...Books...

An article posted in today's Boston.com, and most likely the in the Globes paper edition, drove me a bit batty, momentarily. The article is here:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/09/04/a_library_without_the_books/?page=1 

Personally, I think this kind of model is ground-breaking, completely revolutionary and the way things ought to be. I think the Cappucino machine for $12k is insane, but I think the idea of buying dozens, rather than a dozen, Kindles or Sony Digital readers would be a good idea for students. One quick note, if you are reading this and you don't know what a Kindle or Sony Reader is, than you should recognize that, on this particular topic, you aren't quite prepared to have an opinion. It is people like Liz Vezina, the Librarian at Cushing, who sorta send me reeling. I have no problem with her, and I am sure she is a wonderful person who really has nothing but the best interest of students in mind, but it is possible that we need to recognize her comments as insanity, rather than romantic. 

"'It makes me sad,'' said Vezina, who hosts a book club on campus dubbed the Off-line Readers and has made a career of introducing students to books. 'I'm going to miss them. I love books. I've grown up with them, and there's something lost when they're virtual. There's a sensual side to them - the smell, the feel, the physicality of a book is something really special.'"

I understand her personal perspective, but when things like this are put in an article, we, as readers, are expected to look at these lines and sigh, and think, "geez, she's right...they are putting together a strong argument. Books sure do smell great." She represents the opposition opinion, which really in this case is romanticism v. science. Guess which side I'll fall on every time...

Smell? Can people stop talking about the smell of books? Put this in some context, please. We live in an era where we do not have to wonder things anymore. We can get everything we want answered, at any moment, by the internet. The argument can be made that our direction is off - we often ask ourselves questions about Alec Baldwin's marital status, rather than what drove a spike between King George and John Adams. But the point is that we have tools at our fingertips that we have to embrace, especially on the educational level, and to avoid that is, to me, very backwards.

I am trying to think of something, 40 years ago, that people spoke romantically about that now we realize is completely insane. Like radio, for instance...people can find the idea of 30's and 40's radio really romantic. The muffled sound of the radio shows, bad acting, silly commercials...how wonderful. But how about the alternative? How about HD televisions, still bad acting, still silly commercials...My point is that we cannot rely on the testimony of those with the biggest vested interest, Librarians, to give us the opposing viewpoint. It is too skewed, too crazy. And we cannot speak in romantic terms about technology that is so outdated, that it isn't even technology. What a waste of space a library is when digital readers exist!

If there is a psychologist, or a series of psychological studies, that can prove to me, that beyond reason, people are incapable of reading a Kindle and computing the information, then I'm all for old, smelly, space-taking-up-books...but to deny this revolution of technology - potentially every book you ever wanted packed into a Kindle thats smaller than your copy of The Goblet of Fire, that's just fighting progress...