As Catherine Sheldrick Ross and others have said, reading is a social activity. Books are borrowed, lent, shared, resold and bought second hand. They are picked up on the street, left on busses and passed among families at Christmas and amongst book club members. And until these e-books have the same liberalities as hard cover books (unless publishers deliberately kill them, as I can see with textbooks), paper books will be here for a while.

Every see a homeless person with an e-book reader? Yet, I always see them with a paperback. Who can imagine a hippy backpacking across Asia with his or her well worn copy of Siddhartha in their back pocket? Yes, an idealistic idea, but not very possible with the Kindle.

So I direct you all to read dive in to mark’s post “The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)” with some telling quotes. I’ll include one here:

Act VI: The act of learning If they can somehow strike a deal with textbook publishers, I could see a lot of college students switching to this. Get rid of all your text books and have this single electronic device.

Ankit Gupta

School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students’ computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn’t matter whether you did anything harmful — the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was. Students were not usually expelled for this — not directly. Instead they were banned from the school computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their classes.

Richard Stallman, The Right to Read

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

Just to let you know, Library Five-0 is all about technology:

Some of the twopointopians claim that Library 2.0 isn’t just about technology, that it’s just the stuff librarians have always been doing, or would have been doing if they weren’t such evil librarians and we weren’t such good librarians. We know that’s malarkey, because if that was the case there would be no need to coin such a stupid phrase to describe something that is already going on. Unless of course the point is to coin a stupid phrase to make it seem like we’re doing something new when we really aren’t, which will allow a few of us to congratulate ourselves in a heated circle-blog and get ourselves invited to conferences so we can talk about all this stuff that’s old but that we’ve somehow made to seem new. No, wait, that’s getting too complicated.

In conclusion: “Remember, I’m right and you’re wrong, and if you disagree with me it’s just because you don’t get it and don’t love the library users as much as I do.”

Ah, AL, I’d present a paper about flashy shirts in the library at your L5-0 conference any day.

An insightful addition to the discussion:

I’m all for finding out what our users want and how they want to get it. I’m also for attempting to guide our users towards quality materials and services and I’m afraid that often Library 2.0 chastises librarians who hold this belief.

I don’t think this chastising is unique to Library 2.0, but it does crop up in a lot of the rhetoric so-called progressive librarians make and have made against so-called conservative librarians. We’ve heard it before in the Reader’s Advisory movement of the 1980’s: who are we to say what reading is good and bad. And now, who are we to say what information outlets are good and bad. We should, as they argue, give them what they want.

I wrote a recent essay examining which is more democratic, the imperative of the library to inform and educate its citizenry, or to give them the materials they request, because they have paid for them. It is a difficult balance to walk–I don’t know if my essay came up with a sufficient answer. Will post it later.

Sit in your local coffee shop, and your laptop can tell you a lot. If you want deeper, more local knowledge, you will have to take the narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stairs. There—as in great libraries around the world—you’ll use all the new sources, the library’s and those it buys from others, all the time. You’ll check musicians’ names and dates at Grove Music Online, read Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” on Early English Books Online, or decipher Civil War documents on Valley of the Shadow. But these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.