Bookshelf
Porn
Well-run libraries are filled with people
because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an
indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to
stay. In the modern state there are very few sites where this is
possible. The only others that come readily to my mind require belief in
an omnipotent creator as a condition for membership.
It would seem the
most obvious thing in the world to say that the reason why the market is
not an efficient solution to libraries is because the market has no use
for a library. But it seems we need, right now, to keep re-stating the
obvious.
There aren’t many institutions left that fit so precisely
Keynes’ definition of things that no one else but the state is willing
to take on. Nor can the experience of library life be recreated online.
It’s not just a matter of free books.
A library is a different kind of
social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very
existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.
- Zadie Smith,
As
independent bookstores crash and burn in the United States and Britain,
the book market in France is doing just fine. France boasts 2,500
bookstores, and for every neighborhood bookstore that closes, another
seems to open. From 2003 to 2011 book sales in France increased by 6.5
percent.
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