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Bookstores vs. Libraries?

© Mindy Rhiger

It’s Saturday evening and you decide you want to check out that latest novel by your favorite author. Your local public library isn’t open, so you drive to the neighborhood Barnes & Noble, where you browse for a while then sit down with a cup of coffee to read the book before you buy it. This is not an isolated scenario, and libraries do know that.

Bookstores have been referred to as better libraries by many booklovers because of their conveniences, and libraries have, seemingly, been slow to change. Evening and weekend hours, comfortable seating, and coffee shops are few and far between in libraries and almost ubiquitous in bookstores. Some libraries have felt the pressure more than others to conform to the booklovers’ new standards. Many libraries that are located in the suburbs that are surrounded by book superstores have included coffee shops in their buildings, but most are still not allowing the coffee near the books. It seems as though the coffee shop is as far as most libraries are willing to go in the war for booklovers’ undying devotion.

One main problem is that this issue is viewed as an either/or situation: bookstore people can’t use the library and library people can’t use the bookstore. This is absolutely not true, not to mention, a crazy idea. Libraries and bookstores serve different functions in the community. Bookstores stock popular books (probably music and videos too) that are selected in order to make a profit for the company. Libraries are community organizations that strive to put together a diverse collection of goods that will meet the information needs of the user group it serves. One would go to a library to do research or to find materials that bookstores no longer carry because of age or lack of immediate profitability. Many library lovers and librarians frequent bookstores for the chance to read books they do not own in a comfortable chair while drinking coffee, and they do not feel like they are betraying the library in any way.

Steve Coffman published a controversial article in American Libraries in 1997 entitled “What if you ran your library like a bookstore?,” in which he showed that the bookstores cost less to run than libraries. This article did not sit well with librarians who feel that their education and training enables them to give added value to their services that justifies their salaries, but Coffman writes that library patrons do not agree. He contends that library patrons do not care about the reference and cataloging services that librarians provide, but that people just want the books and a comfortable place to read them.

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