“Today children, we will be talking about a part of our history that started with the Gutenberg press – the printed book library. When I was a little girl, I remember my mother talking about how she looked forward to Saturdays as it was the day she would get to go to the library. A library is a place where you could borrow a book at any time without paying anything. No, Timmy, not the electronic books we read, but books made from paper. Here. I brought a book from my personal library at home. Careful, it’s very old.”
The topic of e-book lending creates anxiety among librarians and rightly so. The recent changes in technology is threatening their stability. How could such a change in technology make such as huge impact in such a short amount of time? And how does the library foresee its future?
Well, according to a talk from Ann Arbor, MI, librarian Eli Neiburger —Libraries are Screwed.
A Bleak Future
The challenge libraries face is the ability to effectively integrate new technologies into their business. The current library codex is severely outmoded, being replaced by an easier form of reading books (e-readers). But it isn’t the move of format that is causing issues. It is the move away from content that is ownable and shareable – the very foundation of a library.
The faster a form becomes outmoded the faster the business that relies heavily on that form dies. Libraries are content sharers – they own and share books. With the shift to electronic content, where does this leave the library? Well, according to Neiburger — screwed.
This has been the decade of fantastic advancements, but are we growing too fast? I love reading on my Kindle as much as any other e-reader owner. But I love the library, too. The personal experience I get perusing the shelves of books, reading the cover, inside flap and back cover.
My Kindle is stuffed with over 60 e-books, many I will never read. Yet, my bookshelf contains items I have read and re-read. They have become friends; you hold them in your arms, listen to their soft murmur as you turn their pages – a connection I have yet to feel with the hard, plastic of the Kindle.
Preserve and Protect?
Libraries do more than just circulate books; they build and preserve collections as well as our heritage. Do I think libraries will soon be a notion of the past? I hope not. There is far too much content to effectively and easily convert to electronic format and having a library or curator to care for our treasures is a right and a necessity to preserving our heritage.
Whether the traditional library can continue to collect, buy and lend materials waits to be seen. Unfortunately, their function does not appear to be part of the e-book world. It will be a sad day when the final library closes. After all, there wouldn’t be sites such as Google books or Guttenberg.org without the collection-building efforts of libraries.
