Is A Bookless Library In Your Future?

An article published in GIZMODO brought to my attention that San Antonio is planning a new kind of library for their patrons. While my preference is to read or listen to books electronically I this isn’t what the majority of the people out want to do. Take my daughter Jennifer, every time that I bring up the discussion of how I consume my literature she tells me that she can’t do it that way. She thinks that the best thing to do on a rainy day is to lay on the couch and read a good book. My mother, after my father’s passing, is slowly shedding herself of some of the technology items that he had. One as the Nook that he used to read with. She would rather go to the library to get the book. I believe she uses it as another excuse to get out of the house and to meet and greet people. You know, socialize.

But, I am firmly in the camp of the group of people that if I can get it electronically, that is my preferred method of consumption. I like having my whole library at my fingertips. I purchase all of my technical books that way so that I can have them available on any device that is at hand. I have even convinced my wife to come over to the dark side, we both have our own kindles on the same account so we can easily acquire and share books together. Its great to see or hear about a book and have that instant gratification of downloading to your device the moment that you want it.

With the advent of the library electronic book sharing system, it has gotten even less expensive to grab that new book or old classic and to have it on your device for a couple of weeks to read it leisurely before it terms out and is brought back into the system. You don’t have to actually visit the library to do this, just sign up for a library card. (Don’t forget to send in your donations to support these kinds of services).

San Antonio’s new book-free library comes with a special name called “Biblio Tech” and they intend to open the first one in the fall of 2013. This is all a part of the a Bexar county wide project. They are not forcing you to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) either. They plan on supplying e-readers (e don’t know which one at this date) to their patrons. This brings up the worry of theft but hopefully they will be able to work that one out as well.  The system puts a time limit of two weeks that you can have the e-reader before it goes dead, and since the library has the patron’s phone number and address in their records this should be enough of an incentive not to be negligent in returning the devices to the library.

This is an interesting new direction for the public library system to take, but there is still something to be said to going into a library to do research using the old tomes that can be found there. In Ligonier where I grew up, the town Public Library is not just a place to get a book. It is also a place to come and socialize. To get away and maybe sit down with the weekly paper or a magazine. We tend to forget in all of our running around and attempts to streamline our lives that there is something to be said in the simple browsing that you do as you walk through the shelves of books in a physical library. So as you may have noticed through this article that I have a slight change of heart from the beginning to this last paragraph on my feelings about a totally digital library, I feel that Library that still has books on its shelves is an important part of our culture but making available the ability to access books electronically is also an important future service that should have available by our libraries.