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These sound great, and do you know the best thing about his idea? There probably already is one in your town. It's called a library. Seriously, they provide al

These sound great, and do you know the best thing about his idea? There probably already is one in your town. It's called a library. Seriously, they provide almost everything on his list: socialising spaces, quiet reading areas, computers, free wifi, book ordering, cafes and bibliophile events. And interestingly, they are paid for by membership fees (if you squint, government-run libraries make everyone a member and pay a fee via general taxation). These government-run libraries would make it quite hard to run a similar thing as a business. That's probably okay, because a library is somewhere between a merit and a public good (a quasi-public good).

MatthewPhillips 15y ago
That's a rosy picture of what a library is supposed to be. In my experiences they are places parents send their kids for free after-school day care, where homeless people go to get out of the heat, or where people who don't have a computer go to use the internet. Bibliophiles definitely use them, but they don't hang out there and socialize with like-minded people.
- jakarta 15y ago
  I don't know where you live, but I've had a lot of good luck finding nice libraries. When I spent a summer working in NYC, the SIBL library was just awesome in terms of facilities, hermann miller chairs, etc. In Boston there's a few good ones too.
mechanical_fish 15y ago
I basically agree, but there is an important article left to write about the future of the library. Traditional ingredients of a library: You need a lot of books. Fewer physical books equals less knowledge. You need a librarian who knows how to navigate all the books. You need a critical mass of library workers (who need not have library science training) to reshelve and process all the books. Because mice and rats and bugs and molds may eat your hundred-year-old books, you need to exclude food and drink from your library. Because it's inefficient to move lots of books through long distances, the scholars are going to park themselves in the library, packed cheek-by-jowl at adjacent tables. To a scholar the desk that's within a few steps of a comprehensive library is the most valuable real estate on earth. So libraries traditionally enforce quiet, and build arrays of private study carrels, and force public gatherings to take place in special soundproof meeting rooms somewhere in the building. Obviously, to house all those physical books in a patron-browseable format you need a pretty big and nifty building. But the future, assuming the righteous librarians finally deal with all this infernal DRM, will be different. To first order, wherever you have three people who love books gathered in a room with a librarian, you will have a library. They will be a lot more efficient to run. They will exist in much greater variety and much higher numbers. They will probably be largely indistinguishable from bookstores and coffeeshops.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago

That's a rosy picture of what a library is supposed to be. In my experiences they are places parents send their kids for free after-school day care, where homeless people go to get out of the heat, or where people who don't have a computer go to use the internet. Bibliophiles definitely use them, but they don't hang out there and socialize with like-minded people.

jakarta 15y ago
I don't know where you live, but I've had a lot of good luck finding nice libraries. When I spent a summer working in NYC, the SIBL library was just awesome in terms of facilities, hermann miller chairs, etc. In Boston there's a few good ones too.

mechanical_fish 15y ago

I basically agree, but there is an important article left to write about the future of the library. Traditional ingredients of a library: You need a lot of books. Fewer physical books equals less knowledge. You need a librarian who knows how to navigate all the books. You need a critical mass of library workers (who need not have library science training) to reshelve and process all the books. Because mice and rats and bugs and molds may eat your hundred-year-old books, you need to exclude food and drink from your library. Because it's inefficient to move lots of books through long distances, the scholars are going to park themselves in the library, packed cheek-by-jowl at adjacent tables. To a scholar the desk that's within a few steps of a comprehensive library is the most valuable real estate on earth. So libraries traditionally enforce quiet, and build arrays of private study carrels, and force public gatherings to take place in special soundproof meeting rooms somewhere in the building. Obviously, to house all those physical books in a patron-browseable format you need a pretty big and nifty building. But the future, assuming the righteous librarians finally deal with all this infernal DRM, will be different. To first order, wherever you have three people who love books gathered in a room with a librarian, you will have a library. They will be a lot more efficient to run. They will exist in much greater variety and much higher numbers. They will probably be largely indistinguishable from bookstores and coffeeshops.