Digital-wise, author Andrew Lam has split loyalties. The NPR commentator and co-founder of New America Media no longer reads newspapers, preferring to get his news online where he can be constantly updated.  But when he settles in with a book, the author of “East Meets West: Writing in Two Hemispheres,” prefers his words on paper.

There he wants the full experience – “the feel of the book’s weight and the smell of its pages.” “There’s something sensual,” he says, “about reading a novel in the old medium that cannot be had in the new.”

Mystery writer Linda Morganstein – her latest is “Harpies’ Feast” – is also a print book reader but she’s hoping to soon justify an iPad. “When I start traveling more, I’m snagging one.”

With so much change happening in the publishing world, I wondered how far into the world of new media the people who write books have ventured in their personal reading habits.  I’ve been involved in our local book festival and queried a few of the authors who will be there.

Author Don Lattin, who wrote “The Harvard Psychedelic Club” is a former newspaper guy who’s always favored “ink sprayed on trees” but confesses to buying an iPad and now “going through some kind of strange spiritual conversion.”

Then there’s Carolyn Cooke, an O’Henry Award winner whose new book is “Daughters of the Revolution.” She reads books the old fashioned way – “turn pages, write in the margins, and leave them splayed and half-finished around the house.”

Plus, she loves the thrill of stumbling upon a literary treasure that can only happen while wandering around a book store, like “the hole in the wall book store in Nevada” where she scored a John Updike first edition.

Where she buys a book is part of the overall experience. “I usually remember details of the store and then where I was while reading the book. The books themselves are also repositories of personal history,” she says, including remarks, stains, even driving directions she’s scribbled inside.

As for the future of the book biz Lam acknowledges “the bad news, with shrinking publishing houses and out of business bookstores.” But he says for writers it’s an easier time to get published. “If one is determined and with the way books can be printed, a manuscript that in the old days couldn’t find its way to the public now has a better chance.”

Who buys them and reads them is another matter, he says, which relies increasingly more on the promotional skills and resources of the author.

Lattin, whose book tells about Timothy Leary and Ram Dass and the early days of drug experiments, became a believer in online promotion when he posted a video on early LSD research on YouTube, where it got 800,000 hits and landed him an interview on CNN.

Still, the classic author reading at book stores is something a lot of writers don’t want to give up.

“The intimacy of real time cannot be beat regardless of how good technology is,” said Lam. He said, “I’ve been interviewed on Skype before and it’s always a hollow feeling after.”

Carolyn Cooke remains hooked on “meeting people who read, who bring their full intelligence to what they read.” And Morganstein said, “Seeing people in a real setting you see their body language, their expressions, their laughing, dozing, frowning. On the other hand you can do a virtual book tour in your pajamas.”

These writers and more plus poets and panels including one on the future of the book business will be part of a day full of book talk in Santa Rosa at Courthouse Square Saturday, Sept. 24. Check out the schedule at socobookfest.org.

A bouquet of daffodils sat on the library’s front desk Monday morning. It was a burst of sunny hope on a black news day. That morning’s newspaper reported that Sonoma County libraries, including ours in Sebastopol, are the latest victims of budget cuts and will be slicing hours and personnel. And the library will be closed on Mondays.

Mondays are our library days. Addison’s and mine. Our granddaughter is almost five and has been coming to our house in Sebastopol every Monday since she was a baby. From the time she gave up her morning nap, she and I have made the library our Monday morning ritual.

I counted roughly 40 customers when the library opened on that bad news Monday. Lots of familiar and long faces.

Addison and I walk to the library on Mondays. She waves hello to the front desk and she goes to the right to find her books – she’s now into the I Can Read, beginning series. I turn left to the reserved section and we meet at a couch in the children’s corner to read. Then we check out, stop at the fountain out front to toss in pennies and make wishes, head over to the cookie store and visit a few shops on the way home.

The library is pivotal. When I forget it’s a Monday holiday and we arrive to find a “closed” sign we’re both disappointed. The first time it happened she asked, “How can a library be closed?” as if it was the most bewildering betrayal.

Come the next Monday she walked in and said, “We missed you guys” to her friends at the front desk.

Painful cuts caused by reduced tax revenues have caught up with the library. The cutbacks will include layoffs and affect children’s programs and class visits. Like with everything else that serves the public good now being axed we are urged to recognize that tough times require necessary sacrifices until things get back to normal.

Libraries are our normal. They’re such predictable civilized places. Business is conducted in soft voices. Well-behaved children are as welcome as well-behaved adults to browse and read and take home books. Return in three weeks. It’s an excellent place to teach little kids to respect other people’s privacy and property, called a lending library because its books are to be shared, not scribbled in, nor lost under a bed.

Addison and I are part of the library community. The librarians comment on her book choices and her colorful fashion sense – the purple striped dress with leopard tights was a big hit. Once we met a man from another town who forgot his library card but could still get books because he’d memorized all 12 numbers on his card.

When her baby brother Theo was born Addison announced it to everyone in line at the checkout desk. Theo was going to be our next Monday regular but given the news, that probably won’t happen.

Book-wise our grandkids will be okay. They have enough relatives who love to read and give books as presents. But we’ll miss our Library Mondays.

The economy is hurting everyone but I don’t think cutting here, slashing there is forward-thinking. We keep hearing about how we must cut spending now in order to protect our grandchildren’s future. But what kind of future are we giving them by whittling away at libraries and schools and swim centers?

Addison’s future is now. Addison’s future is next Monday.

TO LOCALS: That said, here’s one way to help the libraries. On April 23 the Sonoma County Public Library Foundation and the Sonoma County Book Festival will put on a dinner featuring more than a dozen Bay Area authors. You get to drink wine, mingle and dine with well known writers inside the downtown Santa Rosa library. For information and tickets go to the Sonoma County Public Library Foundation website, www.scplf.org.

I have a photo of Eleanor Roosevelt on my home office wall that my sister gave me. Eleanor peers down at me through her glasses and inside the frame I’ve attached the Eleanor quote: “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

I am surrounded by women. I have postcard images of Toni Morrison, Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn being Rosie in The African Queen. I have a Frieda Kahlo light switch. A souvenir Hillary for President bumper sticker.

Every March since 1987 Women’s History Month has been officially celebrated throughout the country, the intent to identify women artists and writers and astronauts who have contributed to the nation, not to be outdone by the mighty men who once dominated history. The project was organized by the National Women’s History Project in Sonoma County, Ca., where I live, and spread across the country.

As a newpaper columnist, now blogger, I’ve been writing about Women’s History Month and celebrating practically every March since then, but I realize I also require daily reminders from the different women I look to for courage, grace, spirit, humor and resolve.

There’s my photo of Rebecca Latimer from Sonoma who was married to a diplomat and became liberated in her 60s when her husband left government, they became pacifists and Rebecca started writing books.

I have a birthday card from one of my daughters that shows a woman in a red dress dancing barefoot. The text, by Anne Lamott, says, “Dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment.”

There’s a postcard of Mayan women in brilliant dress holding hands with children and standing up to a police barricade. A cut-out doll of Simone de Beauvoir. A moody photo of a middle aged woman sitting comfortably alone in a bar, maybe Chicago, maybe Berlin.

Almost every book in my office is written by a woman. My mouse pad is an image of the Mona Lisa.

I do adore men and children and dogs and pictures of foggy beaches and lush French country scenes of tables set with yellow cloths and a bottle of wine.

But in the small working space where I go to think, write and be alone I need my women speaking to me.

There’s a newspaper photo of Indian women lining up to vote. A calendar picture of a Victorian woman stretched out on a couch, holding a book, in a swoon over something she just read. A photo of the Angel of the Waters, the full-skirted and winged sculpture at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. Plus a bulletin board packed with photos of daughters and girlfriends, my sister, my mother, my book club.

A witch doll with curly red hair hangs from the window next to a figurine of a peasant woman with her hair in a bun leaning on a broom.

I look over my shoulder at delicious Josephine Baker with her big eyes and shake-a-tail feather attitude, who fled America to take her talent to Paris, saying she was too afraid to be black in this country.

Gloria Feldt, the feminist author who used to run Planned Parenthood, in the even more embattled years than today, says that we all make history, whether or not we end up on a poster or a greeting card.

In her book, No Excuses, about women and power, she writes: “Every action you and I take moves women forward, takes them back or maintains the status quo.”

Given this point in women’s history, when some would like to halt our progress, I think it’s important to keep all our women in our sights.