as a very frequent user, I say libraries are getting worse. Much worse.
I say libraries should be obsolete. Much obsolete.
Imagine the set of books that people have in their homes as an enormous virtual library, with all books registered in a central registry and available to be borrowed. All we need is an app that makes it work that way.
At any one time, more than 99 percent of the books in my home should be lent out. That would be a win-win. I would have more space, and the people with the books would be reading them–or at least there is a non-zero probability that they would be reading them, which is not true for me. And if I get a sudden urge to read something I have lent out, I can borrow a copy from someone else.
Note that there could be opportunities for charging rent for books, for entrepreneurial book ownership, etc.
It’s much worse than that. If you have any publisher or media friends, talk to them about the economic model of a loser-work, and how many items, newspapers, and magazines are bought almost exclusively by libraries – sometimes many copies per – which are expected to be lent out on only extremely rare occasions.
Also, In my college town, the college-student-dominated (i.e. non-tax paying, already have a university library) voters recently approved a moderate expansion and updating of the existing local library, the total cost of which was several million dollars. However, dividing that amount of tax money per non-student, normal household came to several hundred dollars, with which one could buy 100 used books on Amazon.
Google is useless for the search query “loser-work” (quotes included).
Got any links?
Perhaps what you intend is *not* that the physical collections of print and graphics (don’t forget the graphics) should be obsolete, but the **systems** of libraries (public and private) should be obsolete.
You probably don’t contend that either the individual or “public” acquisition (choosing) of books should be obsolete. Or, perhaps you have something else in mind?
What you suggest for the availability of books could be done in the same way libraries in states and universities cooperate in making their collections available through “local” or other libraries. An individual could simply “register” with the library system that part of his collection “available” for lending to others. Through those systems borrowers would find additional resources.
How does this work as an economic model? Isn’t it the same as the sharing of music prior to ITunes (and afterwards for that matter)? Wouldn’t publishers sell far fewer books at much higher prices which in turn would make it more likely that everyone would be willing to wait longer for the book to show up in someone’s virtual library? Or would especially well-branded virtual libraries bid for new titles? Or would the middleman/publisher disappear as crowdfunding supports authors, the funders then have rights to lend at a price to be set by the market?
good question. I used to advocate a “club” model, in which people join clubs that give them unlimited access to content. This is like crowd-funding at a collective level. But crowd-funding for individual works seems like the best approach.
Libraries might be obsolete for you, because you believe they still exist to serve their original purpose: to loan out books which are expensive and hard to find.
Now that books are cheap and easy to find, libraries have evolved to serve another purpose: to provide air-conditioned jobs to liberal arts majors and climate-controlled places where the homeless can browse pornography. They have become extensions of the welfare state, with a vestigial book section.
Libraries excel at their new purpose.
This.
It’s also the iron law of bureaucracies in action.
The libraries near me are hubs providing a free location for after school tutoring, as well as free internet for the poor. They run out of tables. Books are secondary.
“I say libraries should be obsolete. Much obsolete.”
Agreed, but I’m not keen on the book loaning proposal. You’ve already got better version of that — sell your books and buy a used copy when you want it again. With you proposed loan system, you’ve got all that pointless returning of loaned books, whereas with sales, there’s just one direction.
But I think libraries are obsolete because there’s no reason for all the printing and shipping and storing and schlepping of paper books anyway — it’s a complete waste of resources, time and energy. And book loans and used book sales don’t really reward and incentivize authors. Libraries have seen the writing on the wall and are trying to jump in and become, effectively, ebook brokers, buying blocks of loan rights for books from publishers and then doling them out to patrons. Dumb, dumb, dumb. But not dumber than high-speed rail, so we’re probably likely to be stuck with libraries as middlemen for electronic book distribution convincing voters that ebooks from the library are ‘free’. Sigh.
The libraries I know already offer ebooks, though their primary use is as public internet access points and facilities. Amazon already has the ebook rental market sewn up.
I have a whole house full of dead-tree books that I have laboriously and expensively lugged around with me from move to move. I always thought I could sell them again, only to discover that they are now mostly worthless.
I had a college professor who said that college was the place where you build up a personal library. I took those words to heart and kept most of my texts (e.g., Herodotus). But what a waste. All of that stuff is available on-line, mostly for free.
So while I still enjoy reading the occasional dead tree, most of my books come in an electronic flavor.