Re:France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon
by pkaye on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @09:02PM
(#29008444)
Though even libraries switched from card catalogues to computer databases long ago so some computer skill is even expected there.
Re:France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon
by bsder on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @10:56PM
(#29009083)
True, but the more important thing than even the card catalog was that once you found one book, there were other books on the stacks "right next to the found book" due to the fact that the books were organized by either the Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal systems.
Consequently, your searches had a built in "proximity" result--which would give you more knowledge and keywords to do your next search with.
Are more people actually brought into the fold?
The rise of Amazon seems to correlate with fewer people also needing libraries and that libraries store fewer books.
The problem is that the prerequisite for using Amazon and libraries with fewer books is the wealth to fund a networked computer and the knowledge how to use it.
As someone from a blue collar background whose education utilized the dead trees of the local libraries quite extensively, I'm not at all sure that this wouldn't be an obstacle if I had to go through education today. That is concerning to me.
Even as someone highly trained in tech, I find that when I need knowledge from before about 1995, that knowledge has become increasingly difficult to access. The knowledge likely isn't online, and so many of the books have been destroyed that browsing the stacks is quite often unsuccessful nowadays.