למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

The growth of digital bandwidth means that it will fall to our moment – this early 21st century – to decide the long-term future of this print record. We are unlikely to lose the books as bags of words. But we might very well lose them as objects.

That's because libraries are in a tough spot. Few people check out 19th-century books. The volumes are weird looking to a modern reader, and their typesets seem designed to cause eyestrain. So, librarians—being aware of this unpopularity, as well as their own never-very-big budgets – might decide that they should either put these books in deep storage or get rid of them altogether, after scanning their innards.

Again, lest we become confused and forgetful, the function of a great library is to sort and store obscure books. This is above all the task we want libraries to perform: to hold on to books that we don’t want enough to own, books of very limited appeal, unshielded by racks of Cliffs Notes or ubiquitous citations or simple notoriety. A book whose presence you crave at your bedside or whose referential or snob value you think you will need throughout life, you buy. Libraries are repositories for the out of print and the less desired, and we value them inestimably for that. The fact that most library books seldom circulate is part of the mystery and power of libraries. The books are there, waiting from age to age until their moment comes. And in the case of any given book, its moment may never come – but we have no way of predicting that, since we are unable to know now what a future time will find of interest.