Television and film are our libraries now. Our history books.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Our libraries are valuable centers of education, learning and enrichment for people of all ages. In recent years, libraries have taken on an increasingly important role. today's libraries are about much more than books.
When I was growing up, my house was filled with books. My mother was an educator, and my father was a history buff, so our home was a virtual library, covering every author from Beverly Cleary to James Michener.
We see ourselves as the world's digital library. That can be a lot more than books. We do want to expand to other types of content: sheet music, magazines, user-generated content.
What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book - a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.
I have an extensive library - every birthday when I was a kid my parents would ask what movie or book I wanted, so I have built up a big collection over the years.
Books were king, but now movies are king, and books are sort of ignored. So now there's no sense of a welcoming community where you live.
I would say television is a focus, and expanding our channel platform is a focus. As for buying libraries, when catalogs are going down in value, the answer is that it's all about price!
We're competing with everything: the beach, the mall, bookstores. Libraries are in a transition right now, caught between two forces, the old ways and technology. Libraries are under a lot of pressure to provide both.
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
Half of my library are old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don't get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got stuff right and most of the people who got stuff wrong.