'You probably don't want to check out a popular book,' he told the newspaper. Philip Koehler, a professor of entomology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, told the Times that best sellers that have rested on many night tables are high risk, as are hardcovers with spines where a female can lay eggs. Some books are more likely to harbor the pests than others.

Ways to identify signs of their infestation in your books. Libraries in Wichita, Kan., even brought in a bedbug-sniffing dog and held a 'bedbug boot camp' for employees, showing them how to spot the telltale brownish stains, bug bits and little black dots that indicate the pests' presence. Understanding bed bugs and their ability to inhabit your books.

Libraries are training their staffers to spot the pinhead-size insects in returned books and treat the volumes with heat before reshelving. Libraries are also ordering the devices, as well as a bedbug heat-treatment box called a ThermalStrike. One Long Island exterminator told the Times that he has had hundreds of clients buy a portable heater called PackTite to kill bedbugs, baking any used or borrowed book as a preventive measure before taking it to bed. Libraries across the country are scrambling to deal with the problem - plus how to delicately tell a patron that he or she is bringing back books infested with the tiny critters. 'The bugs crawl out at night to feed, find a new home in a headboard, and soon readers are enjoying not only plot twists but post-bite welts,' the newspaper reports. The New York Times reports that bedbugs and their eggs can hide in the spines of hardcover books. With a bed bug oven such as ZappBug or Packtite, the treatment time for books is usually about 5 hours.Well, here's another reason to buy e-books - evidently libraries are struggling to deal with the problem of bedbugs hiding out in their books and then being spread to patrons' homes, especially when they read in bed at night.

Most libraries have elected to go the route of heat treatment to kill bed bugs in books, because there are scientific studies to back up the efficacy of heat in killing bed bugs in all life stages, including eggs.Īnd for many libraries it’s a much more practical solution, because the time frame is much shorter. The main drawback that we see to the UW Libraries’ protocol is that it takes nearly 3 weeks to treat books. But we feel that, in all likelihood, it is effective because of the long lengths of time involved at temperatures well below the freezing point and because of the extra step of unthawing and refreezing to kill any eggs that might survive and hatch. There are no scientific studies showing the efficacy of this method. And then are re-frozen for another week in case any surviving eggs have hatched. Then the books are allowed to unthaw and be a room temperature for 6 days. The UW Libraries have developed a protocol in which they seal potentially infested books in plastic bags and freeze them at temperatures below 18 degrees Fahrenheit for one week. If bed bugs aren’t frozen at temperatures cold enough or for long enough, then the bugs and/or eggs might survive. We agree that freezing can kill bed bugs, but we feel that you have to be very careful when using this method, because the scientific evidence is unclear how long they must be frozen and how far below the freezing point the temperature must be. (Our own experiments with heating up books show that heat can sometimes slightly curl the pages of books but we haven’t noticed any aging.) Unlike most libraries which use heat to treat infested books, the University of Washington Libraries use freezing to kill bed bugs in books, because they feel that heat can accelerate the aging of books. But more than the geographic location, we were particularly interested to learn about UW Libraries’ bed bug treatment method. Seattle is the home town of ZappBug, and the UW is the alma mater of two of our co-founders. Our interest was recently piqued by a New York Times article that talked about the problem of bed bugs in libraries across the country, and specifically mentioned the University of Washington Libraries, which are in Seattle.

Bed bugs in library books