The Dawn of the Bookless Library

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,

Four miles off its Durham campus, Duke University has a high-density storage facility, with shelves 30 feet high, to hold 15 million books. Harvard's repository is 35 miles away in the rural town of Southborough.

"You just get to the point where you're busting at the seams," said Lori Goetsch, president of the Association of College and Research Libraries and dean of libraries at Kansas State in Manhattan — which stores its books more than 80 miles away, in Lawrence.

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&#8212either 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.)