Did a little more research on the Flash Drive prices and probably should have already known this but I’ve been a bit sidelined taking care of Family here.
The large and accelerating growth in AI Data Centers is sucking up the entire world production of memory circuits which is leading to a shortage in the consumer market and higher prices due to to demand. So far Consumer Flash drives have about doubled in price from just a month or so ago. Projections are that could last through this year and possibly next year as well.
So at least for now I’m not buying any more Flash Drives for the Library copies. The good news is that the price of the smaller capacity hard drives like the 2.5″ 320gb drives I use have not dramatically increased in price and can still be found at reasonable prices.
Only tricky part is at this point the U.S. supply is drying up and you have to order them to be shipped from manufacturing centers in China where Toshiba expanded much of their production over the last year or two. That of course comes with about a 3-4 week delivery time.
So for now I’ll continue to make Library copies available in Hard drive only since I sent out my last Flash Drive this morning. I removed the Book of the Farm/Flash Drive combo but will be reposting it later today as a Book of the Farm/Hard Drive combination.
Also working on a new book to print and bind. It’s the Old Doctor Carlin’s Recipes 1881. The digitized copies I’ve been able to find are reasonable quality but the backgrounds of the pages are so discolored as to make direct printing really difficult to read. I’m dumping it to image format then doing what I did with Book of the Farm and cleaning it up page by page as I have the time. Since it’s not as big nor quite as bad as some of the BotF copies it shouldn’t take too long to get it cleaned and ready to print.
The Librarian
