If book readers and lovers of the printed page felt a disturbance in the force this weekend it may have been due to the latest fatality in the battle for tangible reading materials.
A bookless library opened this weekend in San Antonio. Yes, you read me right—a bookless library.
I’ll begin my analysis of this development with a question: What’s in a library?
Books.
This is not the first attempt to open an entirely digital library, strangely enough patrons of the previous attempt expected books at their library and so the printed word was added.
A library without books is simply not a library, it’s a computer lab.
I admit, I’m a tablet advocate and I do a lot of my news reading off of it, but I just can’t bring myself to make the jump to books. Truth be told, my hand was forced on the magazine front when Newsweek dropped its print version.
I don’t deny the environmental sense of the e-book phenomenon, but libraries are a step in the same direction with their shared material format. Perhaps the digital shift is inevitable, but book lovers won’t go quietly. Well, unless we’re in the library.
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TIME: A Bookless Library Opens in San Antonio
…bi-daily smile…
