just got a call from another collector on that same debt, which was puzzling because when aaron cecal -- terrorist group was the rightful owner of it had discovered there had been fraud, he did the right thing which he retired the debt. he didn't sell it or put it in the hard drive. ..

jesus let me look into this as a portfolio of data that i've i purchased from florida tells couples hold and a lot of the members have been manipulated into the problems. and he -- but his attitude was not a shock, but kind of like this is part of the course in the business. you're just purchasing data and you never know what you're purchasing. and it's this kind of chilling end to the whole thing because of course you're not just purchasing data, you're purchasing the rights to collect on people in a profoundly affect their lives and somehow or another whoever stole it from aaron must have stolen it from someone else as well and to this day, but that is just floating around in cyberspace and someone else will buy it and try to collect on it. and somehow that more than

anything else just kind of seemed to speak to the chaos and the dysfunctionality of this industry. >> host: you actually give one message to consumers and regulators to fix this; what is the take away? >> guest: you have to be skeptical who is calling you on the phone can and can't assume blindly that they have a legitimate claim or that the amount that they are asking for is accurate and you have to do your homework and make sure that there's a legal obligation to pay the debts and the equivalent of fighting defensively, which your financial reaction to the calls. on the larger level there's a few things that need to happen. one is there needs to be better enforcement and resources in places like the consumer financial protection bureau. there were two things have to be careful about what they pass along and make sure the information is correct and that the information is where it's

supposed to be. and number three, i think there needs to be a change in the way the court system works because the 90% no-show rate is creating all kinds of problems. so there's a fair amount that needs to be done. >> host: i want to thank you for coming today for writing this book and for bringing this information what happens to the people of all sides and what they can do and what should be done at a higher level of a regulatory basis. i congratulate you for writing it. i loved reading it. i read this in a very quick setting. i couldn't really stop reading it. so thank you for being here and writing the book and best of luck with it. >> guest: thank you very much. >> that was "after words," booktv signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed

by journalists, public policymakers and others familiar with their material. afterwards airs every weekend on booktv at 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9 p.m. on sunday into 12 a.m. on monday. you can also watch online. go to booktv.org and click on "after words" and the book in the tv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page >> on a recent trip to new york city, booktv visited the new york public library where we spoke with the president and ceo anthony marx about the history of the institution as well as its current operations and futures. >> host: would start with some numbers. how big is the public library and how many employees, etc.? >> guest: it combines the

largest circulating bridge system bridge system in america, 88 inches in every neighborhood as well as for important research libraries this one being the crown jewel at the center of the system but also the schaumburg center in harlem and library for performing arts in the business library. there's about 2100 employees and we have a budget of $280 million operating about half comes from the city of new york largely to pay for the circulating library system in new york. the other half comes from the billion-dollar endowment over the private foundation. we raised between 80 and $100 million a year. there's also in the vicinity 40 or $50 million this year of

capital improvements and again mostly coming from the city but can also come from private sources. it's an amazing system. almost unique in the world combining a great research library system like the library of congress and the public library neighborhood system. in washington, d.c. the library of congress and the washington public library has nothing to do with each other organizationally. here we are all within the new york public library system and we have close to 18 or 19 million physical visits a year. it's one of the great treasures of new york and of the world. people come from all over the world. >> host: when you see items is that the books tax >> guest: books is probably more in the vicinity of 20 million. and then its archives, prints,

maps, manuscripts. this building for instance, and this is true of the research libraries, so schaumburg book of and we have the archives, the manuscripts and great authors both within, charles dickens and just recently added tom wolfe. you can walk into this building and go into one of those special collections and showed no documentation, no fancy jobs come ask to see anything and we will make it available to you rather quickly. >> host: anybody can see that. how many of those 20 million books are available to check out and take home? guest co. the majority in the vicinity of 14 million bucks circulate. the visit in six or 7 million

bucks that have acquired the research collection and added all this other material. we have one of the world's great map collections, we have the genealogy collection. it doesn't stop and we've been collecting for over a hundred years. >> host: what does the public library system meet to an average new yorker? >> guest: something like a third of new yorkers depend on the library to be able to read because they can't or don't afford books. something like a third of new yorkers depend on the new york public library for having computer access because they don't have broadband. you can't even apply for a job in age. especially in the poor neighborhoods who absolutely depend on us to read and go online or to have a quiet place to sit and read and think and

write and create. so that's very powerful stuff and it's also true in the better off neighborhoods in new york that every seat is filled. the new york public library has never seemed more. more books circulating, more computer use. every neighborhood wants one and we had more use than ever. it's a the way that it's experienced most new yorkers.

they come into the branches after school every day. after school programs we aim to become the largest afterschool program possibly in the nation because we have the kids coming in and everybody needs more help on education for all of that is part of the experience of the library where people don't know this with the leading free provider in the english language instruction new york is have immigrants he teaches citizenship. we are the leading free provider in new york and the basic computer skills training. we will be at 150,000 people enjoying those programs and we are also now starting to cheat tv critique so the kids in the south bronx and harlem want to get jobs in the information technology industry to come to the library with a leading

nonuniversity partner with the online education university program to have sessions that will find instructors for them so that they are not trying to learn only online but doing the same thing in the academy. so, educational programs, quiet places, opportunities to read, to take out books and to use computers. and if and that his trust in the circulated letter a. which is the majority of where our people are coming in and then there's the research libraries where people come from all over the world who are writing books and doing research to our archives and material but also our incredible spaces. if you go to the reading room is one of the most beautiful spaces in new york and we will find that every seat is built. >> host: why do you think?

>> guest: i think after the economy had its difficulty in 2008, more people had to come into the branches because they couldn't afford an extra room or quiet at home or air conditioning or computers or books. as so this partly an economic driver. it is increasingly possible to do more of the work of the mind alone in front of the screen the more people want to come in and be with each other. we are human beings. we don't want to just sit in a cave by ourselves. we want to be inspired by beautiful spaces and seeing other people who are working and actually if we do our job right we want you to find the other people in the room working on the same thing you may not even know it's there. it's a powerful part of human

nature and the library is the centerpiece of the ideas and information in any city or town and certainly this one which happens to be the capital of the information age. >> host: do you serve all of new york city? >> guest: so, this system is three euros. i didn't even notice when i took the job. so, this is manhattan, staten island and the bronx. brooklyn and queens were once separate cities and have a separate public library systems but we cooperate very closely with them and coordinate and to try to do things together as it should be. so, for instance we became a system for the public school system in new york. his 100 years we lived side-by-side but didn't actually really cooperate and for 100

years the public schools depended on their libraries on around this site with maybe 10,000 books increasingly out of date in the card catalog. a sweet idea, one that i grew up with in the 21st century that can't possibly work. now we are at about 600 schools we aim to be at all of them with computers in the library and the teacher or student can order up to 100 books at a time from our 17 million books. the three systems together will deliver rights to the school. so you get the efficiency of the systems spreading around the city and if it is an example of how ultimately 1.2 million will be using the library on a dalia basis. children who are assigned a paper would be able to construct their own great library on that topic in the classroom for the month but the paper is being

worked on and then send it back to another classroom. during the paper topic later. so we are increasingly serving all new yorkers and doing it across all five boroughs in cooperation with the peers and friends. >> host: what is the history of the public waiver requests? >> guest: which began in 1985 and the coming together of the three private libraries created by wealthy new yorkers, after, lennox said let's make it available to the public. they came together and ultimately construct it this building to house the research libraries that were their libraries coming together. fast forward about 15 years and along comes the richest man in the world at the time, andrew

carnegie and andrew carnegie had grown up poor and depending on the library as so many people all around the world and certainly new yorkers have and he said let's create a great public circulating library in new york. he gave a gift for the three libraries i think it was about $5 million or thereabouts to create 65 libraries in the beginning of the public library system. it was and remains the largest single gift in the history of philanthropy in today's dollars. billions. so, because of carnegie's generosity, he made a deal with the city where he says that i will tell you the libraries, the city needs to pay to operate than as a public service. and i will ask and carnegie will

ask the library and brooklyn and queens to operate them as private agencies funded by the city to do so but with some independence. it's a complete kid partnership and it means literally have the budget comes from the city and have comes from private sources. i think it actually serves the public well and creates interesting checks and balances and that makes my life a little more complicated but that is a good thing. since that history was started with 60 branch library's all of them were a 205 branches plus the resource library to be at >> host: what is the history of this building that we are in? >> guest: it is 103-years-old. it was constructed with the support of the citizens of new york as well as private dollars. it was about to built to be the new york public library.

they think it is fair to say it is the most public library in the world. the lions outfront everybody knows it was built interestingly on the site of the original reservoir of new york city. so, before the library was built a little over 100 years ago, there was on this whole area where the library into the park behind it is so old that area in midtown is the clinton reservoir and it was built here because it was the highest point in midtown. so as you can imagine that helps with gravity sending water around where it needs to go on the reservoir. they took it down. they built the library and the park and that about 25 years ago we excavated down to the foundation 37 feet down the reservoir and built the largest

basement in the island of manhattan which we used half of the last 25 years and our plans are in the coming months to put 3 million more books under that space. it's a sort of amazing gift of history that the reservoir was here and created the basement of the foresight of the trustees in the library to create that space. imagine being able to find a storage for 3 million more books at 42nd street and fifth avenue at the place of the most expensive and demanding real estate in the world. libraries are also looking for more spaces and we have it because of that amazing history in that reservoir. >> host: walking through the slavery as many of the rooms in areas named after people. >> guest: sure. look we are very grateful to the private donors.

last year we raised about $100 million just in that year of coming in. that makes the library work and it is in large part the research side of the library and increasingly private dollars were also going to add educational programs in the branches which is great. but we are happy to recognize the generosity of the donors. we certainly did it at amherst and most that i know not only was it a way to say thank you, but it's also a way to encourage other people to think about becoming a serious. interestingly mr. carnegie is one of the names you don't find, even though historically he the largest benefactor. that is trusted and he was. >> host: who is on the board of directors of the foundation and is there a separate board for the library? >> guest: it is in the

foundation board but it is known as the trustees of the new york public library. the chairman of the board currently who is the president of harvard at princeton before that and major educator, vice chairman who is the chairman of one of the great golfers of new york, county is one of the other vice chairs from the new york family. we have tony morrison and the editor of the new yorker and escapes from harvard. people that cover all different industries and academics. george stephanopoulos and anthony have princeton at nyu are recent additions. it is a great mix which is what

you would want it to be. let's put it this way. what makes new york amazing? what makes america amazing is the mix of people. the mix of background and talent and experience and experience. the library is where the fix of people come together with all the different information. it's been the most exclusive of combinations. it's where it comes from. at the library is the library is the foundation of that. it's where everyone can do that and does do that. and new york as elsewhere in the country into the trustees are a great mix of experience and bring their ideas to provide for stewardship and leadership. >> host: you talked about new york city being at the apex for the use etc..

when was it not, when it's at its lowest? >> guest: one of my predecessors came here as president in 1981. much of this building was closed beautiful rooms that are now open in the public and used as back offices and storage. bryant park was best known as a drug den. under his 12 year presidency of the major society figure joined with him on the board who had been ceo of time life which of course was the dominant corporation in the media world. they together had the incredible charismatic leadership that turned the place around and opened the species back up and found more resources for this building it for all the other

buildings committed the renovation of the park and turned it into what is now i think the first pair inch the most incredible urban park in the world on a sunny day and another the summer it's just like the library. so, those were dark days and we turned it around. i'm sure there've been other dark days but that's the one that i remember because i lived through it and i remember when my branch libraries were closed to many days of the week. we still have more time. it's seen a 17% reduction to see if we can restore more of that and people in the people that come from all over the world. so this building has some of the

most amazing things in the world in my opinion. we have the original declaration in jefferson's hand with the slave trade paragraph crossed out. they had drawn up the bill of rights to get it ratified. we have the only copy in the world of the original from christopher columbus saying i think i found something. we have winnie the pooh and we have the bare. most of this has been kept safely for the occasional scholar researcher and very rarely shown to the public. we want to put all of our treasure out on public display in the main exhibition gallery off of fifth avenue walk up to

the lions come up through the door, pay nothing because we do not charge for anything and see some of the most amazing material you will ever see and use that to introduce people to the library to say you think this letter is interesting with us told you how you can read more and other programs on that, let us show you some computers and how the scholars are talking about it. we want to use our material to draw more people and to send our material out into the world. again, for 100 years we had to come into this building to see the special collections. now we can put it all online. every school kid in america should be reading that letter. it's only four pages long. it's an amazing letter.

what would be more interesting than actually hearing the words for himself rather than just reading the textbook. we can do that for every school classroom in america. >> host: how far along are you in the transition? >> guest: we are increasingly working with teachers and getting our material of mine at creating the curriculum units that will help with the common core and the various efforts that our greatest teachers across the country are engaged in. the exhibit will probably take another year or two to have it up and running. we have to plan it and to get it right get it right and it will be the most visited per square inch r2 in new york city have to get it right. we are going to over 50% more of the building to the public in the years ahead. we are going to bring business libraries back in and create for the first time a space where

students and teachers use the research library, we are going to double the exhibition space. this is the people's palace. we want the people to fully use it the way they use their local libraries. but we are a big institution. everything takes time. when i arrived we decided it was time to take the 3 million books that were stored in this building and the barcode them. you would think we would have done that before but it was time done for 100 years with little slips of paper. just that took us a year because its 3 million books can actually two and a half. we didn't know how many books were back there. so, when you're working at scale arguably, this is by some measures the largest and the greatest public library in the world appropriately enough.

so you know, it's not a small operation and people rely on it. >> host: has there been controversy about changing the mission of the library? >> guest: people of the library and we are all scared about change. we see change around us all the time. we had controversy about the renovations and building because we are a public institution we engage in the public and we heard from them. we revised the plan because we are interested in meeting the public's need. so we are going to do things a little differently than we thought seven years ago. for instance we are going to take the largest circulating library in the world and renovate it completely and add more education space and computer space. all of that came out of the

commentary as well as as well as our own analysis into the leadership of the board of trustees. i think everyone is uncertain about the future when it comes to books and libraries. i remember my 16-year-old son when i told him we were coming to do this next after having been president of amherst college his first comment was didn't you get the memo that libraries are going out of business? nobody actually beneath that and the numbers suggest the opposite. more pics circulating for, more computer using educational programs, the world is changing. we have to get more material online as more comes online we don't want people swamped with information so we have to help people navigate and we need to carry it for people. libraries have always done this but now at scale.

we also remain committed to our physical collections. at the historic the historic unique material as well as the circulating material and to our great spaces because people love it. so there's some concern, built on love and adoration and need for this institution i think that's true in every library across america whenever there's a debate about there is a debate about should we add books, should we replace with computers come computers come she had a winning or buy more books instead? this is new york and we love to argue again as it should be an appropriate because in my view this institution is the bedrock

of civil society in mississippi as libraries are in every town, village and the city in america it's the only place where people can come from kids, immigrants, homeless, students, teachers, pulitzer prize winners, nobel laureates they are all in the building as we speak i'm sure. the complete cross-section of america and of the world this is where they come to do the life of the mind which is not only not dead but it's never been stronger based on the numbers that we are seeing and that is a great thing but of course that means people are heavily invested. that's to be celebrated. it helps us plan and get it right. >> host: how do you get your books and what is your relationship with publishers? >> guest: we buy from agency and we are the largest library

purchaser -- >> host: every book that is published -- >> guest: we are not the library of congress. they are self published now that we do not have in our collection that we have people ask for it and we will buy. if five people are waiting for book, we will buy another copy so we have expert librarians who are talking to the patrons and watching demand requests and are making great choices about what to buy. partly those might differ by neighborhoods, so we have some in new york where it started in chinese or spanish or russian because that's where people are living that want to read in those languages. the research library is a different operation in the sense that we seek to continue to have

amazing collections of material and books as complete as possible. and we are also buying electronically. the new york public library because they are the largest circulating and we are headquartered where the publishing industry is headquartered within ten blocks of here we were able to negotiate for the first time that all the commercial publishers would be willing to so electronic copies of books to libraries to lend it for free. so you can now read a book in the new york public library by downloading it onto your device any time, anywhere. that's a great thing. the change of the world in terms of information technology is not a threat. it's the most incredible opportunity in our history because we are in the business of providing access, free access to all of the world's

information. gutenberg helped 500 years ago but actually the electronic possibilities could make the gutenberg revolution look tiny by comparison. the day will come -- i can tell you exactly when -- when anyone in the world will be able to read anything, anytime potentially for free though obviously we want the authors and publishers to be compensated in some ways the people continue to create and are paid for their work. that's what we are doing in terms of the publishers with e-books but there is now a possibility of an access in the explosion of access to the world of ideas and information the likes of which we've never seen before. and what is so powerful about that is it's means everyone should be able to read and learn and we hope to contribute to the

world to create so that it shouldn't just be a few people who have access to that kind of material and can contribute with their own books. the world is open to creativity. and that's fabulous. god knows we could use more creativity. we have more problems to solve. the library needs to be in the forefront. >> host: it's available everywhere in the circulating libraries? >> guest: i don't think so, i think actually people are continuing to require and demand many more physical books and electronic. i don't think that's going away anytime soon. if people want to read electronically, god bless. they will still need us to help make that possible especially people at the bottom of the economy who can't afford it otherwise and depend on us and have for a hundred years. and they will continue even more

to depend on our physical spaces and places to come for educational programs and computer skills from after school's coding what have you and they will continue to rely on the expertise of librarians because in fact more information means you need more help to navigate. it's no longer the library looking in the card catalog saying these hundred books this one now we need to do that at scale and we can so i think the future of the library's couldn't be brighter and that makes me quite optimistic about the future of our civil society because you can't have an informed workforce, which is what carnegie was after, you can't have an informed citizenry for an effective democracy unless you have the kind of foundational work that happens in america's great libraries.

>> host: >> guest: i grew up in new york using the public library as i said, sort of part of the life of growing up in new york. i didn't come from a fancy family. my dad didn't go to college. the library for so many new yorkers is the lifeblood of sort of the saving place in terms of access to ideas and books. we have those at home that we are fortunate in that way. i ended up i guess becoming more of an academic than i expected. i ended up as a professor writing books. probably there are some of my books into slavery building somewhere and then much to my surprise became the president of amherst college, one of the great liberal arts colleges without really any of the background experience i should have had for the child. it was an amazing eight years

and college. then it was time to think about the next thing and of course coming back to new york was fabulous as a possibility. new york has always been my home. i haven't really thought about the library other than as a place i grew up in that i hadn't thought about it as something that might be a place for me, i'm not a library and by training. but the more i thought about it after they came to see if i was interested the more i thought wow free public access to ideas of the largest possible scale. what could be more powerful in this moment in history when we are driven by information, drowning in it and driven by it what could be more powerful than that and the very fact that the world of information is changing

means that libraries have to change. we have to preserve what we have always done and people will rely on us and the collections were quiet and expertise but we can't sit still. for someone in my line of work that makes us an interesting, exciting and worthwhile job. it doesn't make us easy but it is easy. >> host: what is your phd in? >> guest: political science. my first work was on south african politics. i lived in south africa in the middle of a civil war in the 1980s and education work but i'm still very proud of this into the thousand students. for me that was life changing not only because it set me off to an academic career of right and writer you got it into teaching about it in a related topic but for that for me was

powerful about that was i saw for those students in south africa that just one year of quality education could reverse 12 years of purposefully bad education because that is what it was providing the students. and that says to me that the power of the mind to repair the damage that can be inflicted, to open possibilities, to make it possible for talent to be used for the individual benefit and societies benefit is more robust than anything else i can think of and that's why i decided to become an educator and why i'm proud to still be a part of the educational community. >> host: as president of the new york public library held much of a job administrative time how much is fund-raising, how much is schmoozing and

managerial >> guest: not so much as a library in. we have some library and that are trained and expert at that. i'm blessed to work with great staff. obviously the senior staff i work with most closely but also working together with 2000 employees. a great board of trustees, donors, on the board. i spent my time as governing authority making it possible for us to do what we do. i spent a fair amount of time with the city administration and the mayor and the city council and again some of our funding comes from there and they are interested in the future of the library system because they understood how foundational it is for chops come at the democracy into the simple life of new york. and i also