gutenberg is dead. long live the print.

don’t be scared, libraries have failed us before. today, we thing this is due to fewer and fewer actual readers, as our younger generation turn not just from books but from reading altogether. maintenance is expensive, books are expensive, the state has obviously different priorities and the private investor sees no hope of return in profits from building a new library or buying and upgrading an old one. so, in time (and i would argue that one single year of latency is enough) libraries slowly loose whatever reason we had to go there in the first place. if i go into a library in bucharest today there’s a one in a thousand change i will find the latest gladwell book. and publishers, who are the backbone of the entire structure, are content with panic.

i think all of the above is a myth. scaremongering by those to rigid to change and adapt into a world that actually would make libraries more accessible, more reliable and innovative.

our narrow perception is this: libraries keep books. some of us are free spirited and may include magazines, newspapers, dvds and such. well, in all fairness, we need take a step back. a library contains edited information. if somebody out there had to say something about anything and then put it in a narrative structure and got published, then it should be in the library. libraries are the museums or care holders of the narrative.

now, for the sake of a good argument lets borrow from google the term tome, which refers to any edited, published and unique narrative, and add it into our discussion. it becomes clear that the fate of the libraries today is tied down to the fate and alterations that the tome is suffering right now.

first of all, books, tomes, newspapers, will never disappear. paper might. but that is just a medium. as nytimes and other saw early on, what makes a good newspaper are it’s reporters, editors and journalists. and what we want from our papers is either the raw news or the opinionated side of the raw news. that is what we pay. and that is what they will continue to give us, through paper, glass or megabits.

i’ve been several times to frankfurt, the worlds biggest book fair. and some years ago i was surprised to see google there. they had a small pop-up shop that by years became larger and larger. at first, they were curious. they talked to all the publishers, big and small, niche and mainstream. then, they started brokering deals. everybody, i mean everybody was highly skeptical at first. you have to understand, these are people who have been in the publishing business, generation by generation, since their great great  great great grandfather. and now google wanted their work. but soon, google books came into being, one of the biggest publishing projects of the world. as any pilot and experiment, google and the publishing world had to redefine concept, structures and such. what is a book? if the different editions of hamlet are different books? if you have a different foreword, does that make a different book? are government documents books? to see a glimpse of what they faced read this article.

anyway, according to the findings, “the world stock of original books might be between 74 million books and 175 million books. google put it at 129,864,880. and this kind of medium change that google is pushing has happened before. from human tibetan tomes, to papyrus, to handwritten bibles. we are just leaving the gutenberg paradigm of publishing, thats all.

also, the rules of writing changed. our narrative has became transmedia, as many genres do not limit themselves only to text to tell a narrative and use sound and static or moving images. so, this is the new book order the libraries have to aline to.

so, lets see where that leaves us. we have a lot of information. some people turn that information in something with a beginning and an end. this edited structure, if any good, will be published in a medium. all published work should is selected and ordered in libraries.

we have reached the world-building part of this article. i think that tomorrows library is a place that orders and curates information. this means reaching relevant information fast. when google, or someone else, will finish the titanic endeavor of republishing into our newest medium, we will be faced with oceans of information, equally accessible. and this is a very risky trap.

in the old library, lack of space, resources and distance made the librarians to take hard choices. out of the thousands of books on rocks they had to chose the relevant two or three. this is for the library what journalists are for the newspaper. someone will have to be responsible to order by relevance. the speed of internet is of no help to me if i can’t find what i know i don’t know. i know i want to read about ancient greece and the possibility of not finding tucidides is kind of huge. and that’s a great risk for for all humanity, and the trap of the internet. giving same accessibility to all information makes the relevance variable crucial.

i thing we should move the debate from the medium to the content. the librarians of tomorrow should get their act together and start ordering and selecting the tomes of today. these 2.0 libraries break the flood of the internet with small islands of relevant, curated, edited, opinionated selections of information.

once the concept is settled lets talk library medium. human aid groups have already realized what many libraries still struggle with. they had and obvious problem in africa: entire states ravaged by war with not even one library. how are these peoples to burn the industrial gap if they don’t have books at all. now, building libraries everywhere is absurd. that takes takes either a lot of time, or a hole lot of money. so they developed one hundred buck laptops that have two qualities. they have tens of thousands of books in them and they are very robust. you can throw one as hard as you can on the floor and it will work perfectly. so, there you have it, a public library in each village for just three hundred dollars. and this is happening as we speak.

another medium issue is isolation. when we finish school we are done with a structured and planned form of learning. but we never actually stop learning. only that without the walls of the school, the pressure of homework, the scare of the tests, we find it a lot harder. this is where the library comes in again. we have to continue to learn all our life, and the library offers the closest space that in our mind resembles the place where we are used to learn. for our brain, after so many years of school, the library is the optimal learning environment.

so, here it goes, joining the debate, my library of tomorrow. a place full of natural light, lots of windows, filled with desks, armchairs, couches, cubicles. a place that provides a comfortable isolation. when you check in, you get a pad. on it, you find instantly curated, relevant, edited information selected for the purpose of your specific subject of learning.