Transitioning Libraries and Schools to E-Book Format

Having read an e-book on a Nook reader for the first time recently I was surprised how much I liked it. The first thing I thought of was how much money public libraries across America could save if they ditched the anachronistic paper books and bought just e-books. Traditionalists such as me usually would profess allegiance to the paper book into a future even when one’s fellow citizens have cold, sharp cyborg fingers yet that changed when I read an e-book on the Nook and even one of my own (A Universal Widget in The Realm of Forms). An e-book reader is actually more comfortable than a paper back book, is cheaper and hundreds of books can be loaded onto a single low-cost reading device.

If public libraries went paperless they could go librarianless too saving the tax-stressed public millions and millions annually. For every new hard bound junk novel purchased several e-books could be bought. Even small libraries could have good academic and technical selections. Overdue fines would disappear; perhaps the book would disappear into electrons when the check-out time is it? There would be no time wasted reshelving books or checking them in or out. Patrons could get a read without mustard stains on it or the more common coffee slop-ons. Many libraries lunk as locus classicus of occlusion of comparative advantage for readers and that needs changing.

With bookshelves removed from libraries more space could be given to placing quiet cubical for reading nooks perhaps with magazine and newspaper electronic editions available for reading on secured low-cost tablet computers. Children’s books could be loaded onto cheap, durable, solar power and USB micro-rechargeable tablet and turn forward when baby says something like mitt or backward when baby says ga ga and dancing bunnies appear to scold for backsliding. Hands free reading is useful when one is juggling, cooking or otherwise busy yet wants to turn the page. Libraries could check out readers to some of those with cards though patrons would be encouraged to buy their own.

Libraries could readily become automated with vast numbers of e-books and venerable paper books converted to digital format. Local libraries could store in-the-cloud and on optical discs if they like too with redundant storage forms for security a useful expense. Automating libraries with audio-visual monitoring by a security and patron consulting firm from a central facility would again reduce cost and travel time to satellite or branch libraries. About the only thing needed in a modern library is lots of quiet reading space for the humble reader of books, magazines and news on the Internet.

I would think that within a decade every poor nation on Earth will have access to low cost e-book readers via public libraries hooked into a free global e-book database of millions of titles. Some will be public domain books, others will be purchased and available for check-out, perhaps though a U.N,. Public Library project that would be rivaled I am sure by national libraries spanning the globe with the excitement of books by their own citizens as well as numerous private and public libraries intended by benefactors to serve especially the poor readers of the world yearning for a better database.

Unfairly gouging taxpayers to pay high wages (a starting library assistant gets 23 dollars per hour in a job a chimpanzee might be able to perform with equal opportunity training) to librarians and school teachers for superfluous tasks better accomplished by taxpayers themselves is just wrong. One 35,000 dollar teacher salary could better be used to buy 310 factory reconditioned Nook readers. One trashy politically correct ideological book packaged novel by committee purchased for 35 dollars is nearly enough to buy a reconditioned Nook at $50 dollars. Librarians and schools ought to evolve into a modern era of public service and away from the Soviet-style sluzhba bureaucracies of stuffed sinecures for the corrupt degrading the nation and reducing human potential. Instead of minimal public spaces for quiet enjoyment of reading and maximal pay, retirement and benefits for redundant staff a constellation of new public reading and media quiet spaces with e-books and libraries of free videos for downloading should develop to let the American public get more books for the taxed buck.

Though libraries seem another swollen pork trough for corrupt government workers serving themselves instead of the public it is important to note that it doesn’t mean they are possessed by homocentric no-boundary government-media-corporate insiders-of=evil temporal lunatics subverting the peace, security and order of traditional values in the United States with massive electronic surveillance and Harvard development of court composition and micro-fly surveillance drone airbugs. If public screwls are developing the tax-dollar absorbent function to indoctrinate and move mindless masses to insiders-of- evil thinking as far away from independent intellectual development as possible it doesn’t follow that libraries and government bureaucracies, courts and corporations are too. It is still possible to reform and improve public libraries locally, nationally and globally to well-serve vital egalitarian, independent opportunities of the masses to live free reading good books.