A library without books is like a book without pages

Steven Tucker

January 06, 2025 5 Reactions

Brave New World – same as the old one

I don’t know about you, but my hometown doesn’t have its own local library any more. It’s now called a “Learning Resource Centre”, which, translated, means a lot of the books have been burned and replaced with computers. Fair enough, to an extent. Unlike buying a handful of cheap kids’ books, computers are indeed expensive, and providing access to them for the poor is a perfectly noble aim. The trouble comes when digitalisation goes too far.

In Aldous Huxley’s great 1932 sci-fi novel Brave New World, there is a scene set in some “Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms”, in which babies are psychologically programmed to grow up hating books. Bright, appealing picture-books are laid out across the floor in front of a class of babies, who naturally crawl across to see what they are. The texts are wired up to the mains, however, and as soon as the infants touch them, they get a painful electric shock. Naturally, a life-long aversion is then formed. I feel that all responsible British parents should repeat this same procedure with copies of The Guardian.  

Contemporary Western librarians seem accidentally to have hit upon an alternative, reverse-mirror-image method of putting kids off books for life. By seeking, quite benignly, to make reading a pleasurable experience for small children by jazzing it all up endlessly with an array of interactive bells and whistles, they inadvertently only render the ordinary act of reading quietly by oneself seem incredibly boring by comparison. “Come to the library for the fun and games, stay to read the books!” is the basic idea, but instead it only ends up becoming “Come to the library for the fun and games, and then go back home to play some more!”

The concept of “gamification” is now widespread. The basic idea is to “nudge” people into doing something desirable by exploiting our innate wish to have idle fun at all times; most famously, toilet-cleaners have painted fake flies and bluebottles onto public urinals as potential “targets” for men to aim at.

For simple tasks like micturation, this theory often works admirably. But what about when it comes to more complex matters, like encouraging children to want to know how to read?  

Losing the plot

The gamification of public libraries is now big business worldwide. I found a whole 2022 academic paper, “Investigating the role of gamification in public libraries’ literacy-centred youth programming”, about the subject. Here, it is shown how, in many Western libraries, special, expensively-made kids’ sections have of late been installed, where “closed off corners in the basement that once housed the children’s stacks [of books] have been replaced with state-of-the-art, multi-level exploration zones, some complete with Willie Wonka-type installations, theatrical performances, and even [giant model] dinosaurs.”

Great! But … doesn’t that just mean you’ve replaced most of the books with miniature theme-park attractions instead?

The term “gamification” was coined in 2002 by designer Nick Pelling, to cover his then-novel idea of applying the basic mechanics of videogaming to various off-screen spheres in order to make them seem more appealing and user-friendly. For example, gamers might repeatedly attempt to beat the same difficult end-of-level boss, again and again, thereby to gain access to a new power for their character, as in Nintendo’s highly popular Metroid and Zeldagames.

Applied to reading, this might mean librarians issuing infants with stickers or badges every time they figuratively “defeat the boss” likewise by successfully managing to finish reading a series of ever-more challenging picture-books. This particular subset of gamification theory makes perfect sense, and many libraries now follow its basic model. Some even offer free books as prizes for those small visitors who successfully complete the reading-based “boss challenges” set for them.

But, as so often, an initial good idea can end up being taken too far. When the entire children’s section of your local library becomes transformed into little more than a soft-play area purely to entice the kids inside like a gingerbread house in one of those illustrated fairytale books they will soon no longer want to read, then how is it even still a library any more at all?

Here’s a photographic example of one of the many exciting attractions you can now find in a typical kid-friendly public library, according to the paper’s authors:  

I have no idea what the hell it actually is, but it certainly isn’t a bookshelf, is it? And here is a very telling illustration of what library-based adult-led group reading sessions once used to look like in the bad old days of black-and-white, and what they increasingly tend to look like now, in our laudably progressive age of glorious Technicolor:

How do the activities in that second image there even represent “reading” at all? It is blatantly just a glorified adult child-minder helping a three-year-old splash about with toy rubber dinosaurs in a paddling-pool.

But, according to the paper, this particular form of gamification via “guided movement” in programmes with names like “Storytime Yoga” and “Rock and Read” is something to be celebrated: “If there was one common thread between the storytimes offered by libraries in this survey, it’s that sitting quietly with your hands under your legs listening to someone prattle on is a thing of the past. In its place are immersive, playful, and hands-on experiences that places the learner, not the teacher, at the centre of the learning process.”

As an initial, bait-luring means to an end, fine. But when books are thrown out of libraries to make way for toy dinosaurs and paddling-pools, then this sort of thing becomes the end in itself, and we’re right back in Brave New World‘s Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms again, but back-to-front. The truly alarming thing, though, is that such literally infantile phenomena are no longer confined solely to the libraries of children – adult libraries too are now becoming gamified in their turn.

The Borrowers – but not of any books

The Los Angeles Public Library System has noticed a disturbing new phenomenon – not only fewer and fewer children, but fewer and fewer grown-ups, are coming through their doors to peruse the shelves for texts. Their solution? To get them to come in and comb the shelves looking for a race of hitherto-unknown bookspace-dwelling ultra-midgets instead, like those once depicted on the pages of classic kids’ novel The Borrowers. Here’s a glowing write-up from the Los Angeles Times:

“Imagine that your local public library is inhabited by an undiscovered race of tiny people. They’ve hidden themselves in the racks, tucked behind books and magazines, amidst history and fiction, new media and old. If you’re lucky, you might spy them — or at least their tiny homes, which are filled with minuscule beds, microscopic stools, itty-bitty flowers and furniture fashioned out of found objects such as board game pieces and one-use spice bottles. And these little folks need help. You have been cast as a ‘Teeny Tiny Beings Residential Specialist’, charged with finding the micro-humans new homes. It appears the librarians — giants, like us, at least to the microscopic persons — have been moving things around. Welcome to the Bureau of Nooks and Crannies, a new exploration-focused, play-inspired experience found inside the Lincoln Heights branch of the Los Angeles Public Library system.”

Just to repeat: this isn’t primarily aimed a children, but at adults.

It is all the work of an expert consultant named Andy Crocker, “an LA-based artist who specialises in theatrical, experience-driven entertainment, having previously collaborated with the likes of Walt Disney Imagineering and Cedar Fairs theme-parks.” In other words, Andy has literally transformed LA’s public libraries from places of learning and into actual theme-parks instead, following a supposed philosophy of “guided meditation through play”.

Each participating local library (probably all of them, I doubt they get a say) has a different novelty theme. At LA’s Atwater Village Library, the place has become akin to the haunted library in the original 1984 version of Ghostbusters, where, in the words of one participating journalist: “Guests at the library today have been instructed to fantasise that they are ghosts who treat books as entryways for thoughtful, personal reflections. We are instructed to shut our eyes and trace a finger along a shelf before opening a random book. Whatever we find on that page carries more meaning if you’re pretending to be a ghost, apparently.”

What the hell is the point of all this? In Crocker’s view, “Kids don’t need imagination assistance. Adults do.” Why don’t they just sit down and read a good book, then? That’s what they’re there for!

Time to shelve these ideas

The big question is: does any of this stuff actually work? Apparently not. As long ago as 2009, figures demonstratedthat, after UK libraries had thrown out huge amounts of their old book-stock and installed rows upon rows of computers for patrons to use instead, the number of books lent out from them had plummeted by half in under 15 years. Yet, simultaneously, the number of Internet-use sessions in libraries was up by 19 percent over the same period.

This, said the UK Government’s Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, was an excellent thing: “The library service is heeding our advice by becoming more relevant, adapting to the changing needs of its users, and meeting the challenge to supply information in the most suitable way.”

A spokesman from the Civitas think-tank was more sceptical, however, issuing a dissenting statement as follows: “Unfortunately the public library system seems to have moved from education to entertainment and as a result we are becoming increasingly illiterate as a nation.”

Libraries are progressively now being redefined as something other than libraries, merely retaining the same old name, for sake of covering the fact up. Meanwhile, if you happen to be a librarian yourself and wish to pulp all your boring old books and gamify your library instead accordingly, here’s a handy practical guide to help you do so:

Ironically, it comes in the form of a printed book.

Has your local library burned its books? 

Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest, “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science”, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, was released in 2023.

Image credit: Bigstock