Bibliocide

Imagine a future where reading is unknown, where sentence structure is continually punctuated with the words "like" and "you know," where memorization skills are reduced to knowing which button to push. Difficult to picture? Just look around; it's happening right now.

There can be little argument that the widespread availability of cheap, mass produced books and periodicals in the late nineteenth century led to the formation of the most literate populace the world has ever seen. In a culture without distractions, reading became a popular, cheap form of amusement which was fostered by the rise of the lending library. Free circulation of literature and texts truly made the public library the "people's university." Sure, plenty of people were reading crap like "Deadwood Dick," but at least they were reading.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century, where distractions in hand-held toys sap young minds of memorization powers, and libraries jettison books like a sinking ship throwing cargo overboard. Slowly young people are losing the ability to spend extended time periods perusing text, and the library has forsaken its primary purpose as a repository of those texts. So eager to appear "relevant," Biblioposers are touting eBooks as some sort of panacea that will reawaken the reading ethic among knuckle-dragging internet junkies. "Makerspaces" are taking the place of book shelving to allow library patrons the opportunity to hotwire garage door openers and produce effigies of Jennifer Lawrence on 3D printers. More and more floor space is devoted to screens and keyboards. As more Biblioposers pursue this tack, books become the victims, and have become the only thing with a spine in the whole library.

Archives must step forward to rescue the codex before it becomes extinct. Perhaps the future does not hold a populace that will resemble H. G. Wells' Eloi, or the drones who feature in the recent (and widely ignored) film Idiocracy. If so, they will be happy we rescued these under-appreciated artifacts; if not, at least they will be on hand to demonstrate to whatever alien race visits our planet a thousand years from now that a few brave souls tried to stem the tide of mass book murder. As it looks now, those brave souls will be archivists, and not librarians.