under there...so i peeled it off and , being the curious great ape i am, i held it up to the light...something of a surprise...not exactly a magnetic device...more of a printed circuit...wonder what could energize it...wonder what it was for...surely not some sort of transponder...high tech overdue book tracking? or just some sort of device to tell the circulation desk what's on the shelf? don't know...but it's taped up to a window in my office at work..it isn't riding around with me anymore.....6-20-2015...okay...it's a radio frequency identification tag used to scan books in and out and prevent book theft...not readable at any great distance...just another organizational tool to see what's where and who has what..buy books at used book stores for cash would be one solution...it's still not going back into my book.
