Not long ago, I noticed two articles on the same page of the local Sunday news paper (News & Record, April 17, 2011, p. H6). The headline above the fold asked Can bookstores survive? Directly underneath that article appeared one titled Library piling up e-books. While I make no claim that the juxtaposition of those two headlines completely answers the question in libraries’ favor, it does point out yet another way that libraries work to keep up with new social and technological trends. And yet some people have been trying to write off libraries for years. Among the falsehoods that have not yet been given a proper burial are “books are obsolete” (a double falsehood, assuming as it does that libraries only warehouse books) and “everything’s available online” (there’s not enough money in the world to make that true, and much online information is so expensive only libraries can afford to subscribe). As to book stores, a generation ago Crown Books (now Books a Million) successfully challenged the publishers’ right to set the prices that all stores had to charge. Soon enough, it and other large chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders pretty much put independent bookstores out of … Continue reading →