Do Physical Digital Libraries Make Sense?

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Bexar County in Texas will be home to one of the world’s first digital libraries which contains just e-readers and lots of electronic editions of books. The interesting idea here is the library is going digital but still needs $1.5 million to start up. Moreover, it believes the ongoing costs to maintain the library will be lower than one which contains traditional books.

The natural question worth asking is, are libraries missing the bigger picture? Do we actually need them anymore – at least in the physical sense? As tablet costs are plummeting and smartphones are ubiquitous – even among the world’s poor, why are we forcing people to go to libraries?

Sure, many libraries allow you to access books virtually from the Internet but not all libraries have all books. The challenge then becomes belonging to many libraries in order to have access to all the books you may want to read.

The opportunity of course is to have a single global library in the same way we have a single global Amazon. The only drawback of course would be the absence of librarians but even centralizing this task and accessing them virtually would be far more cost-effective.

As cities, states and global governments seek to reduce their costs due to spiraling debt which has hurt their economies, one area to look to boost productivity and efficiency is the library. If a plan can be implemented correctly, all of the humanity will have increased access to the world’s books.

Hopefully, this is an initiative which will take place very soon because sooner or later, everyone is bound to start asking, do physical digital libraries make sense to invest in?

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