A library without books

Steven Tucker has an interesting Mercator piece on the dumbing down of libraries. I haven’t visited a library for decades, originally because they never seemed to have books I wished to read, so I enjoyed the serendipity of bookshop browsing instead. Now I read online articles and essays or Kindle books.

A library without books is like a book without pages

Just before Christmas here on Mercator, I bemoaned a new report from the UK’s National Literacy Trust, demonstrating that fewer British children now enjoyed reading for pleasure than at any point since surveys had begun. In that article, I blamed dumbed-down teaching in schools, and asinine online phenomena like BookTok.

But possibly there is another culprit: libraries. Libraries are meant to make children like books, not hate them. But, in seeking to fulfil this first laudable remit in a rather wrong-headed way, are librarians today all too often doing the precise reverse?

Taking a swipe at the wrong problem
There is a disturbing new phenomenon afoot – babies and toddlers are turning up at nurseries and schools not knowing what books are, or how to use them. Used to being dumped before web-connected tablets and iPads by lazy parents, tots are attempting to turn real books’ pages simply by “swiping” them with their fingers, or holding them upside-down, thinking their pages will automatically flip the right way up, like the clever screen-displays on e-devices.

The whole piece is well worth reading, not only because the decline of libraries may be a disaster, but also because it may not be. For lifelong avid readers it is tempting to see the trend in a wholly negative way, but I can’t think how libraries would tempt me back apart from opening a decent coffee shop.

Losing the plot
The gamification of public libraries is now big business worldwide. I found a whole 2022 academic paper, “Investigating the role of gamification in public libraries’ literacy-centred youth programming”, about the subject. Here, it is shown how, in many Western libraries, special, expensively-made kids’ sections have of late been installed, where “closed off corners in the basement that once housed the children’s stacks [of books] have been replaced with state-of-the-art, multi-level exploration zones, some complete with Willie Wonka-type installations, theatrical performances, and even [giant model] dinosaurs.”

Great! But … doesn’t that just mean you’ve replaced most of the books with miniature theme-park attractions instead?