A book aficionado perhaps, but not a [real, graduated in L/IS] librarian. Library and information science is basically the study of all the stuff hackers like arguing about—what information is, what is or is not important/redundant information, what metadata is needed to efficiently find something, the value of information in different contexts, the best ways to guarantee the preservation or distribution of information, and so on. Librarians were the first people to use (and espouse) search engines. I'm sure they'd absolutely love it if instead of having a huge library building that had to survive with little funding, taking up city space with books that have mostly never been touched (and therefore have to be culled sometimes—not a happy pastime for a librarian), they could run a small stall that checked out e-ink tablets with the sum of all human knowledge pre-installed, and never worry about conserving space by removing information again.

Yes, you must remember that you might think of a library as a building full of books, but to a librarian it's always been a means to an end.

A librarian's job is to archive and retrieve information. For them, having to physically unshelve and reshelve books is not an act filled with nostalgia and romance -- the novelty has long since worn off. Moving books around is a tedious cost of doing business. It's what they make the new interns do. They won't miss it any more than grad students will miss photocopying journal articles. [1]

(God, do you realize how much of my life was wasted lugging giant bound journal volumes around, shlepping them on and off of photocopiers, just because I went to grad school five years too soon? You young whippersnappers don't know how easy you have it!)

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[1] With the important caveat that librarians are not at all impressed with the archival quality of electronic media. There's nothing like being handed a truckload of seven-inch floppy disks and being told to preserve the contents for the next 500 years. The job has its challenges.

Curiously, I don't think I know of any librarians working at Google. I wonder what they'd think of the zillions of documents at every engineer's fingertips here.

"If you don't like where everything is heading, that's fine, you're free to keep your old ways but if you're going to grumble on about it, then you better stop swimming upstream and start learning the other way too"

On the other hand, the so-called paperless society was supposed to be here something like 20 years ago.

If people are skeptical about the end of books, I don't blame them.