4 ms·

The tragedy of the modern library is that no one has the attention span for good books. Libraries are getting rid of the classics to make room for new books, th

by jadar 1y ago

The tragedy of the modern library is that no one has the attention span for good books. Libraries are getting rid of the classics to make room for new books, the majority of which are not worth the paper they’re printed on. We would do well to heed C.S. Lewis’ call to read more old books for every new book that we read.

KittenInABox 1y ago
I find that old books can often take away more than they give to me. They often have outdated ideas on women or race and are usually far clumsier with depicting homeless, disabled, or sick people. Engagement with fans of old books often is a set of very sheepish defensiveness when I point these out.
- nathan_compton 1y ago
  You're lucky these days if all you get is sheepish defensiveness and not revanchist conservatism.
nathan_compton 1y ago
I think this is a somewhat wrong framing, and its also shitty to blame libraries for this shift. Tech companies, for the most part, are responsible for the destruction of attention spans, if that has really happened. And I'd be happy to bet that by whatever criteria you choose to select there are more great books written per year now than in 1240 or whatever time you think they only wrote great shit. Its just that now there is much more to wade through and the media environment is totally different. At any rate, I just think that its a very strange thing to do to use "old" as a substitute for "good." There are tons of old books that are moronic and if the population of the world back then had been the same as now there would be tons more.
jasonlotito 1y ago
> The tragedy of the modern library is that no one has the attention span for old books. Fixed that to mean what you say. Luckily, people still have the attention for good books. Which is why libraries still stock good books, classic or otherwise. They also stock books that people want to read. Which might seem odd until you realize that libraries are there for the community to use. However, you are free to setup a library that stores books that no one reads.
bashmelek 1y ago
I respect what libraries do, yet the past few times I went to my local library I couldn’t find anything I was looking for—and these were well regarded and well known books. I get that they want to stock things people read, but I am a person who wants older books, and I think part of the library’s responsibility should include such books.
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
People don't even have the attention span for tweets. You see people asking grok to summarize the points of whoever they're fighting with. Try going back in time and explaining to Neil Postman that people today find watching TV to be a chore that needs abbreviation or summarization.
- geerlingguy 1y ago
  "Grok summarize this comment" I kid you not, I've had people ask Grok to summarize a 3-4 tweet thread I posted.
- alganet 1y ago
  40 minutes or so? You guys are getting lazy. I expected an AI connection in less than 10 minutes after the post.
  - add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    Are you being too passive aggressive to say directly that you're offended by commentary about AI that disagrees with your stance, or do you really keep track of these timings?
    - alganet 1y ago
      My stance is chaotic good, and HN keeps track of timings for me, I just have to look.
makeitdouble 1y ago
I personally think the focus on attention span is a red herring. Many good books don't require that much attention span, and putting the onus on the reader to like and focus on a book that is supposed to be good feels kinda backward. Given that people binge watch whole tv series and still read a ton online there is a desire, and probably ways to properly reach the audience. Not all classics need to be liked forever, tastes change, and the stories are retold in different manners anyway. I'd be fine with people reading Romeo and Juliet as a mastodon published space opera if it brings them joy and insights.
- cogman10 1y ago
  Some classics were written with a "per word" payment scheme to the author. That created bad writing in awkward places. The Swiss family Robinson is an example of this. Times of interesting adventure and then long passages about poetry analysis. Ironically, reading it feels like you are reading the works of an author with a low attention span. There's a reason so many of the classics have abridged versions.
- mingus88 1y ago
  Even a short and engaging chapter book will require someone to focus for more than 10 minutes on the text I have been online since the early web and have seen how much content has changed to engage people. It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now. If you post anything longer I have seen people actually get upset about it. People may binge a series but they are still on their phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine. I am trying to train my own children to seek out difficult things to consume and balance out the engagement bait. It’s hard these days. Everything is engineered to hijack your attention
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    > It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now We've had more publicly available educational content than ever with 40+ minutes videos finding their public. Podcasts have brought the quality of audio content to a new level, people pay to get additional content. People are paying for publications like TheVerge, Medium and newsletter also became a viable business model. And they're not multitasking when watching YouTube or reading on their phone. That's where I'd put the spotlight. And the key to all of it is, content length is often not dictated by ads (Sponsors pay by the unit, paid member don't get the ads) but by how long it needs to be. If on the other hand we want to keep it bleak, I'd remind you that the before-the-web TV was mostly atrocious and aimed at people keeping it on while they do the dishes. The bulk of books sold where "Men come from Mars" airport books and movies were so formulaic I had a friends not pausing them when going to the bathroom without missing much. Basically we accepted filler as a fact of life, and we're now asking the you generation while they're not bitting the bullet. And honestly, I can still read research papers but I completely lost tolerance for 400 pages book that could have been a blog post.
toast0 1y ago
Most libraries track circulation of their catalog. If nobody is using the classics, they're going to get weeded. Most libraries have limited shelf space, and it's best used for things that people are using. Archival can be part of a library too, but I think a reasonable tradeoff is interlibrary loans, public catalogs, and considering copies in other libraries while weeding. Some library systems can also move items to non-public stacks which may be less space constrained, and only access them on request.
bigthymer 1y ago
This has been an ongoing discussion within libraries for more than a hundred years not a recent issue. Should libraries be a place with classics to uplift people or popular books that people want to read even if they are low quality?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

by jadar 1y ago

KittenInABox 1y ago

I find that old books can often take away more than they give to me. They often have outdated ideas on women or race and are usually far clumsier with depicting homeless, disabled, or sick people. Engagement with fans of old books often is a set of very sheepish defensiveness when I point these out.

nathan_compton 1y ago
You're lucky these days if all you get is sheepish defensiveness and not revanchist conservatism.

nathan_compton 1y ago

I think this is a somewhat wrong framing, and its also shitty to blame libraries for this shift. Tech companies, for the most part, are responsible for the destruction of attention spans, if that has really happened. And I'd be happy to bet that by whatever criteria you choose to select there are more great books written per year now than in 1240 or whatever time you think they only wrote great shit. Its just that now there is much more to wade through and the media environment is totally different. At any rate, I just think that its a very strange thing to do to use "old" as a substitute for "good." There are tons of old books that are moronic and if the population of the world back then had been the same as now there would be tons more.

jasonlotito 1y ago

> The tragedy of the modern library is that no one has the attention span for old books. Fixed that to mean what you say. Luckily, people still have the attention for good books. Which is why libraries still stock good books, classic or otherwise. They also stock books that people want to read. Which might seem odd until you realize that libraries are there for the community to use. However, you are free to setup a library that stores books that no one reads.

bashmelek 1y ago

I respect what libraries do, yet the past few times I went to my local library I couldn’t find anything I was looking for—and these were well regarded and well known books. I get that they want to stock things people read, but I am a person who wants older books, and I think part of the library’s responsibility should include such books.

add-sub-mul-div 1y ago

People don't even have the attention span for tweets. You see people asking grok to summarize the points of whoever they're fighting with. Try going back in time and explaining to Neil Postman that people today find watching TV to be a chore that needs abbreviation or summarization.

geerlingguy 1y ago
"Grok summarize this comment" I kid you not, I've had people ask Grok to summarize a 3-4 tweet thread I posted.
alganet 1y ago
40 minutes or so? You guys are getting lazy. I expected an AI connection in less than 10 minutes after the post.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  Are you being too passive aggressive to say directly that you're offended by commentary about AI that disagrees with your stance, or do you really keep track of these timings?
  - alganet 1y ago
    My stance is chaotic good, and HN keeps track of timings for me, I just have to look.

makeitdouble 1y ago

I personally think the focus on attention span is a red herring. Many good books don't require that much attention span, and putting the onus on the reader to like and focus on a book that is supposed to be good feels kinda backward. Given that people binge watch whole tv series and still read a ton online there is a desire, and probably ways to properly reach the audience. Not all classics need to be liked forever, tastes change, and the stories are retold in different manners anyway. I'd be fine with people reading Romeo and Juliet as a mastodon published space opera if it brings them joy and insights.

cogman10 1y ago
Some classics were written with a "per word" payment scheme to the author. That created bad writing in awkward places. The Swiss family Robinson is an example of this. Times of interesting adventure and then long passages about poetry analysis. Ironically, reading it feels like you are reading the works of an author with a low attention span. There's a reason so many of the classics have abridged versions.
mingus88 1y ago
Even a short and engaging chapter book will require someone to focus for more than 10 minutes on the text I have been online since the early web and have seen how much content has changed to engage people. It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now. If you post anything longer I have seen people actually get upset about it. People may binge a series but they are still on their phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine. I am trying to train my own children to seek out difficult things to consume and balance out the engagement bait. It’s hard these days. Everything is engineered to hijack your attention
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  > It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now We've had more publicly available educational content than ever with 40+ minutes videos finding their public. Podcasts have brought the quality of audio content to a new level, people pay to get additional content. People are paying for publications like TheVerge, Medium and newsletter also became a viable business model. And they're not multitasking when watching YouTube or reading on their phone. That's where I'd put the spotlight. And the key to all of it is, content length is often not dictated by ads (Sponsors pay by the unit, paid member don't get the ads) but by how long it needs to be. If on the other hand we want to keep it bleak, I'd remind you that the before-the-web TV was mostly atrocious and aimed at people keeping it on while they do the dishes. The bulk of books sold where "Men come from Mars" airport books and movies were so formulaic I had a friends not pausing them when going to the bathroom without missing much. Basically we accepted filler as a fact of life, and we're now asking the you generation while they're not bitting the bullet. And honestly, I can still read research papers but I completely lost tolerance for 400 pages book that could have been a blog post.

toast0 1y ago

Most libraries track circulation of their catalog. If nobody is using the classics, they're going to get weeded. Most libraries have limited shelf space, and it's best used for things that people are using. Archival can be part of a library too, but I think a reasonable tradeoff is interlibrary loans, public catalogs, and considering copies in other libraries while weeding. Some library systems can also move items to non-public stacks which may be less space constrained, and only access them on request.

bigthymer 1y ago

This has been an ongoing discussion within libraries for more than a hundred years not a recent issue. Should libraries be a place with classics to uplift people or popular books that people want to read even if they are low quality?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]