The op-ed piece grelber referred to is thought provoking and well worth a read. My nephew is a librarian in a growing mid sized community in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex and rather than closing libraries and/or reducing operating hours, they are building new and additional buildings. But the space for shelving printed books is getting smaller and smaller to make way for more computers and various electronic devices. A graduate student friend tells me none of her textbooks are available in print form but are downloaded into each student's iPad. This makes it possible to revise the textbooks during any given semester sometimes more than once.
I agree with the concept of preserving the centrality of the book, but these trends suggest a necessity to re-define the concept of what a book is and, as suggested by the op-ed piece, re-thinking what a library is or should be.
