Why work from a library when it offers no benefit over working in Starbucks?
If you are in Crouch End, have you considered going along to the Crouch End Unlibrary? It is a new kind of library space
: a wifi hub for local creatives
, the Unlibrary is a place to bring your laptop
.
Why not just use your ordinary library? Well, you can’t make phone calls
and there’s no coffee
: It also doesn’t really encourage collaboration, so while you might meet the same person again and again and wanting to talk to them, you do feel that you shouldn’t be talking. That stunts the community development a little
.
I’ve got no problem with coworking spaces and open community spaces: I help run BarCamps - how the hell could I have a problem with them? I do have a problem with them when they overlap with libraries and try to “transform” libraries or whatever the buzzword is. I don’t get it with the social media people: they discover that Twitter and Facebook are cool, and this gives them some kind of strange sense of entitlement to inflict the theories they have come up with to explain why Twitter works to every social institution in the land. It is basically really weak sauce socialism: we all need to be more friendly and communityish, but without any of the radically redistributive economic transformation.
I wouldn’t have any real objections to the Unlibrary idea if it wasn’t for the fact that at the same time our libraries seem to be - oh, what is the right corporate cliche - singing from the same hymnsheet. My local library sells coffee, but has a completely crap selection of books that don’t meet my needs at all. I have to travel an hour each way to London and use a university library to actually get some decent books. Libraries are fiddling with e-books, and librarians are having strange and bizarre dreams of wandering around lending out Kindles and iPads to their users - fully replete with DRM (brought to you by Apple, Amazon, Adobe and the publishing companies), even though DRM is a shit experience for all and probably encourages more copyright infringement than it prevents. The British Library has taken loads of nineteenth century books - public domain works! - and rather than releasing them in an open format are wrapping them up in Kindle DRM.
Here is a radical idea: how about a library that attempts to bring together the best of human culture - literature, science, philosophy, art, history - in book form and make it available in every town and village in the land. Improve libraries by improving the books inside them. Fuck ‘human-scale’ libraries. Fuck all the bullshit architecture advice from central government. Stack every room floor to ceiling with as many books as you can. Keep piling the books in until it resembles the protagonist’s home in the anime Read or Die. Spend a little bit less on computers and social media and outreach and marketing and coffee and make books available. And not just Harry Potter and Dan Brown. Obscure books; books that make you scratch your head in frustration on every page; big, expensive academic books that Amazon sell for three hundred quid; out-of-print books; hard-to-find books. To put it in stupid social media terms: the market serves the Harry Potter crowd pretty well - I remember when one of the new Potter hardbacks came out: you could get it for about seven quid in the first week of release. That’s about the same amount as it costs to park for a few hours near my local library. We don’t need publicly subsidies for Harry Potter novels. We need it because many of the greatest writers and thinkers are so because of libraries. Even Glenn Beck claimed to have learned all about the horros of socialism by reading in his local public library.
If the only way libraries are going to survive is by turning themselves into coworking space, fuck it. Close them down now. Much better to put the libraries out of their misery quickly rather than watch on in despair as they suffer a thousand slow, painful and ultimately pointless ‘transformations’ by techies and social media types. Why bother to subsidise libraries when the have basically become little more than coffee shops.
51.5209207299,-0.12900352478, London
