
The Books of College Libraries Are Turning into Wallpaper - ingve
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/college-students-arent-checking-out-books/590305/
======
8bitsrule
In the past, college libraries with open stacks of printed books were often
the only way to learn of the existence of an obscure book that might be of use
to you ... even change your life or at least enhance your research.

They were in close proximity to other books that you knew to be useful.
Example: I might be looking at someone's obscure technical book from the 1870s
at the college they worked for ... and nearby might be the world's only
remaining copy of a bio written by a friend or colleague that mentions facts
found nowhere else.

I won't know ... because neither is shelved any more. The 1870s book is found
at archive.org. But not the bio. And the computer doesn't duplicate the
proximity once found in the physical card catalog.

The rewards of the physical browsing experience are lost in the digital age.
No way to assess the damage that's been done by hiding college stacks
underground in containers. To assess the effect of moving uncommon books to
special collections with infrequent hours and stringent requirements.

I have to wonder about the professionalism of the people who too carelessly
make the decision to overturn systems evolved by centuries of scholarship.

~~~
mimixco
Yes! I taught myself programming by browsing the 000 section as a kid,
something that would be impossible today.

~~~
chrisseaton
> something that would be impossible today

Why?

~~~
cannonedhamster
I'd wager most coding languages are described in their website docs rather
than in physical books long before they reach libraries. Only the most popular
languages get a full write up more than a few times and then you've got to
compete against shelf space already occupied by long useful books. While
library organizations orgs have our can get most books, your have to know what
you were looking for in advance.

~~~
chrisseaton
But you don't need to learn the very latest language in order to learn
programming.

I think it's pretty obviously nonsense to claim you can't teach yourself
programming at all using the books available right now.

~~~
new4thaccount
Yes and No. Every library is different. A university library may be better
stocked, but my local library's computer section is mostly old books on
outlook, Excel, and Photoshop. There are some coding books, but they're mostly
old books on VB and the like that might be difficult for someone new to
programming to setup. The topics on loops and branching and variables are
probably all relevant, but it's harder to learn just by paper.

~~~
Moru
Our local library gets books only slightly slower than what I can get ordered
online. From the time I ask for a book, they often have it on the shelf within
a few days, with an automatic reservation for me sent by SMS for pickup at the
local branch just outside the door. Of course this is the socialist country of
Sweden and we love our libraries... :-)

Last time I got a ZX-spectrum coding book that a friend on a forum wrote.
Before that some obscure manga comic book. That one took a few months because
they had a hard time to find it, it was long out of print.

They are very open to suggestions even of odd books and very curious
librarians, both young and old.

~~~
mimixco
Here in the US, you can use interlibrary loan to get nearly any book from a
public or university library. Worldcat [0] is a great resource for finding
books in other libraries that can be sent to you free through ILL.

[0] [http://worldcat.org](http://worldcat.org)

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RandallBrown
When I was in college, books played a bigger role than just wallpaper,
although they still weren't used for reading and nobody was browsing through
the stacks.

They were great at sound dampening. Studying in the library was great because
if there was a row of books between you and the people working on a group
project. The books muffled the sound enough to concentrate.

I don't mind losing physical books in the library, as long as we can keep the
same ambiance.

------
Jill_the_Pill
Maybe I read too many horror stories when I was younger, but the concept of a
"digital dark age" has stayed with me. I never fully trust online resources to
be there after a wildfire, flood, or multiple changes of storage format.

~~~
lqet
This is also a major concern of mine, to the point that I _actually_
considered to start printing the English Wikipedia at home, on very thin
paper. Sure, it will take a few years (and probably a few printers) and will
occupy most of my basement, but at least I will have access to this knowledge
in case another dark age emerges.

I am extremely worried that libraries are now replacing physical books by
digital representations. If this is going to continue, there will be a point
where the slightest global catastrophe will wipe out most of the knowledge of
the past 2000 years.

~~~
gdubs
The signal-to-noise ratio there will be huge. Wouldn’t a normal multi-volume
printed encyclopedia be way cheaper and less time and resource consuming?

~~~
ThrowawayR2
Where would you get a printed encyclopedia that's current? The only
encyclopedia that I've heard of that's still actively being published is World
Book Encyclopedia and that's meant for grade school children. Even the
Encyclopedia Britannica released its final edition in 2010.

~~~
dredmorbius
Most information usuful in a postindustrial society is over 100 years old.

------
Illniyar
> And it runs contrary to the experience of public libraries and bookstores,
> where print continues to thrive.

Ha? What about all the stories of public libraries and bookstores closing
down?

These seems like a long article that avoids the obvious - people don't use
books because eBooks and computers are simply more convenient.

~~~
gnicholas
Ebooks aren't doing so hot these days: sales were down about 5% this year.

[https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/ebook-sales-
decline...](https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/ebook-sales-decline-
by-4-9-in-january-2019)

------
Bostonian
From my experience as an undergrad and grad student in the 1990s, you can
learn a lot about a subject by just going to the relevant section of the
library and browsing.

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rxm
There are many aspects of a library of technical books that I miss online: the
curation process, the higher bit rate once you are holding the book, and the
lack of distractions in the library.

What I fear may go away is the long form books offer. When exploring a new
topic, articles are often too dense. In books, authors can establish the
background, help create a shared vocabulary, and motivate what is often so
condensed in a research article.

~~~
nabla9
There was just recently discussion about books on HN. It was based on some
blog post where the author complained about the book format and how hard it is
to remember what you just read.

The discussion revealed that people don't learn in shool how to read and study
with books anymore. Of course you don't remember much if you read the book
from start to end. E-readers may share the blame. It's very hard and slow to
study with e-book. If you spend hours studyin, you really need a book written
into a paper.

~~~
asark
Books are _damn_ good interfaces for reading long-form text. Footnotes, end
notes, indices (sure search is handy—indices are better for some things,
though, by excluding invalid partial matches and other irrelevancies)
glossaries, integrated author bios and expert introductions, and so on. Multi-
page marking with near-instant switching. Two pages visible at a time. Cover,
title, and author visible when sitting on the table not actively in use, to
help passively absorb and retain that info—ever forget who wrote an ebook
_while reading it_? Spatial recall. Margins to mark on or write notes in.
They're _excellent_. E-book readers are a replacement only for disposable
cotton-candy fiction—which has its place, and that part's nice.

Maybe one day computers and digital readers will actually be good enough to
replace books. They're not even close today. The tech's just great.

~~~
WalterBright
These are all solvable technical issues.

For example, I use Foxit for looking at PDFs. Maddeningly, I cannot view two
PDFs at the same time in different windows. There is no technical reason for
this limitation, in fact, the limitation was _deliberately_ programmed into
it.

I'm pretty sure the people who program PDF readers have never actually used
them. (There are a number of bizarre and trivial limitations to them that are
trivially fixed. For example, many readers can only remember the last page
read for the most recently read PDF. So if you open another PDF, your earlier
place vanishes.)

~~~
dredmorbius
The technical problems are largely trivial, and yet in over a quarter
century's use of PDFs, mass-market readers fail to incorporate them. One might
begin to suspect an incentives alignment failure within the industry.

I use a (reasonably good) Android reader which affords metadata presentation
and editing, _but lacks an "author" field_.

Long since reported. Not fixed.

~~~
WalterBright
None of the issues I report ever get fixed, either. I don't bother reporting
them anymore. I just complain on HN :-)

I remember on PDF reader on a tablet which would remember your last read
position only in the last 3 PDFs you opened. Open another one, and one gets
pushed off the bed. I simply cannot understand the train of thought that
concluded that 3 was the lucky number here.

~~~
dredmorbius
I send Pocket long screeds and periodically re-share those to HN. May be due
for another RSN.

------
teh_klev
I don't know how this works in the US, but I wonder if allowing/encouraging
the general public (i.e. you're not an alumni, and perhaps you never went to
college) to sign up and use university libraries would increase usage?

Just had a scan of Glasgow and Edinburgh University's library membership
pages. The general public can access the libraries but how and what you're
permitted to access can vary between institutions.

~~~
ht_th
If the state of public libraries is anything to go by, no. At least here in
the Netherlands, most public libraries that are still open, have reduced their
book shelf capacity in the past couple of years and added study spaces,
conversation spaces, coffee corners, computer spaces, meeting spaces, and
workshops to the menu.

The experience of going to the library now compared to 30 years ago when I was
a kid is totally different. Then it was a quiet place with books, catalogues,
a reading table, and maybe a computer or two. Now it is a social meeting
place.

(What I do wonder is, what were the social meeting places of 30 years ago? Why
is there a need for them now?)

Anyway, in my experience with university libraries, unless you know what
you're doing research-wise, these libraries are not the most accessible for
the outsider. There is a lot of information to wade through, and if you're
unlucky, you have to order books you want from the archive/warehouse anyway,
which can take from a couple of hours to a couple of days. Unless you can go
to the library every day, you will have to plan your visit, search and request
the books and materials you think you want beforehand, and hope for the best.

How I miss searching for hours or days in libraries and archives!

~~~
mcphage
> What I do wonder is, what were the social meeting places of 30 years ago?
> Why is there a need for them now?

Check out the book _Bowling Alone_ by Robert Putnam

------
beamatronic
People used to access printed materials largely because, well, there was no
other choice. Today digital is the native medium of authoring and creation.
Sharing, copying, and indexing come “for free” where historically those were
high-cost.

~~~
mimixco
Unfortunately, there's still a lot of information that's locked up only in
books. The more obscure or specialized your need, the less likely it is to be
found on the web. Countless books will never be digitized because there's no
profit motive to do so. And HathiTrust, while useful, keeps most of its PDFs
behind a 'paywall' so that you can only download them if you are physically
sitting at a partner University. I can't think of a dumber restriction on a
digitized book than making you drive to a university campus to download it.

~~~
asark
I've been repeatedly surprised and disturbed at how quickly one can hit "go
get one of the five copies of this book if you want to know more" on any given
topic, when researching online. You don't even have to go _that_ deep. If
you're lucky you can spend 30min digging around and find a scanned PDF on some
foreign university library's site or something. If not....

[EDIT] and that's just when you can find out that there _is_ something more to
find. How many times does the Internet not even know—or if it does, not in any
way you could reasonably find—what it doesn't know? I have a whole book that's
_just_ a list of works by and about T.E. Lawrence. Books, articles,
introductions, collections, papers. It's the length of a normal book, and
contains almost nothing but a list of works. It's a book-length bibliography.
That's one guy. Granted, famous, but there are tons of people as or more
famous/important as/than him. Plus all those topics that aren't single people.
Buildings, movements, art works, events. The Web's smaller than one might
hope.

------
asark
Does it follow that dramatically reducing the volumes available in university
libraries is the right way to respond to this? Seems to me that might lead to
a death spiral for the library by killing its remaining utility to students
and researchers.

~~~
CydeWeys
The article makes it clear that the library still has enormous utility for
students and researchers in the form of providing a focused space for study
and collaboration. Those needs aren't going away anytime soon, and no other
place fulfills them nearly as well as a library.

~~~
whenchamenia
Starbucks without coffee sounds like a death spiral to me.

~~~
CydeWeys
There's a big difference between a public space like a library, which has no
admission price, and a private cafe like a Starbucks, that exists to make
money from you.

There's a huge demand for both types of spaces, and said demand is not
interchangeable.

And anyway, cafes are way too loud.

------
cheez
In my university there were so many books that part of the comp sci section
was in basically crawl space (I was too tall to enter and had to crawl.) It
was such a vivid experience, I can't imagine not browsing books as a student.

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microcolonel
We absolutely must match the archival properties of books. Send your cold hard
cash and public support to archive.org so that not everything is forgotten.

I can't tell you how many of what would eventually be cultural and historic
artifacts I've seen just disappear on a failed disk somewhere.

------
Macha
In the past, students read the books in the college library, as it was the
best way to find information about the topics they studied. Having their own
copy was prohibitively expensive for anything more than the textbooks and
maybe one or two books of required reading (this may be an experience in
countries with free education, when you're borrowing several thousand a
semester, another thousand for textbooks is probably less significant, but it
was true in Ireland), and the only other source of information was the
college's journal archive which was definitely not aimed at beginners.

Nowadays, most students have a library of pirated PDFs, meaning they have the
information on hand where they need it and with no need to return it or find
it already borrowed in the college library. Most colleges will give you access
to online databases of journals, so they aren't a draw either.

The other problem encountered was that of QC. At least in my institution more
substantial books were always in short supply, as they'd never have more than
5-6 copies of a single book, so you'd arrive at the computing section and
find... "Java 2 for Dummies". Or "Teach yourself C++ in 24 hours". Books that
might have been fine to self-learners (when they were not significantly
outdated), but nothing that wouldn't be covered in a textbook and nothing more
substantial.

Probably this is a disconnect between the people running the library and the
lecturers, but the attitude of the library was "Yes, we have software
development books. What do you mean 15 years is out of date? The psychology
books have been there since the 70s. And our figures show that more students
have taken out 'Java 2 for Dummies' than 'Design Patterns' or 'The Pragmatic
Programmer', so we don't need more copies."

But those two factors, the greater accessibility of pirated PDFs and blogs
(and for some of the slightly more recent students, Stack Overflow), and the
lacking quality of what was probably available on the shelves at any given
point you chose to look meant that the library was definitely way more useful
as a study space than for the contents of the shelves for the other students
and myself during my degree.

------
kazinator
> _Before you tsk-tsk today’s kids for their lack of bookishness, note that
> the trend lines are sliding southward for graduate students and faculty
> members, too_

Graduate students, and some faculty members, are also "today's kids",
depending on your vantage point.

------
tntn
I have strong feelings about this. When I was in university, I would quite
frequently just going wander through the stacks in random sections, look at
the titles, and pick up some that seemed interesting. I'd also go to some
sections I liked (physics, math) and browse for hours. Frequently I'd end up
spending a while looking though several hundred year old books written by the
people that invented what the book was about.

There weren't many people that did this, so in my senior year the library
decided that the books were a poor use of space, and started tagging books
that hadn't been checked out for N years for removal (just with a sticker, I
had to ask to find out what the tags were for). Then they started to remove
the books, so the 10 aisle section (each aisle with 20 or so full size
bookshelves) on physics got reduced down to ~3 shelves. I asked the librarians
where they had gone, and they assured me that I shouldn't be concerned because
they had just gone to storage, so they could still be requested if needed. But
this change meant that instead of just quickly checking several relativity
books (indices are great) when I needed further explanation, I would have to
search in the catalog and individually request them, which took several orders
of magnitude longer.

I have never seen a catalog with an interface that allows replicating the
experience of walking through the stacks. Most interfaces allow you to find 1)
popular books in some field which are almost always from the last decade or so
and reflect what is currently hype, or 2) books with a particular title or
author that you are already looking for.

I'm reminded of a study on the dynamics and distribution of academic citations
over the past century. I can't seem to find it at the moment (maybe it was
referenced in one of Carr's works), but I think the gist is that the breadth
of citations has reduced substantially in the last decades. Rather than citing
many different papers from many different times, papers have begun to cite
that same most-cited papers over and over again (that show up first in the
search results), if I recall correctly. Reading a single pdf excerpted from a
journal is a very different experience from reading the same article in the
physical journal, because in the second you end up flipping past all the other
articles which may catch your eye. In the same vein, reading a single ebook
(or even requested book from storage) is a very different experience that
finding it on the shelf and maybe running across several other awesome books
on the way.

It makes me very sad that centuries of knowledge from the best minds of
humanity are getting shoved in storage, accessible only via search terms and
the like, and replaced by couches where students can sit and browse
Facebook/reddit/etc and occasionally work on schoolwork.

~~~
JasonFruit
That experience _was_ my education. Professors, classes, assigned work — all
helpful, but at best secondary to the time I spent in the library, deepening
and broadening my knowledge of the fields I cared about. I can't imagine how
you could gain from the Internet and your classes the kind of knowledge I
gained from those books in that library.

This is a tragedy, and the worst of it is that the people it's happening to
don't realize what's going on.

~~~
shstalwart
And then there are all of us, so enamored by tech, that we promote the
destruction of serendipity in the stacks every step of the way because
serendipity isn't searchable. Or something.

------
physicsguy
I've found as a graduate student that lots of things I've wanted access to are
out of print, and there's been no digitisation other than bad scans that you
can only access through LibGen and which I end up printing out anyway.

Journal access is also a pain - digital subscriptions are amazing, but my
University is not subscribed to some journals I need access to, or they only
have a subscription for papers after a certain date, which is when they
stopped buying the print copy.

------
Data_Junkie
People think of this as the information age, but we are just approaching it.
Libraries as we know them, public and academic, are about to be completely
different. Even already the old way is obviously just the same because society
doesn't have leadership to advance in blatantly obvious ways because we can't
disrupt the cash flow.

------
rjsw
I was at university in the 80s, I was often the first person to borrow CS
books that I read.

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cglace
When I would study in the library I would sometimes grab random books to read
when I got bored or needed a break.

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gerion
Are they selling the books in second hand libraries? Does anybody where I can
buy them in bulk?

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marmot777
And I have some good times with my girlfriend in the more obscure parts of the
stacks. That's another reason to presume these stacks for posterity.

