Digital Libraries are Like Love
By Mark W.F. Condon, Unite for Literacy vice president
As we all know, regular libraries are places where one goes to borrow books. The books we check out are ours for a couple of weeks or so. Then we take borrowed books back so others can have their time with them, during which they can also benefit from the joyful stories and information those books contain.
If we want books for ourselves on a more permanent basis, we tend to go to a bookstore to buy what we want. There also are some fabulous literary treasures to be found at garage or yard sales. And we may be gifted with a special title or two.
These ways of acquiring books are wonderful, because the desired outcome is to have books present in our homes. That is important because research shows books in a home elevate the sophistication of a family’s everyday conversation and the language spoken by the family.
Being a language guy, I am all for having a home library that contains lots of books of all kinds—whether borrowed or owned. We have an ever-shifting collection of at least 1,000 in our house. We are constantly checking out or buying more, recommending good reads, and lending or giving others away to friends or the library.
Another wonderful way to acquire books is through digital media. The Internet contains a couple of varieties of online libraries—those affiliated with brick-and-mortar lending libraries where you borrow e-books and other e-media for a specified period, and those that just say, “HERE! Have a book. It is yours for free, forever!” The Unite for Literacy library is one example of the latter, as is the International Children’s Digital Library.
A free, digital book, like love, is inexhaustible. The books are never checked out as such, so they are always available for other library visitors. When one acquires a book in this way, we have not borrowed the book exactly, because it is always there on our digital bookshelves, just as if it were ours. While it cannot be said that we own digital copies, we can pull them out of our pockets anytime via a smart phone or tablet and read/research to our hearts’ content without keeping anyone else in the world from doing the very same thing with the very same book at the very same time.
Like love, which is utterly fulfilling and limitless, there is no downside to digital libraries and to the books they freely provide for us all.