The world's first ever bookless library, the BiblioTech, was opened in 2013 in Bexar County, Texas, in the United States. It has 100 e-readers on loan and dozens of screens where the public can browse, study, and learn digital skills. The BiblioTech people don't like the term bookless, calling it instead a "digital library" — after all, it's filled with books, but in digital form. On its first day it had 1500 visitors.
As I understand it, it's a low-cost way of bringing books to a relatively poor district in the city and I applaud the library authorities for their efforts. But even for someone like me, who likes ebooks as much as paper books, I find it difficult to get my head around the idea of a library that houses no physical paper books whatsoever. Rightly or wrongly, the BiblioTech sounds a soulless place and reminds me of the bookless bookshop in Stanislaw Lem's book Return from the Stars (published in 1961!).
"...No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read by the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons – like lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation... . Thus all my purchases fitted into one pocket, though there must have been almost three hundred titles. My handful of crystal corn – my books."
I can't imagine holding an author event at a BiblioTech, or taking my granddaughter to story telling sessions there, or doing any of the other fun stuff our local libraries here in Edinburgh offer, from pole dancing lessons (!) to guerrilla operas. Okay, I've yet to go try the pole dancing classes but I was once lucky enough to catch a couple of opera singers perform a love song between the bookshelves. Fantastic!
