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Bezos should put his billions in public libraries

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Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries

#191

Post by zanny »

throwaway91111 wrote: post #161
speedboat wrote: post #159

Libraries are great. They should be funded with taxes by society, not the whims of charity. Raise taxes and on people like Bezos and Gates for the needs of society.

Ehh i don't think Bezos and Gates are the issue; it's that services (like libraries and public transit) are raising the value of nearby land. We should tax the beneficiaries; ie the landowners who today profit off tax payer investments.

Subsidized public roads also raise the value of land around which they are built, by giving you access to build something there.

It isn't a specific group of landowners. These sources of profit created by public infrastructure simply and generally make people rich, so you need to tax the rich.

I'm definitely not convinced disincentivizing people from living in walkable distance from libraries and public transit terminals is good. Sounds more like we need the opposite - incentivize walkability, build more libraries and public transit, and more generally incentivize higher density residential to cut down on the total amount of infrastructure needed, because our current scale is unsustainable with current tax models.

Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries

#192

Post by KGIII »

tracker1 wrote: post #188
KGIII wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meandering through the stacks with a pint in hand. That's either the best idea ever, or the worst idea ever. I'm not sure that it'd be very quiet, either.

I mean in terms of a larger gathering place of knowledge and ideas... Adding in meeting spaces and coffee/bar for beverages, etc would be a net positive imo. As for quiet, I'm not entirely sure that's always a positive either.

Oh... Hmm... It was much more awesome in my imagination. I'd even drink, just to make it more amusing. I've consumed alcohol in a library, but not openly.

This should be a thing. It might be a horrible thing, but it should exist.

Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries

#193

Post by zanny »

plandis wrote: post #163
jamesred wrote: post #142

The problem libraries solved, mostly access to information, has largely been monopolize by the internet. Most, including the third world impoverished, have access to the internet. Therefore the necessity of a library has been largely diminished and inevitably libraries will disappear. Complaining about libraries when people have no sanitation and access to clean tap water sounds largely like a first world problem, as…

Where is this place on the internet I can legally read the same books I can find in a library for free without paying?

Copyright law is crazy broken. IP in general at least needs dramatically reevaluated in the context of global information networks. Building more libraries to circumvent and subsidize an archaic model of corporate profit doesn't sound like a great use of societies resources.

Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries

#194

Post by malynda »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #134
stillsut wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me give you a hypothetical company IT department: while you are allowed to work there with any education background, only an MBA can be a manager. How do you think they would perform at IT tasks? Who runs libraries? People with Masters in Library Science. I expect severe budget and certification crises would come to any library that won't put a certified librarian in a head position. Or, I'm a working class guy a…

Every library I've been to in every town I've been to had Sunday hours. This includes New York City and its surrounding suburbs, Buffalo and its surrounding suburbs, several towns in Conneticut and several more in Toronto Canada and its surrounding suburbs. Even my university library has sunday hours.

Multiple libraries in small town Iowa do not have Sunday hours. Just to hazard a guess at the nearest place to have a library with Sunday hours probably requires a minimum 60 mile drive.

Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries

#195

Post by jgmjgm »

soperj wrote: post #60
stillsut wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me give you a hypothetical company IT department: while you are allowed to work there with any education background, only an MBA can be a manager. How do you think they would perform at IT tasks? Who runs libraries? People with Masters in Library Science. I expect severe budget and certification crises would come to any library that won't put a certified librarian in a head position. Or, I'm a working class guy a…

Libraries in Canada have the same stipulations, but are actually funded and are open all the time. Our downtown library is open 9am-9pm every day of the year.

I live in Canada in a mid-sized city and my library is closed on Sundays. Just as a poster above, it appears to be the case that the librarians negotiated a great deal for themselves. (Closed on Sundays during the summer, open on Sundays during the winter.)

However, it is a great library. No arguments there. It's a pain that its closed on Sundays just when kids want to use it most.

Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries

#196

Post by zanny »

saosebastiao wrote: post #75

Here's a better idea...and one that will ultimately benefit libraries as well: start buying out all the evil academic publishers, overhaul their technology, get rid of copyright assignment, and offer free access to anyone. Then do the same with legal records, although that is more of a legal problem than a money problem.

This is something I like. Correcting broken laws would be one of the more permanent contributions Bezos could make. We already know from the last ~30 years we cannot amass political capital to fix laws that create the broken journalistic and legal frameworks.

Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries

#197

Post by b4ux1t3 »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #189

As commenters have noted, libraries conflict with Amazon's business. How about instead mass produce cheap (low-profit or at-cost) kindles pre-loaded with a large amount of public domain and other free material (including wikipedia offline compressed database). And then bezos will still make money from some of them buying paid kindle books.

The thing is, libraries are more than just a place to put books. As still other commenters have put it, they are community centers, shelters-in-place, and work spaces.

The more personal overhead (like having to rent out a personal office if you work remotely, or having to pay for a computer and internet access) that people can offload o places like libraries, the more money they have to spend on Amazon.

Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries

#198

Post by b4ux1t3 »

jamesred wrote: post #142

The problem libraries solved, mostly access to information, has largely been monopolize by the internet. Most, including the third world impoverished, have access to the internet. Therefore the necessity of a library has been largely diminished and inevitably libraries will disappear. Complaining about libraries when people have no sanitation and access to clean tap water sounds largely like a first world problem, as…

Libraries are and have always been more than just about the books, and the information therein. They're also meeting places, community centers, and sometimes even double as soup kitchens. They are public forums. They are polling locations.

They're still, to this day, very important, and the fact that they're dying is a bad thing.

And to address your second paragraph, libraries have been, some more slowly than others, adapting with the times. My local library system has _three times_ the number of ebooks as they do print books. They provide access to things like EBSCOHost. Heck, the librarians in this system are even trained to help you find jobs.

In fact, all of this was addressed in the article.

Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries

#199

Post by Pieman103021 »

sol_remmy wrote: post #64
Pieman103021 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A library is free, even if all of the world's knowledge is online it would cost money to access in addition to paying for internet. The point of libraries is to remove any barrier to entry for knowledge. I can go to my library and get access to journals and articles I would have to pay for otherwise. It is not a huge waste of money, it is a great way to save. Taxes are paid into the library and as a result the commun…

> A library is free Those who aren't responsible for paying taxes always seem to think this

You are absolutely correct and this was my oversight. That being said, the net social benefit is still great and the parent commenter's opinion that they are not important because of the internet is a flawed argument. Still, you are correct.

Re: Bezos should put his billions in public libraries

#200

Post by Pieman103021 »

adventured wrote: post #52
Pieman103021 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A library is free, even if all of the world's knowledge is online it would cost money to access in addition to paying for internet. The point of libraries is to remove any barrier to entry for knowledge. I can go to my library and get access to journals and articles I would have to pay for otherwise. It is not a huge waste of money, it is a great way to save. Taxes are paid into the library and as a result the commun…

> A library is free, even if all of the world's knowledge is online it would cost money to access in addition to paying for internet. I wish that were true. It's not. Libraries cost money. Acquiring, storing, maintaining a book in a room, with climate control and a proper shelter, costs more than storing the same book digitally. Providing access to copies of a physical book, to just a million people spread across the…

You are 100% correct, that was an incorrect argument to make. I guess that was the whole point of the article too, so I really got that one wrong. It is important to recognize the incredible amount of money and social benefit going into and out of libraries, and I don't think they should be so quickly discounted just because it is 2017 and we have the internet.
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