Libraries exist for the public.
Amazon exists to maximize profits.
This past weekend, Forbes published and then took down a controversial article. “This article was outside of this contributor’s specific area of expertise, and has since been removed,” said Forbes, after significant backlash. The article in question? An op-ed arguing that libraries are a waste of taxpayer money and should be replaced by Amazon stores.
Libraries do seem to be outside of author Panos Mourdoukoutas’s areas of expertise; he’s a professor who specializes in world economy. (A popular tweet suggested that Mourdoukoutas paid for the privilege to be published on Forbes, though it turned out to be an error; he’s a paid blogger for Forbes.) But both the article itself and the backlash against it point to a profound anxiety centered on libraries and the question of whether they should be up for debate.
If we take it as read that public libraries exist and are good and important, then we’re saying that the services they provide are basic rights that it is our government’s responsibility to safeguard. If we suggest that libraries shouldn’t exist — that they’re a waste — then we call into question the rights that they protect.
Enter Mourdoukoutas’s now-deleted op-ed, whose central thrust was that the roles traditionally performed by libraries — lending books, of course, but also serving as community gathering places — are now performed better by “third places” like Starbucks and bookstore-cafes. And since Amazon’s brick-and-mortar bookstores are equipped with easy access to the comprehensive Amazon database of books around the world, the article concluded, Amazon bookstore-cafes are superior to libraries.
Many people might read this argument and protest, “But I must pay for books at Amazon! At a public library, I may borrow for free!” Mourdoukoutas had a comeback. “Let me clarify something,” he wrote on Twitter. “Local libraries aren’t free. Home owners must pay a local library tax. My bill is $495/year.”
It is true that libraries are partially funded by property tax dollars, in much the same way that taxpayers fund the other public services that we as a society have decided are vital to the public good, like schools and fire departments and parks and roadworks. I may not have children who attend school, but I still pay tax dollars toward the public school system, because we have agreed that when all children are educated, it’s good for the whole country.
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