Stanford Ushers In The Age Of Bookless Libraries

Can you have a library without physical books? According to Stanford University, you can. This NPR blog post by Laura Sydell reports how Stanford's new Engineering library is decreasing its physical book collection from 80,000 to 10,000--a decrease of more than 85%--with most of the collection being digital. Among the chief reasons for doing so are the ease of searchable databases for finding specific formulas, and the fact that engineering is such a rapidly changing field that traditional textbooks have rarely been able to keep up with the students' present needs. Eventually, they believe that even these 10,000 books will eventually be weeded out in favor of digital equivalents. This change heralds a growing trend by many libraries to spend more of their budget on electronic resources and less on physical books.

However the very concept of the bookless library does not sit well with some. For example, this blog post in School Library Journal's Editor-in-Chief Brian Kenney lambastes the headmaster of Cushing Academy for getting rid of it's library's 20,000 book collection and replacing it with 18 digital readers. He claims his will severely limit the variety of age-appropriate books that the students will have access to, many of which aren't available in ebook format, and that this will actually discourage voluntary reading.

In another case, this article by David A. Bell in the May 2005 edition of The New Republic addressed many of the pros and cons of research libraries removing their physical collections (pro: easily searchable databases of rare texts; con: an uncomfortable reading format that discourages slowly taking in the whole text), as well as the negative issues raised by the inadequecies of e-readers of that era--issues that are becoming increasingly moot with the advent of today's technologies such as the Kindle and iPad. While believing that the digitization of library collections is an inevitable process, he also believes that physical books can co-exist with ebooks in the libraries of the future, rather than be wholly replaced by them.

In my view, I am somewhat leery of the idea of a completely digitized library collection. As a reader since childhood and a longtime student, physically browsing the stacks has been an essential means for discovering new information; there are books that I have read that I would have never even looked for had I not picked them off the shelf and flipped through them on a whim. I also have found reading ebooks to be an uncomfortable experience after long periods of time. However, my time as a student has also made clear to me the inefficiency of searching for information using this method, when digital alternatives make such work faster and more accurate. I for one would like to see a coexistence between physical and digital texts in the libraries of the future, rather than having one at the expense of the other.