Text Box: LIBRARY LEDGER Text Box: Hey, Bud, You Forgot about E-book Readers Try reading an e-book reader for more than a half-hour. Headaches and eyestrain are the best results. Moreover, the cost of readers runs from $200 to $2,000, the cheaper ones being harder on the eyes. Will this change? Doubtless, but right now there’s no market forces making it change. Will it change in less than 75 years? Unlikely! Aren’t There Library-less Universities Now? No. The newest state university in California at Monterey opened without a library building a few years ago. For the last two years, they’ve been buying books by the tens of thousands because—surprise, surprise—they couldn’t find what they needed on the Internet. In other words, a fully virtualized library just can’t be done. Not yet, not now, not in our lifetimes. But a Virtual State Library Would Do It, Right? Do what, bankrupt the state? Yes, it would. The cost of having everything digitized is incredibly high, costing tens of millions of dollars just in copyright releases. Questia Media, just spent $125 million digitizing 50,000 books released in January. At this rate, to virtualize a medium-sized library of 400,000 volumes would cost a mere $1,000,000,000! Then you need to make sure students have equitable access everywhere they need it, when they need it. And you must hope the power never, ever goes out. Sure, students could still read by candlelight, but what would they be reading? The Internet: A Mile Wide, an Inch (or Less) Deep Looking into the abyss of the Internet is like vertigo over a void. Not much on the Internet is more than 15 years old. Access to older material is very expensive. It’ll be useful, in coming years, for students to know (and have access to) more than just the scholarly materials written in the last 10 to15 years. The Internet Is Ubiquitous but Books Are Portable In a recent survey of those who buy electronic books, more than 80% said they like buying paper books over the Internet, not reading them on the Web. We have nearly 1,000 years of reading print in our bloodstream. Humankind, being what it is, will always want to curl up with a good book—not a laptop—at least for the foreseeable future. The Web is great; but it’s a woefully poor substitute for a full-service library. Libraries are icons of our cultural intellect, totems to the totality of knowledge. If we make them obsolete, we’ve signed the death warrant to our collective national conscience, not to mention sentencing what’s left of our culture to the waste bin of history. No one knows better than librarians just how much it costs to run a library. We’re always looking for ways to trim expenses while not contracting service. The Internet is marvelous, but to claim, as some now do, that it’s making libraries obsolete is as silly as saying shoes have made feet unnecessary. Mark Herring