Neil Gaiman On Why Libraries Are the Gates to the Future

Neil Gaiman spoke Monday for the Reading Agency's annual lecture series. His talk centered on the importance of libraries and of reading for pleasure. His talk was transcribed and posted by The Guardian. Quoting: "Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end that's a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. ... The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children's books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. ... It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you."

Books perhaps...

[Karmashock]

Traditional libraries are not the future. The dead tree archives will here after be a curiosity.

That said, repositories of books and stories etc will remain very important. They will however be increasingly a digital experience.

Re:books are on computers now

[Instantlemming]

You go to a library to look for books.
You go onto the internet to look for .... Oooh shiny thing

A dead tree book beats a text on a monitor, and even e-ink readers. A book you can take with you and doesn't need power (although you do need a light source).
An e-reader is great (use it myself a lot), but for quickly flipping back to a certain bit to check/read it again, a paper book wins hands down.

I found more interesting books/authors by browsing the books on the bookshelves in a library than online.

Re:Books perhaps...

[Gr8Apes]

While digital formats certainly beat books for a whole host of reasons, pleasure reading is not among them. There's something about sitting down with a book that just doesn't work as well with a digital device, at least not yet. Same with a newspaper - I get more info in 10s with a newspaper than I do on a news website. I can scan the much larger format much faster and focus on what interests me vs having to click multiple links on news websites. I've actually considered going back to getting a paper, it's still up in the air.