Nowadays more and more people enjoy libraries in their palms through their smartphones or other electronic devices. As a consequence, there is an ongoing controversy on whether the public libraries are useless. I accept that the public libraries can be more unefficient than those services online, but I claim that the public libraries should be maintained.
On one hand, public libraries are inefficient in this digitalised society. Today, E-BOOKS are much more convenient and therefore much more popular. By using E-BOOKs instead of paper books, it’s easier to find specific content and we can even scrap them right away if we want. For example, almost all the academic papers are now in PDF and uploaded online. So it is more efficient to use E-BOOKs rather than those obsolete paper books. In addition, books in public libraries are under the risk of being torn. In some harsh conditions, old papers easily get dried and as a result they are dissolved into powder. A Japanese library was responsible for these kinds of problems many years before, and it eventually led to the closure of the library. As time goes by, more and more books will be torn in the library.
On the other hand, public libraries are like treasure boxes in this zero-paper society. In public libraries, we can find many old, precious books. Public libraries driven by the government usually own some papers related to the history of the city or the country they are located. There are many historical documents such as the first newspaper of Korea in the Public library of Seoul. These precious ‘treasures’ have nowhere to go, but have to stay in public libraries. Moreover, public libraries are also a good place for book lovers. Book lovers often like the sense of touching the paper, rather than that of the digital screen. My friends and I always used to visit the library, just to read the books with our hands, even though we all had our laptops with us. At this time in which private libraries tend to give up their jobs, public libraries are the only option for them.
In conclusion, it is not a clear cut issue since there are pros and cons on maintaing public libraries. Even though public libraries can be seen as an unefficient way, we should remember that there are values that the cutting-edge technologies cannot alternate.