Books Sure Are Nice

I love how people are sure the book will survive because it’s a nice thing. Home cooked meals are nice also. It’s all my mother ever made. (Frozen dinners weren’t available when I was a child.) Those meals that moms made in the 1950s were better in every way than frozen dinners, and we all know it. It doesn’t stop people eating TV meals or even feeding them to their kids. Why? Because marketers have convinced us to opt for convenience over quality.
I’ll give you an example of how technology gets pushed onto us. When I was a club cyclist aged 17, my handmade bicycle was every bit as good as the bikes being ridden by Tour de France racers. It cost about one month of a tradesman’s wages. It was lightweight, durable, affordable, and was easy to fix. All racing cyclists in the 1960s had bikes that were similar. The frame was steel, the parts were Italian Campagnolo, the saddle made of British leather. In those days, it wasn’t unusual for a racer with a flat tire to exchange a wheel with a spectator on the road. As a consumer, this was great. I built my bike and was set for years. For the manufacturers, it wasn’t so good. After they’d sold me a track bike, road bike and training bike, I didn’t need anything else for the foreseeable future. This all changed after Greg LeMond bolted a pair of aero-bars to his bike in the 1989 Tour de France. Since then, technical innovations have transformed top-end racing bikes. They are lighter, but they are much more expensive. They are prone to breakage, difficult to fix, have a variety of components that aren’t interchangeable, require specialized tools for repair, and have a limited lifespan. Plenty of people like me remain devoted to the older equipment. We trade bits and pieces on eBay. The cycling press call us retrogrouches. Companies still make steel frames by hand, but it’s a boutique business and expensive. Amateur racing cyclists would be better off if things could be like they used to be, but commercial imperatives force change and innovation.
A good book? Nice as a home cooked meal.
The Kindle? Downloads faster than Lance!

Thing 2: Library 2.0

That's a lot of reading, a lot of fancy talk about conceptualizing, re-imagining, collaborating and innovating. I like libraries the way they are, but I also like other things, such as discount malls and public parks. This re-imagined library is something different, which doesn't make it a bad thing. I might like it. Two examples that illustrate my thinking come to mind: one good, one not so good. I'll start with the not so good.

Public Baths
I'm old enough to remember visiting my grandmother in the 1950s and using the local public baths to clean up. In her poor, working class neighborhood (in Hull, England), homes were built without bathrooms. Once a week, you went to the public baths and paid sixpence to wallow in a large tub filled with as much hot water as you could handle. Those neighborhoods are now gone, bulldozed, along with the public baths. Remove a need, and the public institution that serves the need will disappear also. When everything that the public wants to read, watch and listen to is available online, how much longer will public libraries be needed? What is the remaining need that must continue to be served?

The Aberystwyth Community
Now for the good. Every weekend I visit Aberystwyth online. It's a seaside community in Wales. The University of Wales and the National Library of Wales perch on the hills overlooking the town. I lived there until 1963 (just before I turned 12), and revisited many weekends during my late teens and early '20s. It's where my heart is. My family knows that I want my ashes sprinkled on the north beach when I die. I can't get there nowadays, but I've learned that there are many others who lived there and long to go back, including many graduated students. We meet at a website, look at the webcams, www.bbc.co.uk/wales/mid/sites/aberystwyth/pages/webcam.shtml (it's raining today), and get all melancholy. The site has many features and invites visitors to share their photographs and memories, participate in little quizes, etc. It's great, a little treat I give myself on Sundays.

So, how do we ensure that we don't end up like the public baths? If Library 2.0 can make the library's web site as valuable, rich, and emotionally rewarding to me as the Aberystwyth site, we'll be fine. Meanwhile, let's not forget that reading is an essentially passive activity, and the act of creating within one's mind a setting and characters, and holding them, remembering them, having them fight, love, live and die within the mind is not so much different and no less creative and valuable than most of the activities going on at the library's computers day after day.

So, this is a bit frustrating. The instructions end with "You're ready to start posting" but I haven't been told how to post. I'm guessing that this is the way, but unsure. That's always a bit unsettling. It reminds me of school math classes where the teachers would tell us how to do one thing then test us on something slightly different, presumably to test our ability to 'figure it out.' Why make things difficult when you can make them easy, I always thought. Apart from that, the process seemed not too difficult.