Nothing Can Replace Libraries (Yet)

In the history of terrible ideas, Amazon replacing our libraries is one for the books

My keychain holds little plastic cards, one for each store I regularly visit and, now, a tiny library card, too.

I hadn’t visited my library in ages. I stopped reading hardcover books almost a decade ago, ceased checking out movies on VHS and then DVDs sometime during the Obama Administration and hadn’t cracked an encyclopedia since Outkast encouraged me to Shake it like a Polaroid picture.

For me, my local library had slipped into irrelevancy. And, yet, here I was, back at my local library asking if I could get a new library card.

If I’d read Forbes Contributor Panos Mourdoukoutas recent, muddled proposal “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money,” a few years ago I might’ve agreed with the sentiment, if not the structure, of his argument.

Libraries’ survival in the face of information technology upheaval has been a mystery to me. We have a world of information at our fingertips. We stream movies. The Dewey Decimal System, which I learned to use in my grade school’s library, is about as useful to current generations as a divining rod for finding books. Millennials and Gen Z-ers find whatever they need through natural…