OK, I admit it; I haven’t checked out a book from a library since my senior year in high school.
In fact, it was Woody Guthrie’s autobiographical “Bound for Glory.” And I borrowed it from the library at Poway High, not our branch of the county library.
That was several years before Poway even incorporated and long before the city built its new branch, which opened in 1998. Now, am I proud to admit this? Am I a shining example to not only America’s youth, but also to my own kids?
No, on both accounts. Yet I suspect I am the poster child for many people my age who haven’t been in a library since they graduated college.
I also suspect that as our culture changes, and as the face of media shifts into an ever-increasing electronic age, more and more people will say the same thing: They haven’t used a library in years.
Maybe I’m alone, but I found it puzzling that the San Diego City Council decided to sink so much money into a new Downtown library that could be outdated by the time it’s constructed, which by the city’s timetable is 2005.
It’s not so much that the city is taking money from fixing potholes and plugging leaky sewers to build it. I wonder who’s going to be filling this 10-story, $140 million edifice day in and day out?
Figure the life expectancy of the new Downtown facility is what, 60, maybe 80 years? What will electronic media be providing us in just 20 or even 30 years from now? How many people will have a need for a centralized facility whose main function is to provide us with books and periodicals?
Before you start thinking I’m the book-burning Guy Montag from Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” my concerns are based more around the need for such a massive facility to serve as a receptacle and storage house for paper books when our society increasingly becomes more electronic. I don’t recall a commandment that says books or periodicals must exist in paper form.
There literally are a billion pages available on the Internet. It is much faster for my child to research and write a term paper on killer whales electronically than to thumb through several books , including our 1977 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica that still lists Nicolai Ceaucescu as Romania’s president.
I still like the tactile feel of paper a book brings. A lot of people do. But in terms of pure information, much of it is available on a computer.
A friend recently told me that when he was growing up, no one ever dog-eared the corner of a page to mark a book, because a book had so much value. Today, he added, students he teaches literally write in their books because they offer no intrinsic value. As expensive as books are, especially on a college campus, they are in many cases throw-aways.
If you go to paperboy.com, you can access 5,231 newspapers from 176 countries. Magazineboy.com offers instant access to about 1,700 magazines. And as far as subscriptions go, the online version of the Wall Street Journal costs $49, complete with daily updates, whereas to have it delivered costs $156 a year. You do the math.
As my friend says, like it or not, the future belongs to the MTV generation. Don’t believe me? According to data from the U.S. Department of Education and Student Monitor, a company that follows student Internet use, there are more than 15 million college students in the U.S. , 99 percent of them use the Internet, with 72 percent accessing it at least once a day.
And according to a story recently in the Sacramento Bee, the Cal State University system has started a pilot project to give all students and faculty at its 23 campuses access to electronic books, also known as e-books. So far, the 1,625 full-text e-books in a variety of subjects are mostly scholarly reference books. And the article noted, the University of California is also experimenting with e-books, but on a smaller scale.
It’s a common fact that about 60 percent of all homes in the U.S. have access to the Internet, and that number will only increase daily. Heck, the entire Library of Congress is being placed on electronic form.
People go to libraries today as much for their role as a community center and its access to computers and the Internet as for the books. It’s not a popular position, but the role of the library must dramatically change with the times. Obviously the old one didn’t , or couldn’t.
Fortunately the council is putting money into its branch libraries as well as the Downtown facility. Investing in e-books would be another way to remain vital to the community.
I realize standing up to the pressures applied by wealthy, highly literate members of groups like the Friends of the Library isn’t politically popular. A library, after all, is a feel-good issue. Who doesn’t like a library?
Obviously the City Council likes a library. A 10-story, $140 million library. The one with my mug on a poster in the lobby reading, “Wanted.”
Bell is the Business Journal’s managing editor.
