Rambling Thoughts on Libraries

If Cicero is right, and a room without books is like a body without a soul, what then becomes of the city without libraries?

It is rumored that in next year's budget Mayor Bloomberg plans to reduce aid to New York's libraries by 74 million dollars. This would mean a large number of libraries, particularly those in Brooklyn and Queens would have to close. Is this important? Do we need even libraries in the digital age?

My initial argument against the 'Kindle' and the 'Nook' was that to say these new methods of reading will replace their predecessors, is to misunderstand the reader's relationship with what is being read. I felt that the Kindle reduced the act of reading to nothing more than 'here is the text, here is the reader' scenario, that it ignored everything else that makes book reading so pleasurable; the weight of the book in your hand, the smell of its pages, in short the sensuality of it. What the arguement ignores however, is that generations brought up with the Kindle could very well make the same case for the demise of 'computer book reading' should something come to replace it. The Kindle, the Nook, and their older more worldly brother 'the internet' should I think, rather than being expected to replace it, sit somewhere alongside the book. Umberto Eco argues this point in his 1994 essay 'The Future of the Book'. New technologies should not be leapt upon so readily as rendering that which goes before them irrelevant - one could argue that the experience of writing by hand differs greatly from writing with Typewriter, which in turn differs from writing with word processor. Is one better than the next? I don't think so, they just employ different methods. The author Will Self has argued, if I remember correctly, that in writing with a typewriter he is better disciplined in his writing - you can't lean on the delete key, you have to go back, re-read and re-work.

What about the library then? If books cross over to the digital world, if we can store so much information digitally, arn't they a waste of space? Yes, I think probably they are, which is sad but not too sad. Eco suggests that booksellers will evolve to offer 'made to order' books, that the encyclopeadia will disappear and that the traditional lending library will fade away. Well then the library must reavaluate its position musn't it? What does it want to offer society? How can it remain relevant? Well how about this:

A large central courtyard where people can stroll and think. Along the shaded and pillared walkways on each of its sides, people sit in groups and talk. In rooms leading off from these walkways we find rooms of computers, others are 'debate' rooms. Each night their are readings and debates. There are spaces for coffee drinkers, wine drinkers, opium eaters. There are writing rooms, both private and communal. Each night there are lectures and classes, all free to the public - free I think, so long as each person in attendance agrees to give a lecture on his or her own topic of conversation. A big human computer I suppose, or a Gymnasium.