> I don't see how libraries are to blame. Your ire should be directed at modern society

On the contrary, libraries are there to facilitate the improvement of said "«modern society»".

People have always loved pulp fiction. I love pulp fiction. Reading pulp fiction has always been popular. That doesn't mean it belongs in libraries. Librarians made a conscious decision to shift their focus into providing public entertainment rather than public education. We went from the libraries also providing our "pulp fiction" as an extra service(for lack of a better word) to practically only providing our pulp fiction, and focusing almost entirely on that.

Even in terms of cultural trends, librarians have a shared responsibility to guide the public. And they did. These decisions are not made solely based on the least-checked-out books but also on ideological factors - what they think is good for the public.

To my larger point, you cannot expect me to shed tears over publishers harming your ability to lend books because of your status as the sacred gatekeeper of public education when you've already abdicated that role. I think there is tremendous public good in free public education. I don't think there is much public good in free public entertainment.

The majority of the what we consider classics were the pulp fiction of their day. All of Shakespeare was written to be enjoyed by day laborers who couldn’t afford a seat. Jules Verne and Michael Crichton did the same thing, one just seems more like literature because it’s old.

Some things where both written to be high brow and ended up being remembered but that has more to do with quality than their intended audience.

Libraries also have to get funding. If they don’t provide what their customers want, their customers won’t vote for the taxes they need to run. The people running these things aren’t stupid.

This is some weird elitist bullshit.

Do you know what belongs in libraries. Books, newspaper, interactive media, movies. The knowledge, writings, and creation of human culture. Humans are not machines. We need both knowledge and entertainment to survive and thrive.

Publishers would lock up society and culture and charge you to use it. Fuck them.

It’s fine if you believe this, but this was not the reason the US public library system was created, and it seems wrong to me to have co-opted it and destroyed the original purpose in so doing without having a wider conscious public discussion.

You seem to be making up your own history of public libraries in the US, and seeming to be ignoring their funding and purposes were multifaceted.

I am citing the actual history of the US public library system, which ironically can probably now be found only with difficulty in actual public libraries. But Wikipedia has a decent overview:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_libraries_in_North_Amer...

As you can see, libraries in the US were founded to advance 'learning' and 'piety'.

Here is the treatise of one of the biggest influencers and advocates for the creation of the public library system.

https://ia600909.us.archive.org/10/items/intellectualtorc00t...

I strongly encourage reading all the citations in the Wikipedia article surrounding the creation of the library system. Sadly, many of them are paywalled and inaccessible via even the Archive project, Google Books [ed - to be clear if you think I am pro-publisher, you are wrong: the former two projects had more potential to do good than I can express], and likely your local library. But you can find enough to prove the point.

There has been a massive shift in the mission of libraries in the past several decades, and the public didn't get a say.

You've failed to show how that 'shift' leads to them no longer serving that function. Besides elitist "they now provide things I don't deem to be of a certain quality" that is. Your post just falls into a long list of "things were better in the past" rants. All of them bullshit.

Some things really were better. Some things were not. I’m not sure why you would throw all such complaints into the BS category. Why is that?

The mass destruction of older books and classics is easy to observe by searching your own library catalogue. I provided some sources and one commenter even provided a link where librarians justify the need to destroy books using outdated or biased language.