A bookless library? Sure, why not? Cars started out as horseless carriages.
And many of us have, after all, gone from books to e-readers.
“On [Sept. 14], Bexar County Digital Library - a $2.4 million, 4,000-square-foot space, also known as BiblioTech and located on the south side of San Antonio - opens to the public,” according to a story by Josh Sanburn at Time magazine online (nation.time. com).“The library … looks like an orange-hued Apple store and is stocked with 10,000 e-books, 500 e-readers, 48 computers and 20 iPads and laptops. It has a children’s area, study rooms and a Starbucks-esque cafe. Most importantly, it will have no printed material.”
Sanburn goes on to point out that this isn’t the first venture into bookless libraryism. “In 2002, the Tucson-Pima Public Library system in Arizona opened a branch without books,” he writes. “But after just a few years, the library phased in printed materials. Its patrons demanded them.”
However, the Pew Research Center reveals that e-books were read by 23 percent of Americans age 16 and older at the end of 2012, a figure that had risen from 16 percent in 2011. Meanwhile, American printed-book readers declined from 72 percent to 67 percent. Many other libraries, although not banning paper books, have rearranged and consolidated to accommodate the digital age, according to the story.
I wouldn’t mind having an e-reader, but as someone still easing her way into the 21st century, I haven’t pined for one. I’d side with those Arizona readers who couldn’t do without printed books.
Matter of fact, I dream of someday owning a home with a sizable library. A library that’s meant to be a library, not an extra bedroom into which a bunch of bookcases are stuck. Dark wood, high ceiling and a rolling ladder? Even better.
With such a library, the rest of the home wouldn’t be taken over by the books.
Right now, the apartment in which Dre and I live - still optimistically nicknamed the Songhay Empire - boasts sizable bookcases in the living room, study/hall and bedroom, and a small bookcase in the dining nook … and they’re all filled to the gills. So are the shelves in the large storage closet. Books can also be found forming a false wall on two sides of that closet. In addition, books have taken up the wide ledges of our two large bedroom windows. Books also fight with the videocassettes and DVDs in the living-room TV and bedroom stereo stands.
We used to have even more books. Our current collection includes the books we couldn’t part with after giving a gazillion to the Central Arkansas Library System after our last move. This is what happens when a love of books is combined with gathering countless review copies of books as part of longtime journalism careers. Have we gotten around to reading them all? Not even a fraction, thanks to the real-life drama better known as “busy-ness.” But hope springs eternal.
We’re not the only ones who have had to pay our books rent. A friend and former co-worker often spoke of the texts that dominated her apartment, and a couple of former bosses once lugged tons of their paperbacks to work in an attempt to downsize their belongings.
Yes, switching to an e-book collection would have its obvious and not-so-obvious advantages. I would once again be able to home decorate, mixing our thinned out collection of books with objets d’art. My bad habit of dog-earing pages to bookmark them would be eliminated. There’d be no books that friends would want to borrow, then fail to return.
But oh, the advantages of printed books: that new-book smell. The fact that they can be autographed. And the scrumptious fact that “working” copies can be marked up via smiley faces, clumsily drawn asterisks, hastily written notes or just color-coded by highlighter for our point-getting pleasure. Best of all: If anything apocalyptic happens and causes us to lose all things electrical and digital, we’d still have something to read.
Bottom line: I’d rather drown in actual books than deal with only virtual ones. But most of all it’d be nice to have the time to read them, in either form.
For my email-reading pleasure: [email protected]
Style, Pages 51 on 09/22/2013