[Picture from NBC Nightly News]

Last evening NBC Nightly News ran a story on The Library of the Future.  The “Bibliotech” is a library without books. Its whole collection of 10,000 books is in digital format.  Patrons can either “borrow” books and download them to their e-readers (our own library also offers this) or read them on computers at the library.  Children can read stories on iPads at the library.  E-readers may even be borrowed (they de-activate if not returned).  What we saw on the video is a large, comfortable space with lots of computers and tablets–and that is it.

I think this story is prophetic.  My hunch is that within ten years, most libraries, and most bookstores (if they even exist as physical entities) will look like this.  I’ve already watched this transformation in process in our own library as the space given to stacks has steadily diminished to be replace with computer terminals and other forms of media. Cost and user demand will probably drive this.  But I wonder if it will spawn a new generation of readers–or not.

When I was young, I spent many a summer afternoon at our local library.  Probably my favorite books back then were sports biographies of my baseball heroes–Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, and stories of the teams they played on.  But I also found myself wandering into other sections of the library–the books on science, on history, works of fiction and more. Many I would browse and put back.  But often one or two would end up in the stack I’d take to the librarian’s desk.

I still browse, but rarely at libraries which seem to have less and less of what I’m interested in.  Most of the time, my browsing is in used book stores, as was the case this weekend.  I probably would never have searched for any of the books that I bought (four for under $12) on Amazon because I didn’t know they existed.  But each piqued my (admittedly quirky) interests:  Walter H Conser, Jr’s God and the Natural World because of my interests in religion and science conflicts, Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe because one of the editors of this collection of articles is Dale K Van Kley, an OSU professor of history with whom I’m acquainted, J Philip Wogaman’s Faith and Fragmentation because it explores how Christianity engages a pluralistic world, and China Wakes by Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn because I want to understand the generation of Chinese students coming to American universities and I’ve like Kristof’s op eds in the New York Times and read WuDunn’s Half the Sky recently.

I wasn’t looking for any of those books. And I admit that I’m taking a risk that they will be worth the price and the read.  But I wonder if these “libraries of the future” will afford the same kind of opportunity to make these serendipitous discoveries. Perhaps they will offer ways to browse that parallel my experiences.  (The closest parallel I find are the daily and monthly specials from Amazon for download to my Kindle). Perhaps I’m just nostalgic but I wonder if it will be the same, and if we’ll still be making those serendipitous discoveries of new authors and ideas. What do you think?