A few recent articles have persuaded me to consider the rise of freely distributed electronic media, most specifically books. With the spread in popularity of sites like Project Gutenberg and Google Books, we often hear horror stories of entire collections of books succumbing to a militia of scanners, condemned to be pinned, naked, to the Internet, where they will be permanently visible and available sans charge. Publishers and authors panic at the thought of this copyright infringement, at their oncoming doom suggested by this free information; how will they pay the rent when nobody has to buy their book anymore?

If the overly sarcastic tone hasn’t already suggested my dismissive scoff at this terror, then let me state it quite clearly: there is nothing to worry about. It seems to me that these particular individuals and publishing companies have forgotten one of the oldest and most treasured facets of Western civilization: the library.

So, in truth, what is Project Gutenberg other than an easily accessible, international library that never closes? If we are to call it a library, with 27,000 titles it’s an embarrassingly small one. The Hennepin County library system, seated in Minneapolis, MN, claims to house over five million books. My question is a simple one: why is browsing easily accessible information via the fibers of the Internet a sin when simply visiting your local library and perusing the same titles is encouraged? It’s a paradoxical, daresay hypocritical, concept.

I do confess that I used to think similarly, that freely available information would be the downfall of the publishing industry, and then the end of writing as a career, however I’ve since thought about the situation clearly. There’s something to be said about owning a book. In truth, I don’t know anyone who would choose to download a book in lieu of plucking it off the shelf at Barnes ‘n’ Noble and thumbing through its pages at home, making a comfortable space for it on their living room bookcase. There are certainly books that I use for their informative value that I wouldn’t consider purchasing, but again, I’ll use them anyway when I go to the library—that haven that we seem to never remember. Naturally, some will download, but these readers aren’t going to stop buying books: they never bought them in the first place. Online content is not going to destroy book sales, only increase worldwide readership. It may, perhaps, even spark the interest of readers who may not have been readers before, leading to more books purchased. There’s really no danger here. Readers will always buy books and cherish them as beautiful artifacts: we attach the wonders within to the physical, external form—the font on the cover, the smell of the pages—and are thus forever voracious consumers and collectors of the written word. When bookstores stop charging for books and just give away physical copies like Jolly Ranchers, then we’ll talk.