Hacker News Reader

Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

This sucks but was inevitable. Libraries are such a weird and wonderful thing. Even though books are widely sold, there’s a place where you can go and read them for free instead. And it’s not some weird loophole, it’s a basic unit of our society and an assumed part of every community.

Unfortunately this is America. Nothing can beat out profit motives forever. The libraries really never stood a chance.

View on HN

By 1919, more than half the libraries in the United States had been built by an unabashedly profit-motivated industrialist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library . Most are still around, including the one I spent a large part of my childhood wandering through.

It's one of those fractal issues. The more you zoom in, the weirder it gets.

Is this unique to America? It seems the same problem exists for libraries globally, right?

Broadly every other system of library lending in the world has mandatory collective licensing, but coupled with a significantly larger state funding to pay for said license.

Libraries for the purpose of getting information simply don't make sense in the digital age. The internet is far bigger and more accessible than any library, and you can find information on nearly any topic in exclusively ad-free, public domain sites like Wikipedia, the Gutenburg project, and arXiv.

Libraries now exist more as a place for community: somewhere quiet anyone can freely hang out, access resources like 3D printers (or for the very poor, public fountains/restrooms and the internet), and attend workshops. Some libraries like the Boston Public Library are still nice and active even today (https://www.bpl.org/). But unfortunately as you mentioned, people today really don't fund community, and there are a lot of degrading and closing libraries.

The internet is better for factoids - for learning something, a book is a lot better, if you can get your hands on one.

E.g. for a niche topic there's maybe a 5 page wikipedia article, a thousand useless seo fodder blogs, and a bunch of academic papers on the topic. At the library, I can get a 300 page comprehensive text written by an expert whose motive is to actually teach me the topic.

Same experience here. The Web’s excellent for a handful of (important!) topics but kiddie-pool shallow for many others. You quickly run out of Web resources and have to hit interlibrary loan or books stores to keep going.

It’s telling that probably the single most-valuable store of knowledge on the web is… a book piracy website. And even that’s missing tons of stuff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com