Will the Amazon Kindle Lending Library Mean the Death of the Physical Library?

COMMENTARY | Having done its part to put the brick and mortar bookstore on the ash heap of history, Amazon now proposes to help do the same to the public library. Kindle owners who are enrolled in the Amazon Prime program can now borrow e-books.

Amazon has several thousand books, including current and previous New York Times best sellers, in its electronic lending library that one can borrow and thus download onto one’s Kindle or the upcoming Kindle Fire tablet and read for free. Amazon states that one can borrow one book a month and that there are no due dates.

As a reader, I fully intend to make full use of this feature. But it will be with a hint of sadness, because yet another happy experience of my childhood will be something to be related to the kids that old Uncle Mark used to do when he was a kid, back before they had iPads.

I used to go with my mom to the local library and check out a bunch of books and then spend most of my spare time reading them. It was thus that I was introduced to Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, and all those others who took me to other worlds and other times and showed me great adventures. I also read a lot of history, vicariously marching with Julius Caesar and Ulysses Grant, visiting the courts of Elizabeth I or Richard the Lionheart, sailing with Columbus and James Cook, and traveling to places like Venice or Cairo long before I saw them in reality.

Of course now kids can do the same thing with a few taps of the touch screen, with no need to actually go to a physical place where books are stored, like artifacts in a great temple of learning and literature. There is something wonderful about a library, filled not just with pages bound with cardboard, but with worlds in miniature.

No doubt younger generations who will presently only read about physical libraries on their e-book readers will roll their eyes at the nostalgia expressed here. And truth to tell, I like having a library in the palm of my hand. But there is always a price for progress, which makes it bittersweet indeed.


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