In the WaPo, a librarian laments that books are a hard sell, and futility tries to save them:

But as I moved along in my library science program, I found that books weren’t really our focus. Information management, database networking and research tools claimed the largest share of the curriculum. In other words, literacy today is defined less by how English departments or a librarian might teach Wordsworth or Faulkner than by how we find our way through the digital forest of information overload.

As I mentioned in my earlier post about libraries, information searches are usually for more specific information than a book offers.  Finding that specific information is tough, and a book surrounds it with hundreds of pages of noise that are difficult to search through.  Successful librarians, or information specialists, are the ones who are recognizing this and adapting.  They see their profession holistically.  Unfortunately, too many nostalgic Luddites are still wandering around library science programs trying to prolong and accentuate their love affair with the physical book.

Categories: Books, Education, Information Economics, Libraries, Marketing