Libraries are always budget-constrained, and you’re going to start seeing less and less shelf space dedicated to print books, because they’re costly to maintain, rebind, stack, and insure. In an effort to save space and preserve shrinking resources, libraries will trend toward becoming miniature clouds of their own, collections of hard drives with all these ebooks on them. Perhaps the librarians themselves will become digital avatars of their former selves too, giving you online advice on which ebooks to read or which electronic encyclopedias and resources to use.
What will it mean as we lose this personal touch? Will we want to seek advice from an algorithm? Will we appreciate it if librarians are outsourced to a call center in the Philippines and there’s no personal touch? No. I think we’ll come to regret this loss. Whenever I visit my favorite library at the University of New Mexico, I find the librarians eager to help and anxious to please. I like the personal touch, the care they provide, and I believe we should work to embrace and preserve their crucial role as gatekeepers and conveyors of information.
I’m somewhat skeptical of the idea of digital librarians or digital libraries. Perhaps it’s because some of the best years of my life were spent in libraries, surrounded by books. I really do love print books. I spent a lot of my childhood at the county library every Saturday, and I learned more from the MIT library than I ever did from my professors. I was so open in my reading attitudes that I would devour everything. Fiction, math books, history—it was all tasty. To this day, I still spend hours walking through the racks of libraries, poking through their basement stacks, and looking for interesting or esoteric tomes. Libraries offer a sense of discovery like no other.
Still, I was thrilled when my local library finally figured out how to offer ebooks to patrons. That night, I maxed out my library card and downloaded twenty books. The selection might still be small—only a few tens of thousands of ebooks—but I found abundant reading material. I ordered a pizza, stayed in, and read all night long—sheer bliss! And I love the convenience of being able to beam the books directly to my Kindle, instead of lugging them back from my local branch in the back of my pickup truck.
For me, it really is about books. They’re not commodities, but soulful voices that actually speak to you. Some books whisper, some shout, and some seem to speak for no reason whatsoever. But I’m sensitive to the way they all sound, all these voices that stay mute until you open the covers and start reading.
I’m glad to see libraries embracing the promise of digital books, even though such books mean a threat of sorts to their continued existence—at least, the existence that libraries currently imagine for themselves. Because the charter of libraries is changing. Digital content is causing libraries to change now, just as newspapers changed ten years ago. For newspapers to thrive now, they have to target their local audiences. The ads need to be local, and so do the stories. Local papers can’t maintain staff reporters to investigate events abroad anymore, and they don’t need to. They focus on what’s local.
Libraries can do the same. They can succeed by digitizing and making available local periodicals, historical archives, and books by regional authors. That’s how they can differentiate themselves and stay afloat. In contrast, there’s usually nothing local about a best-selling paperback. These more popular trade books are great candidates for being offered through a centralized, nationwide library service that local libraries can pay into.
As it stands now, individual libraries can sign up with a company called Overdrive to offer lendable ebooks—but many choose not to, for budget reasons. Having to provide print and digital books to patrons is a financial burden. I think the sooner we can accelerate the adoption of digital books, the better it will be for libraries and the more likely that some of the smaller libraries—often with great regional and local treasures—will survive into the decades ahead.
That said, I think there’s one little-considered adjunct to libraries that will likely fade with the widespread adoption of ebooks, and that’s the humble bookmobile.
On Main Street America, the bookmobile is as much a fixture as the ice cream truck, trundling down shady streets on summer afternoons, bringing library books to kids all over the country. In a digital age, it’s hard to imagine a future for the bookmobile, except perhaps as an avant-garde piece of installation art from the past. It’s not likely that the truck will drive down the streets letting the kids borrow digital books and download them onto their iPad minis, effectively zapping the children with ebooks.
In spite of the bookmobile’s demise, libraries as a whole have a great future. I elaborate in the next “bookmark” about bookworms and how libraries are likely to become instrumental as cultural safeguards of books, as a check against rampant retailer sales practices and possible censorship. There’s no better time than now to dust off your library card and check out some great ebooks to read on your iPad or Nook. You do have a library card, don’t you? I’ve been using mine so much recently that I’ve memorized the twenty-digit bar code.
And I’ve fallen so much in love with my local library that I might just hug the librarian the next time I stop by.
For now, books can be preserved forever in digital form, like pressed violets between pages of an ebook in the cloud. As long as our ebooks can keep pace with changing file formats and are duplicated enough to avoid loss through hard-drive crashes, their future is assured.
The ebook revolution allows us, once and for all, to know ourselves. As a culture, we no longer need to fear death. The Constitution and Declaration of Independence will live on in digital form, even if the aging originals in Washington, DC, turn too brittle to read. We no longer need to fear culture loss—assuming, of course, that there’s no futuristic form of library burning through selective viruses that attack a library’s data center and preferentially wipe out ebooks, like digital Huns or Vandals.
Bookmark: Bookworms
Ebooks don’t get viruses—not yet, anyway. Your own computer might succumb to a virus that turns it into a spambot zombie sending Viagra emails all over the globe or that monitors your keystrokes and sends your credit card numbers overseas. But your ebooks are safe. Until a nanovirus is made that can burrow through plastic and glass and eat away at resistors and diodes, the bookworm is an insect of the past.
I, for one, am glad I’ll never have to see bookworms again. In the summer of 2000, I packed up all my belongings and put them in a storage facility in Boston before taking an international job assignment for a couple of years. Little did I know that just a few months after I left Boston, the storage facility would be flooded and my belongings on the basement floor pretty much ruined.
When I came back three years later in a moving van and saw the intricate colonies of fungus and rot on the walls, I was in despair. I opened up brittle cardboard boxes to find books whose pages were punctuated by insect tunnels and running lines of blue mold like antifreeze fluid. I lost hundreds of books, more than you’d find in an average public school library. It was devastating.
Culturally, though, we still face deterioration and loss of our content, although it’s at the hands of something bigger than bookworm beetles. I’ll put it to you like this: In the old days of antiquity, the works of Cicero and Plato were copied by hand, and because the copying took so long, scribes had to be choosy about what they preserved. If they didn’t like a given book or didn’t have enough parchment, they wouldn’t copy it.
Because of this, we’ve lost a tragic number of works from antiquity.