Take the kid to a physical library a few times. I think the visceral experience of the vastness really has to be experienced by our spatial-relation lizard-brains. Explain the "anything you want, but only a few at a time" concept. Nurture the kid-in-a-candy-store wonder.

Then take them to the most impressive library you can feasibly drive to. Universities spring to mind. Let that awe really sink in. See if you can get a librarian to talk to the kid for a few minutes about why _they_ personally think this is important.

THEN introduce ebooks, gutenberg, archive.org, apps, etc. All that and then some, right here in the palm of your hand.

I think you are highlighting great ways to impress upon a kid the: "visceral experience of the vastness." Which is the core of what I want. That's a really good way to put it by the way.

I really like the idea of taking kids to really impressive libraries as well. My parents did that for me and it really did create lasting memories.

But I am more thinking of something that can emulate that experience remotely. Your focus on the space made me thing of maybe a library on Minecraft or Roblox? Maybe it can be a space where you can somehow see the books in a virtual space and design something that allows you to explore the collections. I know this would be really hard in Minecraft and I don't know how hard this would be in roblox. But I really like this idea because it would be easy to create, easier to maintain, and be a really cool thing that a teacher could say take a class trip to.

It would be important that you where presented with a way to checkout the books you found in this virtual library from a real library near you that has ebooks for children. This would also allow you to checkout the public works books from the awesome sites you referenced instantly.

Maybe something like this (aimed more at journalism, but the virtual space is still impressive): https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/18/21184041/minecraft-librar...

This looks really cool and is exactly along the lines of what I was thinking. I will explore it later after work.

Thank you for linking this.

Oh oh oh.

I think you mean https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360054148012-Brow...

This is exactly the kind of tool I was hoping to find. Thank you!

I wasn't really expecting to be having novel ideas here and as usual someone built something close and someone on hackernews can tell me about it.

This service isn't perfect and doesn't seem very kid friendly to me. But it exists and is free so it's something to learn from and recommend.

One of my defining memories looking around universities as a 16/17-year-old was going to their libraries and being overwhelmed with how much knowledge there was there. Shelves that showed the parallax in the rooms, where books went off into the distance and motion-activated lights. As an undergraduate, I worked extensively in an underground library -- isolated from the world, isolated from anything but my tasks at hand, and with all the knowledge one could conceivably want if you could find it effectively (or, at least, that's how it felt).

Libgen.rs may have an unimaginably larger number of titles on offer, but it's not quite the same as walking into a cathedral-size store of books and looking at the weight of humanity's greatest achievements staring back at you. Libraries are awesome. We should support them, and keep supporting them, as much as possible.

I couldn't agree more. I have 0 desire to replace or limit libraries. They are some of few places where you can feel the progress of humanity in a physical space.

I just want to allow people who can't access libraries easily to experience some of that.

I don't think that is possible (to re-create that feeling of awe) on a single screen computer. Perhaps some VR room, but then again most people do not have such special hardware.

What I can see might be useful is a traditional Web space that creates a lesser but similar "flavor" of the awe by showing plenty of book titles while letting you navigate in different directions like you would wonder along the shelves in a physical library. At least such a low tech Web version can be consumed from less than wealthy countries.

Everyone says they're awesome while at the same time pointing out that the digital services are far superior in terms of scalability, quantity, searchability, etc.

It seems the one things libraries have going for them versus digital services is the emotional effect that these physical places have on us. That doesn't bode well for libraries long term.

Discoverability in libraries is better, and difficult to replicate in an online setting I've found. When I found a book through the online database, I would go to get it and almost always the other books on the shelf or nearby shelves were also relevant to my research. But most of these books didn't show up in the results of my initial queries, so I would not have found them without the physical library.

Unfortunately, the libraries I went to, have drastically shrunk their accessible physical collections in favor of keeping most books in storage.

Big thing libraries also have is books that haven't been digitized. There are so many great works that simply cannot be found online.

Now people at that age are used to having all of that information at their fingertips and for free.

They say that this ease of information is causing physical changes in how our brains operate.

I don't think anything compares to going in person.

I'm father of a 4 year old, and we live a couple of blocks from the library. Seeing how his interactions with the shelves has changed over the past couple of years has been really interesting. At first it was enough to look at the covers and spines, then he could pull himself up to the bins of board books, and eventually started grabbing from the shelves himself.

And like you, he loads up with a little bit of everything (it doesn't matter what he chooses, we check it out) and we take it home to read and see what sticks.

It's probably no surprise that one of the most exciting trips he can make is driving to PDX to go to Powell's.

There's probably a UI genius out there with great ideas for it, but I don't see how anything can beat going to a library in person.

I completely agree. I don't think you can fully replicate this experience remotely.

I am just trying to imagine what you need to do to get as close as possible. Maybe I make this a project happen if I end up with something actionable. Maybe these ideas inspire someone else, maybe they fade away into memories and do very little.

I love the it doesn't matter what you choose you can check it out part. I think it would be really important to have a filter where all the books the kid can see, the kid can have right now. This of course could be disabled by older kids that understand sometimes there is a wait but I think for the younger kids this would be an important detail.

I don't want to replace libraries, I want to make it so every kid that has access to the internet on some device or gaming platform can get 30% of that experience. Or whatever is possible.

Yeah between the “take whatever you want” and the sensory experience of seeing and touching and opening books of different sizes, textures, thickness, etc it’s mind blowing to try to replicate.

Just something as simple as having books shelved higher than you head and getting to use a stool to get up to them - that makes finding books so fun!

The more I think about it, the physical is just so important to the experience. I guess it’s for this same reason I hate ebook versions of picture books. The interaction just cannot match what you get to do with a real book.

Not to say this isn’t a worthy goal or interesting problem-every kid should have an awesome library nearby. Just wow, going in person is amazing.

This is one of those "pure HN" comments that you're almost guaranteed to find here.

How can we take a genuinely pleasant, analog human experience, strip all of the magic out of it, automate it, and make it remote?

Your comment made me sad to read. I don't really feel like that's a fair take at all.

I love libraries and the experience they provide. These memories are core to who I am today.

For me this is about access. I want every kid who doesn't live near a library or who's parents don't have the time to take them there to have something more than nothing.

I don't think that we can make it remote without taking a lot of the magic out of it. But I don't think it's a bad idea to talk about what we might do to try.

I don’t think that’s a fair portrayal of it. Rather, it’s a matter of observing that people are using the digital more because of certain advantages it has, and trying to think up ways of mitigating its disadvantages.

For a similar sort of thing, take the example of paper versus digital Bibles. For the last couple of hundred years until recently, almost everyone who cared about the Bible would have what I call a primary Bible; this helps immensely with memory and comprehension, especially spatial. Recently, many people have shifted to digital Bibles. I think this is terrible; very little software even pretends to be designed for reading (study is the typical focus, not that they do that well either), and none of it is; so I say no Bible software is suitable for use as a primary Bible. So I’ve been planning Bible software for the last few years, to answer the situation by seeking to get the best of both worlds, in significant part so that people that insist on eschewing the paper can have a less harmful option—though I think that it’s possible to reach a stage where I personally would switch from my increasingly-decrepit paper RSV.

The fact of the matter is that we have a habit of turning analogue experiences into half-hearted digital experiences, implementing the simple parts but ignoring the hard parts. Don’t complain because people are seeking to digitise more of the analogue experience, but rejoice when people contemplate the hard parts.

Self-host libgen [1]. Then run https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web or https://www.kavitareader.com/#home over the top.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692222

I still regularly go to a library and take random books off the shelf and read them in the branch.

It's silly and paranoid, but I want to know some things without a record existing.

No web browser, or online payments.

It doesn't even need to be anything interesting. I just want to have some skills/knowledge with no documented evidence

The internet is much better than a library. I've gone to the library a handful of times and the information there typically pales in component to the information that can be found on the internet. The internet also has videos too which can help explain concepts. Books in a library are typically old too. Good luck finding a book about some new piece of software that came out.

I've found the opposite: it's often even hard to find out that some piece of knowledge might exist on the Internet.

I think it might(?) be better for math and things like that, but dig into social sciences or history or whatever, and often at a surprisingly shallow level you're going to have to go find some real books. eBooks fill some of the gap, but lots aren't there. Some stuff is rare (very niche) and can't even be found in newly-printed books, let alone online—used books and libraries are it. Some special collections—again, without even digging that deep, sometimes—become necessary and would require international travel to pursue (depending on where you live).

It's not hard to poke around a decent used book store or university library and find information that's simply nowhere online.

> often at a surprisingly shallow level you're going to have to go find some real books.

Google scholar + sci-hub is astoundingly deep.

Plenty of rare old books can’t be found online, but there are also plenty which can if you learn where to look and spend some time hunting.

The tactile experience of a library or even a bookstore cannot be replicated by the internet or ebooks.

It is indeed something wondrous for little kids... and adults.

Sure, I don't go to libraries to find anything about code or even computers. I go to find old fantasy series and enjoy the physicality of the library.

I would say the internet is almost always better at everything non-fiction for adults. But I am talking about 4-8 year olds here mostly, and by extension anyone older that wants some of the library experience.

Why would you limit yourself to the information that is on the internet when the vast majority of the world's information (and music, and video, etc.) is elsewhere?

because I'm not interested in that information

How do you know if you haven't seen it?

Really, the libraries' contents are just a significantly more difficult-to-search part of the deep web.

Quite different, but with a similar sense of discovery: Listening/watching to Harold Bloom or some other literary pundit or author, I scribble the mentioned titles down to look up and download later.