This time I am writing about books. As a son of a librarian, I can tell that not all libraries are the same (although many smell the same). I have already told you once about the Robarts library. They have there books in the many languages spoken in Toronto, including Chinese and even Hebrew. It is so huge, that the weight of the books affected the stability of the building, since the engineers forgot take the weight of the books into account. Sounds familiar? If I remember correctly, the same story happened with the new huge libraries in Paris and Alexandria. These things happen because engineers think books contain only words, and words are weightless.
Besides university libraries, the Toronto public library has 98 branches and over 11 million items. When I entered the central branch, I wasn't sure whether it is a library or a spaceship. Everything is free for city residents, and they also loan music CDs. The music collection is smaller than what you find in a large music store, but still bigger than what you can listen to. So why do people buy books and CDs if they can loan them for free? They have a desire to own things (somehow this phenomenon doesn't occur with software).
Motivated by this desire, I once I saw a sign "over three million titles in stock" and went into a three stories store. One meter from the entrance, on a small white table there was a Luxor-size pyramid made of yellow Harry Potter bricks. If that's what you came for, you can pick, pay and leave. I didn't find what I was looking for. Observing that some titles had several copies, a quick counting argument showed that something was wrong. Where are the three million titles? Then I noticed pc's scattered all over the place to help people search. In fact, the workers in the store don't remember all the books and their locations, and use the computers themselves. However, most books were not physically in the store. You can order them from within the store the same way you can order from the store's web site. The result is that at the library you can read books but can't buy them, while at the store you can buy but can't take a look inside.
When there are so many books, new books have to be promoted. This week I went to the promotion of Jane Jacobs' new book "Dark Age Ahead". She is an 88 years old author. In 1961 she published her famous book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (no, I didn't even saw the movie). She writes about cultural and urban problems in modern society. The thesis of her new book is that the modern society shows symptoms of "mass amnesia" to important things in its basis. The event at the university was over four hours long, with invited distinguished speakers (some couldn't resist telling George Bush jokes which are similar to jokes about you know who in Israel). First speaker was Martin Wolf, a chief economist from the Financial Times, whose recent book is called "Why globalization works". Second was Robert Lucas, an economist from Chicago who won a Nobel Prize. He displayed a graph showing that in the last 200 years production grew much faster than population and in the last 50 years it started to grow exponentially in the third world as well. No dark age and no watermelon. Then started the offensive: Allan Jacobs, a city planner from Berkeley, claimed that modern cities are not designed for humans. Henry Mintzberg, who was promoting his book "Managers, not MBA's", said that GDP means nothing if everything else is sacrificed. And there was a theologist and a philosopher saying that intellectual integrity and peoples' connection with nature are declining. It took me some time to realize why the debate was so passionate (in Canadian standards). Here issues as communities, government malfunctions, over standardization and industrialization, urban planning and environmental issues are essentially their politics, with their camps, ideologists and books.
