Since Margate library has been improved and has the new status of a Thanet gateway book lending has dropped by 40%, I can’t imagine a greater cultural disaster could happen to a town than to have its only bookshop closing and borrowing from the library nearly halved.Possibly the Nazi book burnings of WW2 caused this level of drop in reading, but I would doubt it, certainly having council desks in the library is an unmitigated disaster for the town.
TDC and KCC need to understand that the primary purpose of a library is to make books freely available to the population, and to do to this it is necessary to have an environment that one can concentrate enough to read in.
It is time for a review of the function of libraries, I can see a good case for publicly funding the free availability of books, however is there a case for publicly funding the loan of DVDs which is the equivalent to publicly funding cinemas, or internet cafés, what do you think?
