Youth Talk

Each book is a brand new portal to a new thought, each page is a platform for intellectual contemplation and each word is a new feeling. Being an avid reader and book-lover, the digitalisation of books has troubled me on multiple occasions. I do know that this statement may make people feel that I bring along a fair share of irrationality in this approach but there is something beyond the transit into e-books that I find disturbing.

It is the question that: ‘If books have so easily become digitalised, will libraries too?’ It is not just the fact that we will lose a place to save our stacks of creativity and imagination, it is also the environment that a library has and continues to preserve.

I find myself stepping into a different mind-set when I step into a library. I assume the role of Indiana Jones on my individual yet shared hunt for imagination and information. Moreover, this sort of supportive atmosphere chisels us through the stems of development towards the bloom of perfection.

I believe the loss of libraries is no different from deforestation or polluting lakes. After all, here too, it’s humans chopping off the roots of our resources, our culture, the territory of our brains and possibilities of our future. Added to this is the already diminishing demand for books, probably because finding something out is so much easier by entering key terms into the Google search engine.

What we are also forgetting is that we are reducing the habit of learning by accident like we once used to stumble upon the wrong pages in encyclopaedias, dictionaries, other informative material or even story books, and pick that knowledge up subconsciously anyways.

I remember crying when I read about the books being burned in Pompeii, I remember sitting on the edge of the sofa and reading the Magic Treehouse books, making sure the books returned too with Jack and Annie and I have even walked through the library in Alexandria, all enchanted, as Bayek in Assassin’s Creed Origins.

Libraries are far more important than we think and I believe that digital libraries may, in time, cause the loss of sharing knowledge.