Amid all the fuss over Stanford University’s announcement that they are unveiling a bookless library (is it the wave of the future? A sign of the literary apocalypse?), everyone seemed to be missing one rather obvious point: when it opens in August it will, in spite of the misleading nomenclature, contain books. True, the new physics and engineering library will house eighty-five percent fewer books, but it isn’t some sort of thought experiment (if a tree falls in a forest with no one to hear, will it still make a noise? If a library contains no books, is it still a library?) or Borgesian symbol. In fact, it isn’t even a sign of the end of books; it’s a result of schools being so overcrowded with them. According to the San Jose Mercury News, Stanford buys the equivalent of two hundred and seventy-three books a day. As you can imagine, that adds up to an awful lot of shelf space and, as a result, Stanford has been forced to move many of their titles to storage facilities miles away. The University isn’t alone in this. As the Mercury News reports,
Books aren’t obsolete; they’re so ubiquitous that they can’t even fit into a traditional campus and, like mushrooms, branch underground to cover entire states. In that light, reactions to the “bookless” Stanford library seem to be missing the point. They’re more a sign of how Manichean gut-feelings about literature are these days—either the digital world is an insidious devil, reluctantly acquiesced to or assiduously avoided, or the Internet is about to usher in a renaissance of reading, and digitization is a kind of messiah shedding light and learning on the world. Everyone knows there’s a middle ground but, when the whiff of a word like “bookless” floats about, no one ever seems to be standing on it.
As for Stanford engineering students stuck using electronic texts, the debate over a bookless library is made moot by recent reports that college students are studying only half as much as they did in the nineteen-sixties. Are they hitting the books, or scrolling through them? Apparently, they aren’t even cracking them.
(Image: Empty Library by Thy, via Flickr.)