Don’t deny the change. Direct it wisely.
THEY ARE, in their very different ways, monuments of American civilization. The first is a building: a grand, beautiful Beaux-Arts structure of marble and stone occupying two blocks’ worth of Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The second is a delicate concoction of metal, plastic, and glass, just four and a half inches long, barely a third of an inch thick, and weighing five ounces. The first is the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the main branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL). The second is an iPhone. Yet despite their obvious differences, for many people today they serve the same purpose: to read books. And in a development that even just thirty years ago would have seemed like the most absurd science fiction, there are now far more books available, far more quickly, on the iPhone than in the New York Public Library.
It has been clear for some time now that this development would pose one of the greatest challenges that modern libraries—from institutions like the NYPL on down—have ever encountered. Put bluntly, one of their core functions now faces the prospect of obsolescence. What role will libraries have when patrons no longer need to go to them to consult or to borrow books? This question has already spurred massive commentary and discussion. But in the past year, as large-scale controversies have developed around several libraries, it has become pressing and unavoidable.
The most heated of these controversies involves the NYPL itself, which has long served as a model for other major American libraries. Under an ambitious Central Library Plan drawn up under its previous president, Paul LeClerc, the institution is preparing to banish millions of books from the venerable stacks of the main branch to off-site storage in central New Jersey, from where it will take them at least twenty-four hours to arrive in the grand Rose Main Reading Room. The plan also involves the sale of decrepit nearby facilities (notably the mid-Manhattan branch lending library, one of over eighty branch libraries in the NYPL system) and the consolidation of their functions in a renovated Schwarzman Building. The plan did not come in any direct sense as a response to digitization, but clearly digitization has made the removal of physical books easier for the library to contemplate. The protests against the plan, which include a letter signed by several hundred prominent writers and academics, have gone so far as to allege that the NYPL’s new president, Anthony Marx, formerly the head of Amherst College, sees the libraries of the future less as repositories for books and learning than as glorified Internet cafés.
This last charge is clearly incorrect. Marx arrived at the NYPL only a year ago, at a moment when the Central Library Plan had already advanced too far to be canceled. He is also, like virtually every other library director in the United States, operating under severe financial constraints. Even the Harvard University library system has seen its budget shrink drastically over the past few years, and the reduction of its staff by over a third (making it the focal point of another library controversy). At the NYPL, the acquisitions budget has shrunk 26 percent over just the last four years. Simply by consolidating several different facilities in a single building, Marx claims the new plan will save as much as $16 million a year in operating costs, or the equivalent of adding 50 percent to the library system’s endowment. The high-profile redesign of the Schwarzman Building—by Norman Foster—will attract additional funding. And Marx is anything but a barbarian geek at the gates. To the contrary, he clearly wants to put as many paper books in as many hands as possible. Among his other initiatives, he is developing a program under which all New York City public school students will be able to order books from the NYPL system, and have them delivered directly to their schools within twenty-four hours.
The critics of the Central Library Plan do have a point when they suggest that it will make the NYPL a more difficult place in which to do serious research. Even if the development of new storage spaces underneath adjacent Bryant Park minimizes the number of books ultimately shipped to New Jersey, there will still be many moments when a reader, paging through a book, excitedly learns of another one crucial to her topic, only to find that it is off-site. (The same thing occurs in many university libraries, which are making increasing use of off-site storage.) Placing a lending library in a large, attractive open space within the main branch will probably at least double the already considerable foot traffic in the building, adding to its levels of noise, dirt, and disruption, although the library is also creating new spaces for serious scholars and writers.
Soon most if not all libraries will be facing quandaries similar to that of the NYPL, owing to the devices on which more and more people are doing more and more of their reading. Already at least a fifth of all book sales come from e-books, and the numbers are rising fast. Total e-book sales in January 2012 came in close to twice those of a year previously, and were more than ten times the figure for January 2009. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that 21 percent of all Americans have read an e-book in the past year, with the proportion predictably higher among the young. Nearly all of the most popular English-language titles are downloadable, including millions of free books in the public domain, mostly digitized by Google Books. Amazon and Barnes & Noble sell hundreds of thousands of copyrighted titles for a price similar to or lower than that of the equivalent paperback. When the Harry Potter novels finally appeared in electronic versions this spring, they racked up $1.5 million in sales in just three days.
This technology cannot simply substitute for the great libraries of the present. After all, libraries are not just repositories of books. They are communities, sources of expertise, and homes to lovingly compiled collections that amount to far more than the sum of their individual printed parts. Their physical spaces, especially in grand temples of learning like the NYPL, subtly influence the way that reading and writing takes place in them. And yet it is foolish to think that libraries can remain the same with the new technology on the scene.
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