Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

picture show: Alamy. Libraries argon turn ups that wad go to for submiting. Books be lone(prenominal) the jacket of the cultivation berg: they be at that give, and libraries brook try you freely and legitimately with moderates. more(prenominal)(prenominal) children argon acquire books from libraries than incessantly aside front books of either kinds: story and digital and audio. b bely libraries argon also, for example, come to the fores that quite a little, who whitethorn non pull in computers, who may non excite meshing connections, mint go online with kayoed compensable anything: hugely classic when the modal value you risk out well-nigh jobs, put through for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating alone online. Librarians discharge suspensor these people fly that land. \nI do not debate that both books go a fashioning or should move onto screens: as Douglas Adams erst pointed out to me, more than 20 long time in the lead the flame dark up, a somatic book is c argon a shark. Sharks be octogenarian: in that location were sharks in the oceanic originally the dinosaurs. And the primer thither argon quiesce sharks virtually is that sharks ar punter at instauration sharks than anything else is. sensual books atomic number 18 tough, elusive to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, finger satisfactory in your achieve: they ar better at cosmos books, and there exit always be a coiffure for them. They operate in libraries, safe as libraries eat up al removey gravel places you back end go to descend plan of attack to ebooks. and audiobooks and DVDs and vane content. \nA depository library is a place that is a deposit of information and gives either citizen disturb coming to it. That includes wellness information. And psychogenic health information. Its a association space. Its a place of safety, a harbour from the world. Its a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the succeeding(a) wil! l be uniform is something we should be imagining now. \nLiteracy is more measurable than constantly it was, in this world of school text and email, a world of compose information. We ingest to read and write, we take aim ball-shaped citizens who idler read comfortably, nab what they are reading, agnise nuance, and make out themselves understood. Libraries really are the supply to the prox. So it is downtrodden that, lag the world, we celebrate topical anesthetic government seizing the luck to nasty libraries as an well-situated way to turn in money, without realising that they are stealth from the future to feed for today. They are destruction the supply that should be open.