Is a Library Without Books Progressive or Pointless?

I would call it a library without paper rather than a library without books - it just provides access to information in a format that is less expensive, less harmful to the environment, more accessible, and more versatile than paper, just as printed books and paperbacks made information cheaper and more accessible than when books were all hand-written on parchment, vellum, or papyrus, or expensively bound. The new technologies don't ever completely replace the old - there are still people creating beautiful calligraphy and illuminations on vellum, or other forms of artistic books - but new standards will continue to replace the old ones.

It is very important, though, that people who cannot afford technology such as the Internet and E-readers be provided access to this information in some way, and it is important that information not be discarded just because it is not currently available online. Until all books are available electronically, libraries still need to be able to provide access to paper books, but a paperless library can provide this through some kind of cooperative program such as interlibrary loan. It's also important to have experienced librarians and other staff who can assist the public in locating, obtaining, using, and evaluating the information they need.

Many cities are completely shutting down their public libraries because of budget constraints - surely a paperless library is preferable to no library at all or to a library that is full of worn out facilities and outdated information. The paperless library will never replace all paper libraries because there will always be reasons to preserve the valuable paper books that have already been written, but the paperless library (and even the virtual library, without so much as a building) certainly seems to be the wave of the future for libraries.

It's also short-sighted and stupid, for many, many reasons. Note one of the supporters' statements:

"We all know the world is changing. I am an avid book reader. I read hardcover books, I have a collection of 1,000 first editions."

I'm throwing the BS flag on "Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff". The key bit in his statement: "I have a collection of 1,000 first editions." Yeh, bub. You're a collector, not a reader. I'd lay 100-1 odds I read more books in a month than this poseur reads in two years. Or ten. I weeded more than 1,000 books from my own library that I've read more than once just a couple of weeks ago, and still have no room in my walls of books for all my library, which includes 263 recent acquisitions on my reading list for this Winter.

I read ebooks (seven of them this last week--and my ebook library is _beginning_ to rival my physical collection), but even with Gutenberg.org, Google Books, Amazon and all the other resources on the web, just the valuable _great_ books that've been written in the past couple of thousand years alone--let alone all the new stuff coming out--just aren't all available in electronic formats, and not all books are really suitable for formatting electronically, either.

*agh* Not going to take it any further. The people who are dedicated supporters of eliminating physical books in libraries are, almost exclusively in my experience with such persons one-on-one, NOT avid readers. Casual readers? Sure. Occasional readers? More likely. Fakers and poseurs, _pretending_ to be avid readers? Almost always.