Do Bookless Libraries Signal The End of the Printed Word?

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One of my favorite activities in a library is roaming through the stacks and finding a book I didn’t know I needed in my life. Such happy accidents! There are great reads waiting to be discovered around virtually every corner.

Look! Here’s a nonfiction book about badly behaving women in history that I haven’t seen before. I love those books. And I didn’t realize that a certain bestselling author had a new book out. And that’s just a short summary from my last trip to the library. I always bring a large tote bag with me to the library to fill with books.

Browsing bookshelves at a library or a bookstore is one of my best ways of discovering new reads.

However, our public libraries are being asked to do more with tighter budgets. Libraries are becoming community centers often providing a wide-range of programs to its patrons. My neighborhood library offers art programs, sewing lessons, computer classes, and a myriad of children activities. They also have ebooks, audiobooks, and music available for download, DVDs, audiobooks CDs, music CDs, as well as a large selection of books. This collection must continually be updated with new releases and purging older materials that are no longer being checked out. New materials can be costly, especially if they need to be purchased in multiple formats (hardcover, ebook, and audiobook.) New technology equipment must be purchased from time to time too. And librarians have to be trained to use the new systems. Many libraries don’t have the budgets to cover the cost of doing, well, everything. Hard decisions must be made.

A few libraries have decided to help their bottom line by eliminating print books.

Wait. What? No! Are you serious?

That was my knee-jerk reaction the first time I read about what are being called bookless libraries. (The name is misleading. They’re not actually bookless. There are books available in the libraries, just not the print editions.) But really, this isn’t right. Such libraries are depriving the public of the joy of discovery that I’ve already described.

Will libraries become cyber cafés? Will the sweet scent of books be replaced with a metallic smell? No. I don’t like this. Yes, I do enjoy reading ebooks. But losing print books. No, this doesn’t make me happy.

I wonder if our ancestors felt the same sense of panic and loss when the codex replace scrolls. A codex is a predecessor of a modern-day book. It has pages that are stitched together. The introduction of the codex changed how books looked and worked in much of the same way ebooks are changing how books look and work today. Flipping through pages in a codex to find a certain piece of information was certainly easier than having to roll through an entire scroll. Looking for a piece of information in an ebook by typing a few words into the search bar is easier than flipping through the list of pages giving in an index. And that’s assuming the book even has an index.

After thinking things over and doing a bit more research, I decided to highlight the issue and explore the tension that naturally occurs whenever technology changes are made by writing a cozy mystery series. I started to ask myself what a librarian who has an emotional attachment to printed books might do if her library was converted to a bookless library. The answer was simple. She’d save the books! That’s how the Beloved Bookroom Mystery series was born.

My heroine, Trudell Becket is an assistant library in the small town of Cypress, South Carolina. The town leaders, hoping to attract high-tech jobs to their town, decide to convert the library to a high-tech bookless library. Trudell is horrified by the idea. The books on the shelves are her friends. She sneaks into the library one night and takes many of the books that are boxed up to be removed from the library. She then opens a secret bookroom in the library’s basement. While she’s working in the basement library, someone kills the town manager, who is the driving force behind the library’s modernization. Tru cannot tell the police her whereabouts at the time of his death because she doesn’t want to reveal the work she’s been doing in the basement. At the same time, she feels compelled to help the police and make sure her library stays a safe space for everyone. That is why she and her friends decide to investigate on their own. That’s the start of the series and the opening of The Broken Spine, the first book in the mystery series.

In the second book, A Perfect Bind, a man is killed the basement door that leads to her secret bookroom. Is this murder linked to the recent break ins to her secret bookroom? Tru hopes not! She investigates with the hopes to prove to herself and to her friends that the murder and the break ins aren’t related. Because if they are, she’ll have to tell the police about the secret bookroom that shouldn’t exist and risk losing her precious printed books.

Tru is a book warrior. She’s determined to protect the books she loves.

Luckily, we’re not called to do the same. For now, most libraries will remain filled with print editions of books. Thank goodness! But one day those books might become as obsolete as the ancient scroll.

So, let’s cherish the printed hold-in-your-hands books at the libraries for as long as we can. While at the same time, we can celebrate that there are also ebooks, audiobooks, and graphic novels for readers who love those too. Let’s love them all.

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