My problem on Save Our Libraries Day was deciding which local library to try to save. The one 500 yards down one side of the hill, or the one 500 yards the other way? The one 15 minutes gentle saunter south, or the award-winning, architect special 15 minutes east? Or maybe the closest one, 300 yards away (which I don't usually count, because it's just over the borough boundary)? But since none of the five libraries within a one mile radius seemed to be staging a protest – no Tony Benn, no Billy Bragg – on the digital map of national outrage, I stayed at home and read my Guardian instead.
Top of page one of the Guardian: an audio book offer, Never Let Me Go – "normal price £19.69, but now download Ishiguro's bestseller free of charge". And on page 11 there's a story about Tim Waterstone trying one more time to buy his eponymous bookshops back from HMV. They've lost £9.9m in the last six months. They're the last big high street book presence left in the land (with Dillons and Borders gone). They're squeezed between the internet and a Sainsbury's shelf. But what's the point in forgetting that squeeze?
My best friend hasn't been near a library or bookshop for weeks: not since the whole of Trollope came downloaded free on a Christmas Kindle. iPads, hot cakes around the globe, add hundreds of thousands more titles at nil extra cost. You have to have a tablet, smartphone or laptop to access the half-free New York Times, to be sure; but, if you do, you can read how ebooks have spurted to 25% of all HarperCollins sales to young adults – up from only 6% this time last year. "Teen fiction is getting to be hot, hot, hot", they say. Kindles and Nooks are the latest device of educational choice. American schools are teaching on e-readers now. Parents have taken the hint. And reading – with Narnia and all the classics free – is suddenly something that children do, and talk enthusiastically about. It's the fashionable thing.
So, for a moment, put angst and anger to one side. We know that the digital revolution keeps pounding along. We know that EMI like HMV, is a music business changed beyond recognition, that tax returns and bank deposits are migrating online, that Google is Murdoch's real challenger, that Amazon and eBay are the real masters of the retail world. We read about the increasing predicament of newspapers. And yet we seem bizarrely unready to take the next imaginative leap. Where's nurse to hold on to?
Nobody, setting up such public provision now, would dream of building and stocking conventional libraries the length and breadth of the land (least of all in clusters of five). "As pensioners, do we really need computers?" asked a 75-year-old and 86-year-old in Saturday's Guardian. Yes, said a librarian, who "spends a lot of my time teaching people of all ages" the internet. Yes, said a bed-ridden 69-year-old, who orders her books on an Apple. Yes, said a 40-year-old from Cumbria because "you probably can't imagine how little the younger generation use their local libraries". And the point, however unwelcome, is that time and infinite possibilities are passing Andrew Carnegie's legacy by. We can't embrace something fresh without leaving older ways behind.
There are sensible transitions to all this, to be sure: councils winnowing, not slashing and burning. Many hundreds of libraries will remain for years. If the problem is computer access in an era of universal broadband, we might subsidise cheap access centres in coffee bars or schools, public-private partnerships. We might target green spending at reusable, recyclable e-readers rather than books. We might try to have one big society idea that works. But it's not just a question of cash: it's a question of change and simple enthusiasm.
Of course you can irate about some of the cuts: swimming baths closed, care homes neglected, meals without wheels. But there are too many protests that don't make sense. We don't, apparently, want to let go of the old range of BBC World Service foreign language broadcasts, even though nobody listens to them on short wave any longer. We want, apparently, to restore old regimes on privacy (and contempt of court) in the age of Wikileaks. And we're easy meat for a shhh-in started by something called Library Workers for a Brighter Future.
But innately conservative concepts and brighter futures don't match. Never Let Me Go for free? That's one small example of the mutualised, connected, brave new world this paper constantly propounds. And, cuts or no cuts, some things have to go if you want to make room for them.
