Through The Windows of Privilege (Like Karl Lagerfeld’s) The Enduring Value Of Physical Books And Libraries With Big Collections Can Readily Be Discerned

Lagerfeld loved to pose and have pictures taken of his library that appeared in many, many, many, many, many, many  promotional stories.  Take a peek: Can you spot the two-volume set related to a semi-obscure poet who lived in the south of France?

After renowned and prolific fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld died in Paris, Tuesday, February 19th there was so much written about him, and there were commemorative full page tributes paid for in the New York Times by Chanel one of the fashion houses he most famously deigned for.  For us, one of the most fascinating descriptions about the man published was in the New York Times obituary (Karl Lagerfeld, Designer Who Defined Luxury Fashion, Is Dead), which commented that “he estimated his library at 300,000 volumes.”

Confirming that Lagerfeld loved and valued his books, we can relate that three of the volumes in Lagerfeld’s collection were given to him by the mother of Citizens Defending Libraries co-founder Michael D. D. White who worked for Chanel when Lagerfeld was designing for that fashion house.  Two of those books were a two-volume set that Lagerfeld wanted (and couldn’t find) because of his interest in a semi-obscure poet who lived in the south of France.  Lagerfeld took the time to personally extend his thanks when the book was given to him.

Lagerfeld “estimated his library at 300,000 volumes”!   That library of volumes personally collected by just one privileged individual is almost equal in size to the 400,000 volumes that the  NYPL sometimes talks about the new downsized version of its Mid-Manhattan Library holding. Mid-Manhattan (now to be rechristened “SNFL,” the “Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library”) was designed to hold far more books than that, 700,000 books.  That downsized 400,000 number at the NYPL’s largest circulating library in New York City is what is supposed to represent, after a consolidating shrinkage, all the volumes that were also in SIBL, the Science, Industry and Business Library from which more than a million books have gone missing, and another 175,000 books from just one of Donnell’s collection when that central destination library was shut down.  Moreover, the NYPL’s architects for the shrunken Mid-Manhattan Library have represented repeatedly, including assurances to the NYPL trustees that the shelves meant to hold the 400,000 books can always be removed is the collection is shrunk still further.

This shrinkage of physical books in the NYPL’s libraries is occurring when circulation, mostly physical books is way up, nearly 70%, and the public still prefers physical books rather than the (more expensive) digital books that library administration officials are pushing at them.

We have supplied information about how with huge and overwhelming percentages of our countries population agreeing quite sensibly about what they want (and could and ought to be able to have), elected officials representing corporate and monied interests are not delivering those things.  Tim Wu wrote an op-ed that appeared the New York Times Wednesday offering up the same stark observation about the thwarting of democracy (See: The Oppression of the Supermajority-  The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the thwarting of a largely unified public.)

What’s happening in New York with the real estate deals dismantling libraries and the elimination of books is another prime example of the way the public is not getting what is a top priority for a huge majority of citizens even though what the public wants is entirely affordable and makes sense, especially as a public commons . . .

. . . The other side to this is to see, via the expression of of privileges of wealth and rank in our society, how those in a position to make their own personal choices (like Lagerfeld) value books and their own private libraries.  So, for instance, the NYPK sold the Donnell Library in a book-eliminating shrink-and-sink deal that netted the NYPL perhaps less than $23 million for the for the drastic shrinkage of what was once a beloved five-story, 97,000 square foot central destination library . . . The double page color advertisements in the New York Times advertising the luxury condos featured the penthouse apartment on the market for $60 million.  In the color advertisement you looked through the windows of the penthouse condo to be allured by the private library therein. 

Adding to the embarrassing contrast, that penthouse apartment devotes a far, far higher percentage of its floor space to luxury owner’s private library as a amenity than New York City devotes in its budget to public libraries as a shared resource serving all New Yorkers.  See- What’s Wrong With These Numbers?: The Baccarat Tower’s $60M Penthouse and NYC’s Library Budget, April 29, 2014.

Real Estate News: Even While Sacrificing NYC PUBLIC Libraries To Create Real Estate Transactions, Developers Use The Creation of PRIVATE Libraries To Promote Their Projects.

Similarly, we have written about how developers apparently are adding private libraries to their their developments as selling points to market them better.  See: Real Estate News: Even While Sacrificing NYC PUBLIC Libraries To Create Real Estate Transactions, Developers Use The Creation of PRIVATE Libraries To Promote Their Projects.

The Brooklyn Heights Association, which once fought for a bigger and better Business, Career and Education central library in Brooklyn Heights reversed course to side with the development community coming out in favor of selling that library in a development deal that generated a windfall for the Private Saint Ann’s School.  Until just recently the Brooklyn Heights Association raised money with neighborhood house tours that afforded the public tantalizing views of the select interiors of many of the magnificent homes in the neighborhood. One of the most spectacular hits on the BHA house tour the year before the BHA started promoting the sale and shrinkage of the local public library was a was a townhouse equipped with its own two-story private library customized with magnificently detailed yellow-green wood bookshelves . . .  (In retrospect we can only wonder whether it was the home of a Saint Ann’s school family.)

The architect hired by the developer and Brooklyn Public Library for designs respecting the shrink-and-sink deal selling of that Brooklyn Heights Library in downtown Brooklyn Marvel Architects headed by Jonathan Marvel.  The firm refused to produce numbers describing the number fo books being eliminated from the libraries by its redesigns.  However, when the firm needed some good PR to counter the negative news about its involvement with the library sell-off and the shady calculations that resulted in the oversized Pierhouse impairing the view from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the New York Times obliged with a Matt Chaban authored puff piece that generated some of its warm and fuzzies plus gave the architect’s cred by posing Jonathan Marvel and his father in front the shelves holding their library of architectures books. . . many of those books are likely to be hard, if not impossible to find, in a New York Public library.  See: It’s Marvelous To Have Books!- Indeed, But Architect Jonathan Marvel Designs a Library Seemingly Oblivious To The Tradition of Finding Books In The Library.

It endears Karl Lagerfeld to us that he so loved books.  No doubt his easily accessible library contributed heartily to his wide ranging productiveness.  We’d love to love everyone who loves books, and when you peer through the windows afforded when the privileged make the choices that they are free to make, it is clear that there are many who love and value their books.  It’s just that we’d like it if all those who have such privilege to have their own libraries would also love for the rest of us to have books in our public libraries of New York.  Please.  Please.

Some other tidbits about Mr. Lagerfeld and books.  To accommodate his growing library, Lagerfeld planned a facility underneath the tennis court at his house in Biarritz the centerpiece of which was a 10,000-square-foot, 20-foot high library space.  And Mr. Lagerfeld ran "his own bookstore, 7L, on the Rue Lille in Paris."

One last surprise, while New York library officials take pot shots at "dusty" physical books (calling them "analogue books" and "artifactual originals," while they speak dismissively about “old time" versions of libraries that are not "twenty-first century" "Libraries of the future"), Mr. Lagerfeld perceived the world differently– Rumors came true, and Mr. Lagerfeld, who one must think of as quite intimately linked to the renowned fragrances of Chanel, helped produce a new perfume based on a loving evocation of the scent of books.  It was named  “Paper Passion.”

Orchestrating Another PR-Grabbing Move to Telegraph Supersedence of The Traditional, Curated Library With Distracting Technological Glitz, The NYPL Starts Posting To Instagram Public Domain Books Already Freely Available on The Internet

The story is available from the Wall Street Journal (NYC Library Takes Novel Approach, Posting Books to Instagram The service, dubbed ‘Insta Novels,’ will be available to users of the photo- and video-sharing platform, by Charles Passy, August 22, 2018), but to read it there on the internet you’ll have to get through the Journal’s paywall if you are not already one of its business news oriented subscribers.  The article is, however, also available through Morningstar/Dow-Jones.    

Swaggering fecklessly into the internet to emphasize yet again its asserted faith that technology, represents the future of libraries, supplanting the age old traditions of curated collections and physical books, the NYPL will put what it calls “Insta Novels” on Instagram, the social service network owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. (That’s the same Facebook now involved in current censorship scandals, the scandal being how Facebook, subject to the wrong sort of influences, is censoring valuable content and free speech that it shouldn’t be censoring).

In a previous and similar highly promoted initiative, library administration officials partnered with Amazon to encourage the reading of digital books, back then it was to be on the subway. 

Previous digital reading campaign promotion (some of it)

The few works the NYPL is putting up on Facebook's Insatgram are public domain, and hence already readily available.

Library officials told the Wall Street Journal’s Charles Passy that the idea was to promote the  “NYPL brand” communicating in connection with that promotion “that libraries are changing with the times and fully adapting to the digital era.”  (“Fully adapting”: That certainly makes it sound like it's imperative that libraries adapt need to a lot.)   Just in case anyone missed the point about the NYPL’s fixations on a digital future for its libraries vs. what libraries have always done so successfully, Christopher Platt, the NYPL’s chief branch library officer, took the opportunity of this Instagram stunt to synchronistically dismiss the tradition of physical libraries.  He grabbed and combined some adjectives and nouns to say in a denigrating way that (aside from Instagram stunts?) the NYPL wants people to understand that libraries are not only “brick-and-mortar places full of dusty books.” — Achoo!  Anyone feel that administrative chill?

The Journal article included this reaction supplied by Citizens Defending Libraries:

Michael D. D. White, co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries, a New York City-based watchdog group, said the emphasis on online reading works against the idea of libraries as physical spaces where books are curated and knowledge is shared. 

It diminishes the sense of place and purpose,” he said.

When does a library stop being a library?  At the last NYPL meeting in September the trustees during a report about the NYPL’s recent forays into private partnerships (another issue to consider) were told of the NYPL’s expectations that it will go into the film business with HBO to make movies!  Hooray for Hollywood?: That is something we will have to delve into at some later time.

Interesting to think that it all began with BOOKS! Amazon, With Bezos Now The World’s Wealthiest Man At Its Helm, Tops $1 Trillion!

Amazon growth charts, one of revenues and one of returns since Amazon went public.  Not the respective flat lines in each and consider what that means.

Interesting to think that it all began with BOOKS!

Amazon is now the second U.S. company (following Apple) to top $1 trillion in value.  That makes Jeff Bezos ($167 billion) world's richest man.

As Yasha Levine covered in his book “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet” Amazon is an internet company engaged in surveillance as a key part of its profit model and it works with the federal government and the federal government’s military and CIA.  As part of the sales blurb (on Amazon) for Mr. Levine’s book states:

Levine examines the private surveillance business that powers tech-industry giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, revealing how these companies spy on their users for profit, all while doing double duty as military and intelligence contractors. Levine shows that the military and Silicon Valley are effectively inseparable: a military-digital complex that permeates everything connected to the internet, even coopting and weaponizing the antigovernment privacy movement that sprang up in the wake of Edward Snowden.

For more on what we have already covered on this see: Reading on the Internet vs. Reading a Book You Picked Up Browsing In Your Library: Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet” and for even more that is relevant coming from Mr. Levine’s book; Self Proclaimed As Fighting Surveillance, Library Freedom Project Is Tied to Tor Service With Its Deep Ongoing Connections, Including Financing, To The U.S. Government.

Second biggest U.S. Company as of September 2018?  Amazon grew very fast to do that.

Amazon, which began in a converted garage of Bezos’ rented home, launched on the internet in July of 1995.  That’s just 23 years ago.

The story is that Bezos, not particularly a book lover for any reason, coming out of an unusually successful Wall Street hedge fund, D. E. Shaw & Co., was not so to speak “following his bliss” when he decided to start his internet sales company with books.  He was instead selecting books from amongst “a list of 20 products” he was considering theoretically as the result of what where essentially mathematical computations:

Bezos eventually decided that his venture would sell books over the Web, due to the large worldwide market for literature, the low price that could be offered for books, and the tremendous selection of titles that were available in print.

The Unites States, in 2013, according to a Bloomberg Industries analysis was contracting out “about 70 percent” of its “intelligence budget.”  That figure is probably, for the most part not calculated considering most of the surveillance being done by companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook as talked about by Levine in his book.

What is clear, as written about by Mr. Levine in his book and by Tim Shorrock, author of “Spies for Hire- The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing,” is how intertwined the intelligence community is with private sector companies with an interdependence that has a lot of implications for who succeeds or fails in the private market place.  If we are talking about small start up companies trying to establish themselves, both these authors write about how the efforts of those companies may be aided and quietly, nay secretly, assisted by the government.  Both authors write about how “In-Q-Tel” was founded in 1999 (an interesting date in terms of ramping up electronic surveillance) as the CIA’s venture capitalist company operating in Silicon Valley “to invest in start-up that aligned with the agency’s intelligence needs.”  (Yasha Levine p. 174)  And “through its In-Q-Tel venture capital fund, the CIA invested in all sorts of companies that mined the Internet for open-source intelligence” that’s “information that it could grab from the public web: Videos, personal blogs, photos, and posts on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram amd Google+.” (Yasha Levine p. 188 -189)

In-Q-Tel “works with the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology” to find companies with products with intelligence application and then “buys equity positions in these firms— many of which are managed by former intelligence officials.”  (Shorrock p.16) Along with technology incubation funding from the CIA and other agencies “high-tech companies would be offered a huge natural market—the Intelligence Community and the federal government, plus assistance in testing and perfecting their products for use by the private sector.”  (Shorrock p.144) The interrelationships between the Intelligence Community and the tech community are very widespread, Stephanie O’Sullivan, the CIA’s director for science and technology said in 2006: “There is no technology out there that is not relevant to our mission.”  (Shorrock p.145)

Citing In-Q-Tel as just one example of “private-partnerships” with the technology industry that serve as a “convenient cover for the perpetuation of corporate interests” Tim Shorrock in his book (p. 365) describes In-Q-Tel’s “partnerships” as “masking the fact that the CIA’s investments amounted to a hefty government subsidy that allowed companies to do things like hire lobbyiests to expand their market share.”  And the companies with those expanded market shares are likely to get a pass for when the private surveillance they engage in may flout  laws—   Citing the defense cavalierly offered by the the Chamber of Commerce for AT&T’s secret spying on U.S. citizens, Shorrock writes that “the ultimate result of the privatization of intelligence activities” is that the Chamber’s an amicus defense brief ventures to describe as a “friendly `partnership’” a “secret alliance between business and government that may be one of the most egregious examples of a corporation skirting U.S. privacy and foreign intelligence laws” (p. 366)

In-Q-Tel, designed with a focus on incubating start-ups, is one end, the small company end, of the spectrum of the government as a presence injecting itself into the picking of winners and losers in the market place.  And In-Q-Tel is only one of those government market influences out there; for example, there is also a cousin company of British Intelligence heritage, defense and intelligence research company, QinetiQ Group a privatizing ownership share of which was transferred to the Carlyle Group.  Shorrock writes of George Tenet, former head of the CIA (under whom In-Q-Tel was launched) being on the QinetiQ  board.  The U-less Qs in the names of both these companies are intended to merrily invoke the Q of the James Bond films who equipped 007 with all his disguised tech gadgets.  QinetiQ’s model and influence on the market is different from In-Q-Tel's, buying up other tech companies for Intelligence Community purposes after becoming a privatized part of the Carlyle Group.  (One thing they like is robots.)

The other end of the spectrum of how the government is a presence injecting itself into the picking of winners and losers in the market place is the big company end.  And obviously, Amazon is now a really big company.  (For instance, circa 2014 Amazon was reportedly providing the CIA with cloud computing services pursuant to a $600 million contract.)

When the companies that the United States relies on to do its intelligence work are really huge, when those companies have most of the available experts with security clearances working for them (at higher salaries than individuals working for the government), when those companies have most of the collected data and most of the systems that are up and running that the government has grown dependent on them for, plus when those companies have huge government derived income streams that they can recycle into lobbying for the big shares of secret government budgets that they are allowed to know and can talk about, but that the public isn't allowed to find out about, there is a question of who is running the show.  This question about contracting out is one that Tim Shorrock delves into and contemplates at length in his book mulling it over from many different perspectives.  Finally, while government officials may or may not lose the upper hand, government officials can nevertheless direct huge influence about who amongst these big companies will be the winners or losers in the market.

The implications of huge private corporations having so much power in the Intelligence Community are more pronounced given that, when individuals work for such private corporations, unlike the individuals who work directly for government, loyalties run in the direction of making profit.  By corporate law definition, that means profit first, not patriotism.  Furthermore, loyalties can be bought or sold.  And private corporations pursuing private profit are becoming increasingly multi-national in character and thus untethered from the patriotisms of any particular nations, including ours, that may hire them.  Hiring out to other private firms or interests (not nations) as they are allowed to do, they may be acting with no national patriotism at all.

Bezos started with books, but in time expanded Amazon’s offerings beyond books, including, initially, to some of the other products he was supposed to have been considering early on, music, by selling CDs and videos.  . . .  Nowadays if you want to see a video, a movie, particularly anything you might consider vintage or historic, say you want to see something with a political message, like “Seven Days In May” (about a military coup against the U.S. President in the Kennedy era) it’s likely you may find that your best chance, your path of least resistance to easily view the film easily will be to pay for it to stream through Amazon.  This is a far cry from the days when pretty much everyone’s  Friday night film viewing came from their local, often independently owned, video store.  In 1988, the year after the home video market surpassed box office revenues, with the number of stores leveling off, (the Blockbuster chain was simultaneously buying another chain to expand) there were 25,000 video stores nationally (about 45,000 other outlets renting tapes); in 1997 there were 23,036.

Video stores are vanishing practically to the point of non-existence, including in New York City. . .  Amazon, with probably lower overhead and fewer employees involved, will charge you about as much, maybe more, than your local video store once charged.  Did you once have a relationship with your local video store operator who knew your tastes, what to recommend intimately?  Think of what Amazon knows about you, learning more each time you rent a film like “Seven Days In May.”  Once Amazon just knew the books you read, but now as you might browse to look to possibly buy almost everything in your life through Amazon, Amazon now knows so much more.

In 1988, months after starting it's expansion into music, Amazon announced its expansion beyond books.  At the same time it bought a service that would keep track of your friends and their birthdays, so, for example, Amazon could suggest when it was time to order them presents.

In November 2007 Amazon introduced its, three year in development, Kindle (continually connecting you to the Internet) to sell ebooks, staring with 90,000 books (more than four times as many as Sony offered at the time and 90 percent of the current best sellers) and vowing that its “goal” was “to have every printed book on earth available for instant download.”  Of course, whatever their benefits, the ways in which e-books in contradistinction to physical books, are problematic are manifold, especially in terms of issues of surveillance.

By the beginning of 2010, hardly two years later, with the “nascent” ebook market still “only a few years old,” Amazon was clearly dominating it with an estimated “80 percent of e-book purchases” and by the end of 2010 a “full 50% share.”   The difference in those two percentages offered (books vs. market share) may reflect the low price that Amazon was charging for every book.

Offering best sellers for $9.99, Amazon left no room for any profit margin as it sought to claim virtually the entire market.  In 2013, author (and lawyer) Scott Turow said that Amazon was using “unfair tactics” trying to “monopolize” the e-book market.  He said:

If you price e-books well below the cost, which is what they did for years, it both destroys physical book stores and drives the reading public into the e-book, which of course Amazon dominates.

As the point is made in Scott Turow's quote above, Amazon's disruption of the market not only drove e-book competitors out of the e-book market, but also drove brick and mortar book stores and stores selling physical books into bankruptcy as well.  Furthermore, publishers haven't liked Amazon very well either because they too have found themselves impoverished by Amazon's model.  Their impoverishment can limit support given to authors.

Should we all just relax and surrender to the fact that Amazon dominates the market while pushing digital books?  Citizens Defending Libraries reported last year how New York City library officials were partnering to further promote digital books in a program that featured prizes from Amazon.  See: NYC Library Officials Partner To Promote Digital Books With Prizes From Amazon.

A New York Times Sunday Review Op-ed this week by sociologist and author Eric Klinenberg reminded us that this summer Forbes Magazine ran published an article arguing that Amazon should replace libraries with its own retail outlets, and claimed that most Americans would prefer a free-market option. But, the public response "was so overwhelmingly negative that Forbes deleted the article from its website." 

Amazon has grown fast because its model is to grow fast.  Although its valuation, its gross revenues and its market share keep growing dramatically, Amazon's net revenues have been nearly flat.  Everything goes into expansion.  There have been times in the past when that strategy was problematic and close to edge, a risk to have no profit going out to shareholders, but whatever threats that lack of net return seemed to pose to company or to Jeff Bezos as its leader financing always came to the rescue, and they both survived. . . . and continued to take over market after market.

Amazon should be a walking poster-child advertisement for antitrust litigation and legislation.  Instead, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, the newspaper for the national capital where such issues should be discussed and where the careers and day to day lives of the all the legislators and government officials responsible for the enforcement such antitrust measures are reported on.

The Washington Post has always had a special role in influencing the nation.  We are pretty sure it was Peter Dale Scott, credited with coining the term the "deep state," who in one of his interviews said that the Washington Post along with the New York Times and the LA Times was a preferred outlet by the CIA when it wanted to get its stories out to the public (often without telltale fingerprints).  Whether that's exactly the case, the Washington Post has certainly played an important role historically for the CIA in this regard.

If it all started with BOOKS, why Amazon?  Why not Barnes and Noble?  Why isn't Barnes and Noble now the second biggest company in the United States?

An interesting comparative analysis points out that as of Spring 2017 Amazon increases would have returned 48,197% since their May 15, 1997 (before their 1988 announced expansion beyond books) debut as a public company.  Barnes & Noble would have only returned 26%. Borders went bankrupt! Some other comparatives: Walmart-  +96%; Best Buy: +38% ;  Macys:+19%: Target: +4%: Staples: -50%. 

And Amazon has become the second trillion dollar company in the U.S. even as sales of the digital books it is pushing are dropping for years in succession.

Open House New York Hosts an NYPL Presentation of Its Mid-Manhattan Library “Renovation” Plan

From left to right: Elizabeth Leber, Francine Houben, Iris Weinshall, and Gregory Wessner

On Tuesday March 6, 2018, with Open House New York hosting, the NYPL presented its renovation plans for The New York Public Library’s Mid-Manhattan Library to an audience of architects and the architecturally interested.

The NYPL’s presenters were Iris Weinshall, Chief Operating Officer of The New York Public Library (and wife of Senator Charles Schumer); and architects Francine Houben, Founding Partner/Creative Director, Mecanoo Architecten, and Elizabeth Leber, Partner, Beyer Blinder Belle.  They were introduced by Open House New York Executive Director Gregory Wessner who afterward moderated a brief discussion of the plans with the audience submitting suggested questions on index cards.

One such question submitted on an index card

Open House New York exposes the New York public to important architectural projects, often with site visits.  In this case pictures of the project and a virtual reality film of it were shown on the impressively huge screen of the SVA Theatre at 333 West 23rd Street.

Citizens Defending Libraries equipped the audience with flyers beforehand as they entered the theater.  Our flyer is below.

CDL Flyer for event- Click to enlarge

Here is the text:

What’s Happening to
Manhattans’ Central Destination Libraries?
What’s Happening to NYC’s Libraries?
Where Are the Books?

What happened to the Donnell Library and all its books?  It was sold off for a pittance in a shrink-and-sink deal, replaced by a luxury tower (just like the second biggest library in Brooklyn).  See: PICTURE & VIDEO Gallery: Opening Ceremony For 53rd Street “Replacement” For Donnell Library- “Where the Hell Is Donnell” Demonstration Outside.

Why are we spending millions on a glitzy consolidating shrinkage of the Mid-Manhattan Library and selling off SIBL, the city’s biggest science library, while the architects promise the NYPL trustees that even the paltry reduced book collection that results can later be done away with?  Why are library officials telling us to get our science from the internet as net neutrality is attacked?  See: As NYPL Senior Execs Present Pretty Pictures To City Council Of Expensive Mid-Manhattan Do-Over Renovation They Neglect To Mention One Thing: Rush To Immediately Sell SIBL (at a suspiciously low price?) To Very Interesting Buyer.

Why is the NYPL spending millions to commercialize the 42nd Street Central Reference Library with a wine-serving restaurant to replace its Map Room facilities and a new “exit buy the gift shop” while the famed central stacks designed to hold three million now exiled books sit empty?  See: Citizens Defending Libraries: NYPL’s Presentation of its “Master Plan” to alter and commercialize the 42nd Street Central Reference Library and Committee to Save the New York Public Library: Response to the NYPL Master Plan - Improving A Research Library For The 21st Century.

“There is little in this plan that advances the goal of providing researchers with faster and better access to NYPL’s collections; in fact, the plan to relocate the maps does exactly the opposite. . . NYPL’s promise of an open, transparent, participatory planning process has a hollow ring when its trustees approve a master plan based on a video and a few renderings without public consent. . .   A master plan that ignores the stacks is no master plan at all.” (CSNYPL)

AND Read more at Citizens Defending Libraries about the real estate deals between Blackstone’s Stephen A. Schwarzman and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, their involvement in selling libraries and America’s public assets.

Sign our petition on the web: Citizens Defending Libraries

* * * * 

Francine Houben, the architect from the Dutch firm of Mecanoo

These NYPL presentations are highly scripted and PR vetted before they are made so that when you hear them more than once there is usually little deviation from what you have heard before, even if Tuesday’s presentation was pitched in somewhat more architectural terms.  What is always most interesting is when something slips through the tight seams of the presentation that amounts to an admission against interest, or in the case of architects presenting, an admission against the client’s interest.  In this vein, Francine Houben, the architect from the Dutch firm of Mecanoo made statements about squeezing into the renovated Mid-Manhattan those things they want to fit there.

During her presentation she said:

And of course there is this dotted line [around a color graph up on the screen of multiple functions that it was the goal to include in the building] . . In a way, we wanted too much happening in one building.

And went on just a bit later to say:

I think it will be a very workable building, but at the same time it’s also a compact building.  It’s not that big.  It’s the largest branch library, but it’s not- uh- uh -uh not a very great- uh a big building.   

As Houben faltered, architect Elizabeth Leber of Beyer Blinder Belle, intervened, changing the subject to how the renovated library was intended to provide everybody with an all accommodating cradle-to-grave library experience.

Although Houben referred to the Mid-Manhattan library as the “largest branch library,” that does not distinguish it for what it really is, a central destination library intended to have the most complete circulating collection in Manhattan.  In fact, Mid-Manhattan is a central destination library just like two of the other special function libraries for which the NYPL plans, in a consolidating shrinkage, are now having Mid-Manhattan take over.  Those two other central destination libraries are the once esteemed and beloved Donnell Library and SIBL, the Science, Industry and Business Library.

At one point Iris Weinshall was asked about what was happening to SIBL, including the science library that the NYPL is doing away with entirely.  There was a gasp heard from some in the audience when Weinshall explained bluntly: “We sold it.”  (The NYPL sold it to the fabulously wealthy son of a librarian who made his yacht and vintage airplane fleet supporting fortune in science.)

One of the things that didn’t come out when Houben alluded to how the sufficiency of the remaining space at the renovated Mid-Manhattan could be debatable, was that the renovated library will actually have less space than the existing MML.  That might seem counter-intuitive, since the NYPL is introducing new rooftop space, but Veronika Conant of the Committee to Save the New York Public Library calculates that with only 100,000 square feet, the “renovated” library will have one third less space than the pre-renovation library.  This significant loss of valuable floor space is due to the floor space lost through the creation of atriums in the building.

The overall shrinkage was never made clear when the “renovation” was presented to the City Council or to the Community Board.  Nor was it truly clear when the plan was presented to the NYPL trustees.

The NYPL also tries to obscure the overall shrinkage by pointing out how work space at the library will be transformed into public space, by which they mean space accessible to the general public space (all space, including work spaces at libraries, is “public” space.)

The loss of books at the libraries was obfuscated in the presentations and in the responses to questions.  No one would have known from what was presented that the previous incarnation of the Mid-Manhattan was designed to hold 700,000 books, far more than the 400,000 the NYPL sometimes talks about the new MML holding.  Nor would anyone have known that later the Mid-Manhattan was supposed to absorb another 175,000 books from just one of Donnell’s collection when that central destination library was shut down.

When presenting this MML plan to the NYPL trustees, Francine Houben brazenly assured them that there could be even fewer books in the library in the future: “They are not structural, the shelves, you can take it away later if you want.”  (We have since publicized her remark.)

Before this architectural audience on Tuesday, Ms. Houben was only slightly more circumspect in her phrasing. First she described the central stacks around which the 42nd Street Central Reference Library across the street was famously designed as “problematic” because they are “structural.”  Those 42nd Street stacks were designed to hold three million research books and in a marvel of engineering deliver them efficiently and quickly to readers.

One big difference with the stacks in the SASB Building [i.e. the 42nd Reference Library] is they are structural, which make them very problematic.  Here [in the MLM redesign] is flexible, so I don’t know, in a hundred years there’s maybe more, maybe less books, you can even make something else out of it.  So it’s flexible.

Houben calls the reference library “the SASB Building,” which has been renamed as advertising and brand name burnishment for NYPL trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman, head of the Blackstone Group, recently in the news for being the first CEO to pull in an annual income of more than $1 billion.  His crossing of that financial line this year was probably helped by his spearheading of Trump administration-assisted plans to sell off and privatize American infrastructure.

It must be noted that Ms. Houbenm, along with the Beyer Blinder Belle team, is also one of the primary architects that the NYPL has engaged to "renovate" the 42nd Street Central Reference Library Carrère & Hastings designed building.  So for her to refer to what is almost universally recognized as the genius of that building's design, the way it research stacks are incorporated integrally into its function and plans is supremely disconcerting.  It is also a window into the NYPL's thinking about the building, one at odds with how the NYPL has represented to the public that it has an open mind about the future of those stacks, which it now official says it intends to treat as an afterthought to the "renovation" it is launching for that building.

The presenters were asked about whether the NYPL was going to reduce books because of the concept of the world now being in the “digital age.”  The question was: “Why have books at all?”  Iris Weinshall gave a perfunctory and safe answer about how the NYPL wanted to provide both physical books and digital books while acknowledging the obvious, that people do like to hold physical books.  She steered clear and at a very safe remove from the much more complete answer she could have given and the slew of nuanced issues that question invokes.

Ms. Houben explained the lack of bookshelves and the reduction of books as a vision of the future to which she subscribed:

In a library you should not have shelving that is blocking views.  So if we would put all the books back, so these are the kinds of shelving system, we would only have just have a little bit,  few place, for people sitting together to study.  Come on!: This is not `the library of the future.'

(Science fiction writers, with perhaps better imaginations than Ms. Houben’s, have had a field day imagining the “Library of the Future.”)

There was no discussion about how expensive the “renovation” is, about $2,000 a square foot.

The evening got off to an amusing start with Gregory Wessner, the Open House host for the evening, introducing the discussion with his memories of the blissful refuge that he, as a youth, had taken in Mid-Manhattan’s air conditioning.  Apparently he didn’t get the memo from the NYPL saying that one reason it had wanted to sell Mid-Manhattan entirely (which our library defending efforts helped prevent) was that the NYPL was telling the public that the building couldn’t be adequately air conditioned.

Ms. Houben mobilized against any favorable reminiscing about the old Mid-Manhattan telling the audience that the building smelled: “you could also smell the building.”  Elizabeth Leber. However, was more complimentary about how the building, given its commercial history as a department store, “had great bones.”   It was intriguing to learn that the shape of the site and the building heralds back before that when the a Vanderbilt mansion and carriage house had stood there.  Belying its coherent facade, the building was actually built in phases over time.

Much was made of how architecturally appropriate it was that the MML building is the same period as the 42nd Street Reference library across the street.  No mention was made of the fact that SIBL, just is a ways further south in another former department store on Fifth Avenue, the former Altman’s, is also of the same period with the same good bones.  Those good bones were taken advantage of to make it the “library of the future” in 1996.

The last big news of the evening for the architecturally omnivorous was about the finishes that will be used.  Red carpeting has been chosen because it echos the red carpeting used in the research library across the street.  Also, they have not yet selected furniture, but they know it has to be sturdy and that they should go with vinyls rather than upholstery because of the heavy use.  (The durable furniture that was discarded was worn because it had been subjected to decades of heavy use.)

Iris Weinshall, Chief Operating Officer of The New York Public Library and wife of Senator Charles Schumer who receives significant funds from Stephen Schwarzman and Blackstone

Elizabeth Leber, Partner, Beyer Blinder Belle

Are The Libraries Being Shrunk, Pushed Underground, Books and Librarians Eliminated Because the World Is "Going Digital"? NO, That's NOT a Reason It Should Happen.

Although the people promoting library sales and elimination of books would like to use as an excuse that the world is going digital, that is not the case.  New York City libraries are more used than ever.  Although use was up 40% programmatically, most of the recent increased use is in terms of circulation, 59%, and almost all of that circulation is physical books.  That is despite an effort by NYC library administration officials to steer people into the use of digital books (which, maybe surprisingly, are actually more expensive for the libraries) and away from what they derisively refer to as "old-fashioned analogue books."

While digital books sometimes have some advantages the general population tends to prefer physical books.  Further, there are advantages with physical books related to the way people learn and think and there are problems and concerns about digital books that need to be considered.  See:  Physical Books vs. Digital Books.

At the same time, libraries do need to address digital needs and provide access to the internet; they need to help bridge the so-called "digital divide" between those who have ready access to computers and the internet and those who don't.  For that reason libraries should actually be growing to address these expanded needs rather than shrinking.  In this regard it is, indefensible and inexplicable that two top-notch libraries with some of the most advanced and robust support of computer and internet libraries, SIBL the 34th Street Science, Industry and Business Library and the downtown Brooklyn Heights Library with its Business, Career and Education Library, were both targeted for simultaneous elimination.

For complete information go back to our Citizens Defending Libraries Main Page (or to read through all the content of our Main Page in LONG FORM CLICK)

One of “100 Ways To 100 (Expert Advice for a Longer Life)”: “Never Stop Reading- Join Your Local Library”

Like the glittering gold of El Dorado the fabled Fountain of Youth eternally beckons- And it sells magazines off the rack at you local pharmacy or convenience store.

We won’t represent this advice as the most authoritative, but we thought our fellow library defenders would find the thought entertaining, and not at all bad advice.  Want to live longer?: Keep reading and read physical books from you local library.

One of our library defenders picked up what appeared to be a sort of one-shot magazine-style publication put out by some group called Athlon Classics: 100 Ways To 100 - Expert Advice for a Longer Life (display until 717/17).  Don’t try to too hard to find anything about it from the internet unless you just want to pick up a copy on Ebay.

In “Section Three- Stay Brain Fit” one of the 100 suggestions to live longer is to “Never Stop Reading- Join Your Local Library” and read physical books.  The tip tells you that “according to a study conducted at Harvard Medical School” reading ebooks from a screen before bed “can trigger some undesirable side-effects” because the “blue light” negatively impacts “your circadian clock.”  We have heard the same thing from Bette Midler in interviews although we can’t say she is an authority either.

The “Stay Brain Fit” tip goes on to advise getting and reading physical books from your local library where, “you’ll get a chance to take advantage of an institution that has nurtured the best minds of American generations for centuries.”  (Bette Midler has said that she was one of those nurtured “best minds” speaking at a Barnes and Nobles talk with Judy Gold about how she had practically been raised is the Morgan-designed library in her native Hawaii.  More recently, Midler has been enlisted to say how spends valuable research time in libraries.)

The “Stay Brain Fit” tip then tells readers that “expert librarians are better-informed search engines than even Google” and goes on to tout the benefit of finding social interactions at the library (one reason we think that working with librarians is more fun than Google).

If the magazine has another tip about staying socially engaged other than some quick advice introducing the Happiness section (“engagement with friends, family and the community” matters), we missed it although there is definitely evidence that social connectedness prolongs life significantly, as the point is made in the research on the subject and book “The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest” by Dan Buettner.

Although the magazine advises that reading physical books from a library is helpful for longevity and offers quite a few more tips about how good mental stimulation is good for longevity, it misses mentioning the research that physical books are likely better for learning well than digital books.

Physical Books vs. Digital Books

[Back To Main Page] In addition to the main resource page, here are some extra useful links about physical vs.digital books.  This page will be updated.

This page is just about physical, printed books vs. digital books.  The links on this page were (and most still are) part of another Citizens Defending Libraries page about libraries in general (Extra Useful Links About Libraries In General), but it finally got to the point that, with more and more updates, the links on the subject of the benefits of physical books vs. digital books got to be so numerous it was time to put up a page just for the purposes of linking to articles on this subject alone.

Let us say at the outset, that Citizens Defending Libraries is not against digital books.  It is just that we think that physical books (for many of the reasons you see in the articles linked to below) still need to be found in, and a primary focus of our libraries. . . . Instead, in New York City library and city administration officials have been denigrating the value of physical books as they have moved forward to remove them from the city's libraries . . . Why?  We think it is clear that the answer is because physical books take up real estate and developers are clamoring to have that real estate transferred to them notwithstanding that library usage is way up.

Here are the links to those articles.

      •    Scientific American: The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: Why Paper Still Beats Screens (Why the Brain Prefers Paper), by Ferris Jabr, November 2013.

IN BRIEF: Studies in the past two decades indicate that people often understand and remember text on paper better than on a screen. Screens may inhibit comprehension by preventing people from intuitively navigating and mentally mapping long texts.

* * *

Preliminary research suggests that even so-called digital natives are more likely to recall the gist of a story when they read it on paper because enhanced e-books and e-readers themselves are too distracting. Paper’s greatest strength may be its simplicity.
 
* * *

. . reading a then popular electric console book . . . prevented the three-year-olds from understanding even the gist of the stories, but all the children followed the stories in paper books just fine. 

       •    New York Times: Is E-Reading to Your Toddler Story Time, or Simply Screen Time?, by Douglas Quenqua, October 11, 2014.

 . . .  new studies suggest that reading to a child from an electronic device undercuts the dynamic that drives language development.

“There’s a lot of interaction when you’re reading a book with your child,” Dr. High said. “You’re turning pages, pointing at pictures, talking about the story. Those things are lost somewhat when you’re using an e-book.”

       •    New York Times: Parenting-Traditional Toys May Beat Gadgets in Language Development, By Pam Belluck, December 23, 2015.

. . .  in the midst of the holiday season, a new study raises questions about whether . . .electronic playthings [Baby laptops, baby cellphones, talking farms - “whirring, whiz-bang toys of the moment, many of them marketed as tools to encourage babies' language skills”] make it less likely that babies will engage in the verbal give-and-take with their parents that is so crucial to cognitive development.

The study, published Wednesday in JAMA Pediatrics. . .  builds on a growing body of research suggesting that electronic toys and e-books can make parents less likely to have the most meaningful kinds of verbal exchanges with their children.

“When you put the gadgets and gizmos in, the parents stop talking,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University who was not involved in the new study, but who has found similar effects with e-books and electronic shape-sorters 

   •    The Gothamist: Park Slope Parents Say Library Has Too Much Technology, by Lauren Evans, March 26, 2013.

Josh Skaller, father to a 12-year-old and a 3-year-old, told DNAinfo that while he appreciates the resources offered by the library's Park Slope branch, he worries that his children may not be able to locate books under the heaps and heaps of gleaming technology. (Which, for the record, no longer includes iPads, which were taken off the floor after one of the library's four was stolen promptly after the branch reopened in September.)

“It’s not so easy to peruse the stacks because the tables with the computers are right there," Skaller said. “There's not a lot space away from those screens... For the 3-year-old, there's an immense opportunity to discover new things to read, and anything that's pulling her away from that gets in the way of the purpose of the trip to the library.”

      •    The Huffington Post: Sorry, Ebooks. These 9 Studies Show Why Print Is Better, by Maddie Crum, February 27, 2015. 

. . A slew of recent studies shows that print books are still popular, even among millennials. What's more: further research suggests that this trend may save demonstrably successful learning habits from certain death. Take comfort in these 9 studies that show that print books have a promising future:

* * *

Students are more likely to buy physical textbooks.
A study conducted by Student Monitor and featured in The Washington Post shows that 87 percent of textbook spending for the fall 2014 semester was on print books. Of course, this could be due to professors assigning less ebooks. Which is why it's fascinating that...

Students opt for physical copies of humanities books, even when digital versions are available for free. . . .

     •    The Washington Post: Why digital natives prefer reading in print. Yes, you read that right, by Michael S. Rosenwald, February 22, 2015.

Textbook makers, bookstore owners and college student surveys all say millennials still strongly prefer print for pleasure and learning, a bias that surprises reading experts given the same group's proclivity to consume most other content digitally.

* * * 

Earlier this month, Baron published "Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World," a book (hardcover and electronic) that examines university students' preferences for print and explains the science of why dead-tree versions are often superior to digital. Readers tend to skim on screens, distraction is inevitable and comprehension suffers.

. . . Pew studies show the highest print readership rates are among those ages 18 to 29, and the same age group is still using public libraries in large numbers.

* * *

most important . .  is "building a physical map in my mind of where things are." Researchers say readers remember the location of information simply by page and text layout - that, say, the key piece of dialogue was on that page early in the book with that one long paragraph and a smudge on the corner. Researchers think this plays a key role in comprehension.

* * *

. . . there has been "pedagogical reboot" where faculty and textbook makers are increasingly pushing their students to digital to help defray costs "with little thought for educational consequences.". . .

"We need to think more carefully about students' mounting rejection of long-form reading," . .

      •    Wall Street Journal: The Reader on the Prowl- Even the smartphone-toting, text-messaging generation prefers to study using real books. It makes things easier to remember, by Steven Poole, February 19, 2015. 

. . .   it turns out that the smartphone-toting, instant-messaging young generation still prefers to study at university using printed material if it can. What is driving the adoption of electronic textbooks is not any preference of students or teachers but simply the fact that they are cheaper. . .

Students forced to study using e-texts complain about eyestrain, distractibility and poorer recall of material.

* * *

. . . Amazon's latest Kindle, the Voyage, has a high-resolution e-paper screen but still a tiny collection of ugly typefaces, while paragraphs are forcibly "justified" by a brute algorithm (so that the right-hand edge of a paragraph is straight). Compare this with a beautifully typeset physical book: I'd wager that the typographical difference is more impoverishing to the reading experience than the difference between screen and paper itself.

    •    School Library Journal: Pew Study: Teens Still Love Print Media, ‘Traditional’ Library Services, by Karyn M. Peterson, June 25, 2013.

Tech-savvy American young adults are more likely than older adults to have read printed books in the past year, are more likely to appreciate reading in libraries, and are just as strong supporters of traditional library services as older adults, a new national report from the Pew Research Center shows.  According to the survey of Americans ages 16–29, a majority of young adults believe it is “very important” for libraries to have librarians and books for borrowing, while relatively few think that libraries should automate most library services or move most services online.

* * *

“Younger Americans’ reading habits and library use are still anchored by the printed page,” says Kathryn Zickuhr, research analyst at Pew’s nonprofit Internet & American Life Project and a co-author of the report.

* * *

85 percent of 16–17 year-olds read at least one print book in the past year, making them significantly more likely to have read a book in this format than any other age group.

     •    Toronto Star: Kids, teens still prefer books to digital readers, by Michael Oliveira, November 22, 2013.

Based on the results of online surveys conducted for Booknet Canada, a non-profit industry organization that tracks sales and trends, it appears parents and children aren’t eager to give up on the time-honoured tradition of flipping through paper books in favour of clicking around in digital content.

* * *

. . . few indicated they actually prefer digital books or could see themselves eschewing paperbacks for good.

Only one per cent of the parents polled said their kids aged 13 and under were at the point of reading more ebooks than print books.

* * *

Only about one in four parents said they read ebooks with their kids. And only four per cent of parents said they preferred that their children read ebooks, while 63 per cent favoured old-fashioned books.

Among teenagers, 29 per cent said they preferred reading ebooks, 37 per cent chose print . . . The surveys suggest teens aren’t rushing to embrace ebooks.

     •    Economist: The future of the book, October 11, 2014.

Books are not just "tree flakes encased in dead cow", as a scholar once wryly put it. They are a technology in their own right, one developed and used for the refinement and advancement of thought. And this technology is a powerful, long-lived and adaptable one.

    * * *

What is the future of the book? It is much brighter than people think.

Even the most gloomy predictors of the book's demise have softened their forecasts.
   
 . . . The much ballyhooed decline of the physical book has been far from fatal.. ..  The growth rate of e-books has recently slowed in many markets, including America and Britain. Publishers now expect most of their sales to remain in print books for decades to come-some say for ever.

There are a number of reasons. One is that, as Russell Grandinetti, who oversees Amazon's Kindle business, puts it, the print book is "a really competitive technology": it is portable, hard to break, has high-resolution pages and a "long battery life". . . Sales of e-readers, the most popular of which is the Kindle, are in decline. "In a few years' time," a recent report by Enders Analysis, a research firm, predicts, "we will look back at e-readers and remember them as one of the shortest-lived of all consumer media devices."

Cynthia Pyle’s erudite letter to the editor in amplifying response: Letters to the editor- Scholars like books.

     •    NPR: Pew Study: Many Technophiles Also Love Libraries, by Lynn Neary, March 13, 2014. 

You might think that in a world of Google and Wikipedia, people who love technology wouldn't care much about the musty old local public library. But, according to , you'd be wrong.

* * *

In its latest study, Pew set out to determine what types of people use and value public libraries. It compared highly engaged, "library lovers" and "information omnivores" to those who have never used a library . .

Not surprisingly, library lovers . . tend to be better educated, have higher incomes and are more involved in social and cultural activities than people with little or no engagement with libraries.

. . the Pew study finds that the most highly engaged library users are also big technology users.

Report:

. . . . 90% of Americans ages 16 and older say that the closing of their local public library would have an impact on their community..
.  Deeper connections with public libraries are often associated with key life moments such as having a child, seeking a job, being a student, and going through a situation in which research and data can help inform a decision. .
. . Members of these high engagement groups also tend to be active in other parts of their communities. They tend to know their neighbors, they are more likely to visit museums and attend sporting events, and they are more likely to socialize with families and friends.. . .
. .those who have used a library in the past year, adults living in lower-income households are more likely to say various library services are very important to them and their families than those living in higher-income households..
. . Many of those who are less engaged with public libraries tend to have lower levels of technology use, fewer ties to their neighbors, lower feelings of personal efficacy, and less engagement with other cultural activities. 

     •    The Guardian: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming, speech by Neil Gaiman, October 15, 2013.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them.

     •    Noticing New York: The Library of the Future Envisioned- "The 21st Century Library". . . And Beyond- Questions Floating In Science Fiction's Crystal Ball, by Michael D. D. White, January 26, 2015. 
 Monday,

In 1989 Isaac Asimov, speaking to the American Booksellers Association:

    made a passionate defense of the survival of the book when he asked his audience to imagine a device that "can go anywhere, is totally portable. . . . Something that can be started and stopped at will [and] requires no electric energy to operate." This dream device is, of course, the book. "It will never be surpassed because it represents the minimum technology with the maximum interaction you can have."

   •      Melville House: Citizens Defending Libraries calls the Central Library Plan “a real estate grab” and “contrary to the public interest”, by Claire Kelley, February 19, 2014.

Are you concerned that libraries are moving towards privatization and that there is a move to replace physical books with digital resources?

. . . Libraries are an essential public commons, and should continue as such.

The issue of ownership is a good segue into the second part of your question. There is much evolving right now with respect to digital rights that hasn't been resolved:  Copyrights are being extended and made stricter; so-called "orphan works" are in serious jeopardy; content providers are consolidating into monopolies that raise prices while much of what is available digitally is made available through time-limited subscriptions that have a potential ephemerality that never applied to books on the shelves.  Technology busily shifts too: The New York Times had a sentence in a tech section article recently, "If you own a Nook, the fate of your books may now be up in the air."

We favor, and we are not against, adding digital resources, but right now we think that the benefits of digitization, partly fad, and partly, to an extent, legitimate future, are being seized upon and exaggerated to excuse a rush to get rid of physical books because books take up real estate and the focus of too many people running the libraries is selling real estate.  The public, all of its generations, like physical books.  For the most part the public hasn't switched away from physical books.  Scientific American just did an interesting review of the science literature indicating that the human brain may be hard-wired to learn and retain information better with physical books.  Many books aren't available digitally.  Making them available would be a massive undertaking at which it is easy to fail.  Nicholson Baker's "Doublefold" and his tales of the unutterable destruction that occurred at San Francisco's library provide serious cautionary tales.  It doesn't serve to banish books in a precipitous experiment undertaken by people with questionable motives who lack library credentials.  Working for a hedge fund doesn't qualify you to curate mankind's store of knowledge.

NYPL President Tony Marx reads a physical copy of the New York Times, so do I, and that`s the way I read many books.  Physical media shouldn't be the exclusive preserve of a lucky privileged few.

    •    The Washington Post: Where are the books? Libraries under fire as they shift from print to digital,  By Michael S. Rosenwald, July 7, 2015.

"Some of the clashes have been heated. In New York, protesters outside the city's main branch have shouted: "Save the stacks! Save the stacks!"

* * * *

librarians are steering tight acquisition budgets to e-books, which are more expensive than print. . E-book spending has grown from 1 percent of library budgets to 7 percent, according to a Library Journal survey.

* * * *

library purists. . say the futurists are pushing budget-busting e-books when large swaths of society still want print, particularly as research emerges showing print provides a more immersive, less distracting reading experience.

They also cite sales data showing that e-reader and e-book sales have leveled off and argue that the next generation of library patrons still strongly prefers print."

    •    N+1 (N Plus One Magazine): Lions in Winter, (Parts One and Two), by Charles Petersen, March 7, 2012.

Until Congress acts, if it ever does, the best that Google will legally be able to provide when users request orphan books is “snippet view,”* the annoying feature that lets you search through a book and see a line or two whenever a particular word occurs, but nothing else . .  “Snippet view” is . . . . of little use to researchers without access to the book itself.   (*Even “Snippet View” is currently being challenged by the Authors Guild in court.. . . )

* * * *

But even if Congress were to act tomorrow. . . the availability of digitized books to the point where one could be confident of finding what one needed, in the way one can still be confident upon arriving at the New York Public Library, is still some years away. . . . probably closer to twenty.

* * * *
. . . . While the administration at the New York Public Library likes to pretend the renovation will not affect researchers, when pressed they insist the main building must be “democratized.” . . . .

More than anything, this rhetoric reveals the fundamentally anti-democratic worldview that has taken hold at the library. It is of a piece with what the new Masters of the Universe have accomplished in the public schools, where hedge funders have provided the lion’s share of the backing for privatization, and in the so-called reforms to our financial system, where technocrats meet behind closed doors to decide what will be best for the rest of us.. .

   •      New York Times: The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far From Dead, by  Alexandra Alter, September 22, 2015. 

"It's a very simple thing; only books that are on the shelves can be sold," Mr. Dohle [Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House] said.

[Citizens Defending Libraries comment: We would add that only books on the shelves of a library can be borrowed by visiting patrons.  That is obviously becoming more of a challenge.]

    •      Noticing New York: Internet Guru Clay Shirky Speaking At Brooklyn Heights Association Annual Meeting Says We Need Libraries Because Of Holes In The Internet, by Michael D. D. White, March 5, 2014. 

. . .Tim Wu and Lewis Hyde, two names . .  that Mr. Shirky would have to know, who both write about the impoverishment of the public sphere, Wu writing about how it occurs when media industries inevitably trend toward monopoly and Hyde talking about the disappearance of the public commons through increasingly privatizated ownership of the ideas and information we consume. . .

    •      Citizens Defending Libraries: Testimony By Citizens Defending Libraries At June 27, 2013 State Assembly Committee Hearing On Selling New York City Libraries, June 27, 2013, (see also similar testimony before the New York City Council September 30, 2013 and March 11, 2014. 

Dear Committee:
         
While many of us are well aware that these proposed library sell-offs represent real estate deals that privatize publicly-owned assets there is another associated concern about privatization that should not be overlooked.  Library officials talking about getting rid of books are at the same time discussing digitizing and relying on digital content sometime in the future even if their plans are not yet ready for prime time).

But we must be wary that there are many who see the digitized future in terms of an increasingly privatized future where corporations pushing for various plans expect to make a lot of money
by controlling digitized information, in many cases, by charging the public for what's already owned by the public in public collections that are being put out of reach.

Many consider that this was the principal motivation behind the sickening 1995 hollowing-out of the San Francisco Public Library collections, which was underwritten with big-ticket contributions from telecoms and Silicon Valley.

Digital activist Aaron Swartz warned about this disturbing trend:

    The world’s entire scientific ... heritage ... is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations....The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.

In the future we may expect that after the libraries have contracted out to privatize content we will be charged exorbitantly high fees for what was once publicly owned.  The further irony in all of this is that much of the transcription and other work to create digitally available content may have been crowd sourced so that the public will be charged for what it once freely owned and for the result of its own freely contributed work product and intensive labor creating privatized content.

Sincerely,

Citizens Defending Libraries

   •      Library Journal: ALA vs NSA: Reflecting on Libraries and Social Media, by Woody Evans, June 14, 2013. 

. . . Edward Snowden is drawing lots of attention at the moment. . . .  but here I'd like to consider something that happened way back in the last decade. Forget Snowden for a minute.

Remember with me a time when librarians were freshly militant and radical. Remember January 2002, when, just a few months after the attacks we suffered, the ALA proposed this response to the USA PATRIOT Act. [Includes "RESOLVED, That the American Library Association urges librarians everywhere to defend and support user privacy and free and open access to knowledge and information."] A year later, the proposed resolution would be adopted by the ALA Council, and library staff have been since emboldened to take such "radical" steps as to fail to keep patron book checkout records.

Edward Snowden remembered, like the militant librarians defending privacy and the 4th Amendment that came before him, that the government is for the people. But PRISM represents the kind of program that reminds us: government is not by the people any longer.  . . .

 . . . we could start by finding something to praise in Edward Snowden's decision. . . .  he, like us librarians, took a stand for patron privacy-for citizen privacy. Snowden's action give us a moment to ask some overdue questions.

If a citizen's data really is hers, shouldn't she get to say who sees it?  . . 

No matter how "radical" a librarian you may or may not have become over the last 12 years, you know the answer by now.

A comment posted on the article:

A few weeks ago, I attempted to use my county library's online book reservation system to reserve the latest Percy Jackson book for my daughter, and was more than a little horrified to see this:

"The feature you have selected is associated with personal data in your patron account. Such data may be accessed by law enforcement personnel without your consent. Do you wish to continue?" 

   •      BuzzFeedNews: Publishers Know You Didn't Finish "The Goldfinch" - Here's What That Means For The Future Of Books- The publishing industry's uneasy embrace of Netflix-style analytics, by Joseph Bernstein, January. 21, 2015.

How did [Book publisher] Kobo know this? Like every e-reader and reading-app maker today, the company, a subsidiary of the Japanese e-commerce titan Rakuten, has access to a comprehensive suite of data about the reading behavior of its users. In a white paper titled "Publishing in the Era of Big Data" and released this fall, the company announced that "with the onset of digital reading . it is now possible to know how a customer engages with the book itself - what books were left unopened, which were read to the very last word and how quickly." In other words, if you read books digitally, the people who serve you those books more than likely know just what kind of reader you are, and just how little effort you made with Infinite Jest.

* * *

Amazon and Apple - that know the most about how you read are ferociously silent about that knowledge. Both Apple and Amazon declined to comment for this piece.

    •      The Guardian: Big e-reader is watching you, by Alison Flood, July 4, 2012. 

. . . Would Orwell have been amused or disturbed by the development that Big Brother now knows exactly how long it takes readers to finish his novel, which parts they might have highlighted, and what they went on to pick up next?

Because your ebook, as a recent article in the Wall Street Journal put it, is now reading you right back.

* * * *

Back to Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four, says Amazon, is the 608th most-highlighted book it sells. "'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'" has been marked by 349 Kindle users, while "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever" has been highlighted by 195. What would George have said?

        •      Center For An Urban Future: Report -Branches of Opportunity, January 2013 (emphasis supplied).

. . .  libraries could learn a lot from the Apple Store or, indeed, from many other private sector retailers and service providers. . . .Library websites attract millions of visitors a month. If they could perfect an online browsing environment with recommendations and interactive capabilities, libraries could sell advertisements and user data like any other digital media company. Knowing how a user landed on a particular book, for example, could be extremely valuable to publishers.

   •      New York Times: Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle, by Brad Stone, July 17, 2009. 

In George Orwell's "1984," government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the "memory hole."

On Friday, it was "1984" and another Orwell book, "Animal Farm," that were dropped down the memory hole - by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

* * * *

Of all the books to recall," said Charles Slater, an executive with a sheet-music retailer in Philadelphia . . . "I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased."

* * * *

Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand . .

     •      New York Times: How to Survive the Next Wave of Technology Extinction, by Farhad Manjoo, February 12, 2014. 

If you own a Nook, the fate of your books may now be up in the air. Sorry, you bet on the wrong horse.

The Nook's fate isn't unusual these days. Technologies have always gone belly up, but tech extinctions may become even more common over the next few years.

     •      On The Media: A Wish List for Obama, December 23, 2016

BOB GARFIELD:  What are you most worried is going to disappear in a Trump administration?

Frankly, we have no idea [what “is going to disappear in a Trump administration”] This upcoming administration is very aware of the power of the Internet and how it can be manipulated, how you can go and push things out in the middle of the night and use the journalist system in ways that are really pretty blatant. So let's at least keep a record of it.

* * *
The history of libraries is a history of loss. Libraries are burned. That's what happened in the Library of Alexandria. It will be what happens to us. I just don't know when. So let's design for it. Let's go and make copies in other places. Let's make sure people want universal access to all knowledge, that they want education based on facts. Let's go and make sure that there is an environment that supports libraries. That's the only way that, in the long term, we're going to survive, and the copies that are maybe now unique at the Internet Archive will survive  [Audio used in our CDL YouTube video]

     •      National Notice: Snowden Revelations Considered: Is Your Library, Once Intended To Be A Protected Haven of Privacy, Spying on You?, By Michael D. D. White, March 8, 2015. 

During the McCarthy era there was also concern about what books were available in the libraries, how readily available certain books were and concern about the political leanings of librarians working in the libraries.

* * *

. . .  the surveillance state is interested in something else: The surveillance state wants to know what you think and for that reason the surveillance state believes that libraries should tell the government what you read.

Librarians in Connecticut were the first to successfully challenge the PATRIOT Act when the FBI, along with an accompanying perpetual gag order to keep its actions secret, demanded broadly that the Connecticut librarians turn over to the bureau library records concerning what their patrons were reading and their computer use.

* * *

Now consider this: Changes are being implemented at libraries, and the changes are particularly apparent in New York City, that would make the heroism of these librarians wanting to protect their patrons' privacy virtually meaningless except for its symbolism.

     •      Noticing New York: Snowden, Booz and the Dismantling of Libraries As We Know Them: Why Was A Private Government Spy Agency Hired to Take Apart New York's Most Important Libraries And Turn Them Into Something Else?, By Michael D. D. White, October 30, 2016.

“Booz Allen Hamilton is really an arm of the intelligence community.”. . . . with as Bloomberg Businessweek said, the "federal government as practically its sole client."  The government's surveillance work is now carried out predominantly through `private' spy organizations like Booz . .

. . .  the New York Public Library hired Booz Allen Hamilton to advise and help oversee a "radical overhaul at the NYPL . . “

 * * * *

If librarians were the first to successfully stand up and oppose the intelligence overreaching and if Booz Allen Hamilton "is really an arm of the intelligence community" involved with the federal government's "most controversial federal surveillance programs in recent years" then why was Booz Allen Hamilton hired to help reorganize the New York Public Library's most important libraries?

* * * *

Why was a top U.S. intelligence spy agency engaged for radical overhaul of libraries as we have traditionally known them?

For more about the related issue of surveillance infringing on libraries as zones of privacy and freedom of thought see our other Citizens Defending Libraries page:

     •      Citizens Defending Libraries: Articles About Library Privacy and Surveillance In Libraries

CONTACT: To contact Citizens Defending Libraries email Backpack362 (at) aol.com.You may also leave a comment with information in the comments section at the bottom of this page.

The first petition (gathered over 20,000 signatures, most of them online- available at signon.org with a background statement and can still be signed).   On June 16, Citizens Defending libraries issued a new updated petition that you can sign now:

Mayor de Blasio: Rescue Our Libraries from Developer Destruction

You can also paste the following url into your browser.

http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/mayor-de-blasio-rescue-2?source=s.tw&r_by=5895137