The Future of Libraries, With or Without Books

How many decades have I heard this prediction of the death of libraries and books. The digital community have not lived with any single media standard for five years. How many of us can still read information stored on a 10 inch floppy disk without having to send the disk to a computer data retrieval center? Yet people still think that the multi-generational memory of books in a library will be replaced with a media that can be attacked and altered from anywhere on the globe.

I do believe, as the article implies, that neighborhood public libraries may not be as prevalent as they once were. As the article states, surviving libraries will continue to be community centers with adjacent warehoused stacks of books.

I do think that the "xxx.pdf" format standard may finally provide a stable format that a long term digital archive maybe possible. But I said the same thing about the "xxx.txt" and "xxx.doc" formats earlier.

But to prove my point, I deliberately used my fifth edition Merriam-Webster pocket dictionary to verify some of my word choices, © 1964. With its cover long gone and the pages slowly oxidizing to delicate brittle yellow sheets, I now require reading glasses to read the fine print of this reference book. But I do not require any antique hardware to be activated to read this book. Unless one wants to prematurely put me into that last category.