I'm actually really glad you wrote this because it's made me think. Maybe this is the way the world is going (he says fatalistically) but we're a long way away at the moment, thank goodness. The first thing I take issue with is the suggestion you're offering me an equivalent experience. You aren't. E-readers are rubbish. They're getting better but they are deeply unconvincing facsimiles of books, not even Stepford wives, more like something William Hartnell would defeat. It's not merely their soullessness, it's their inability to support basic reading tasks, like idly flicking through a magazine by feel because you know where the sections are. When you say "lending books is not what a library is for any more", of course you're half right. Libraries are about a whole suite of services; they have been for a long time. But one of them is lending books, millions of them every month by your own figures. I like books and I like borrowing them. You, as it happens, prefer to consume your media in other ways. That's fine. You're free to enjoy your scentless, shiny, e-ink experience as much as you like. It's a poor reason to deny me access to superior technology. I'm sure some people can't see the point of going to the cinema when they could stay home and watch a DVD. That's their loss too. (I'm ambivalent about opera but I don't mind it being subsidised.) But fundamentally I think, despite clearly thinking about this quite a bit, you've missed your own point. When you say in italics (as if, I have to say, they are a little hard of thinking) that those library enthusiasts are "talking about a community centre", you're quite wrong. One of us has a very backward idea of what libraries are for but, I fear that it seems to be you. (It's not surprising. You're not as young as you were and you've not been in one for some time). What they are talking about is a library . You sort of raised this in your previous post but you've gone down a bit of a rabbit hole. What you are describing doesn't happen anywhere else. It is what happens in a library. Take the library away and the behaviour (the browsing of various sorts, the talks by authors, the storytelling) doesn't shift somewhere else. It just stops. The reason for this is that library activity is not sustained by magic but by librarians and funnily enough they're not present in other places. You are seeing effect without cause: the two things are not two things to be decoupled, they are one. I know you know that a library is not primarily a collection of books but you've not grasped what it is more than that. Which is odd, since you're helping to make it through your (I've no doubt, having seen you present) extremely excellent teaching. As a rampant egotist, why would you exchange your good self for a small screen? I'm afraid you're part of it now; that library experience. Don't sell it short just because it seems too good to be true: you really are what libraries are (somewhat) all about.