I take pride in my sense of humor, but sometimes it can get rather heavy-handed. That was demonstrated about ten years ago when I was invited to the New York Public Library to give a talk to librarians about the future of books.

The venue was the Map Room, an exquisite gilded salon that epitomized an age that revered the printed book. The attendees, solemn acolytes of the Dewey Decimal System, fit perfectly into the decor. My subject, you will not be surprised to hear, was the digital revolution, and to illustrate it I brought with me some CD-ROM discs. On the podium I had piled a large number of impressively thick tomes. I then produced the discs and declared that all the content of those books and more could fit onto a few of the slim shiny objects I held before them. I declared that a day would come when brick and mortar institutions known as libraries might become irrelevant. Whereupon I gestured broadly at the magnificent building and said, “I’ll bet this joint would make a great condo.”

One hundred librarians volubly sucked in their breath and gaped at me as I had torn a page out of Audobon’s Birds of America and blown my nose in it.

“Just kidding, folks,” I said sheepishly.

Actually, I wasn’t. As print media – newspapers and magazines and books – enter the endangered lists, so do the brick and mortar venues that service them: magazine stores, book shops – and libraries. The contents and catalogues of most libraries are accessible online from practically anywhere in the civilized world. The only reason patrons must go them is to check out and return their physical books. But as libraries acquire e-books, even that function becomes irrelevant. As I recently wrote, E-libraries don’t have a locus. Their patrons have no loyalty to a specific branch; they can traverse cyberspace to locate and download the e-book they wish to “borrow”. Yes, libraries (like bookstores) have managed to remain relevant in the digital age by offering a warm and vibrant social center for scholars, students and book lovers. And many provide computers for patrons to search the Worldwide Web even though they could do as much from their home, office, or a café in Paris.

These ruminations are reinforced in Millions of Books, but No Card Catalog, a New York Times article by Noam Cohen describing the recent legal settlement of the lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and a publishers group against Google, which since 2002 has been scanning millions of books into its colossal digital archive. Cohen suggest that “digitization of books is ending the distinction between circulating libraries, meant for public readers, and research libraries, meant for scholars.”

Cohen’s article ends on a hopeful note: “The digital-rights class-action agreement has the potential to make physical libraries newly relevant. Each public library will have one computer with complete access to Google Book Search, a service that normally would come as part of a paid subscription.” He cites an NYU professor, Thomas Augst, as asserting that Google is “creating a new reason to go to public libraries, which I think is fantastic. Public libraries have a communal function, a symbolic function that can only happen if people are there.”

Okay, you can hold up on the wrecking ball for now. But I have dibs on that 44th floor penthouse on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.

RC