Toronto blogger wraps 1,000 Awesome Things. So what’s the most awesome?

Michael Oliveira, The Canadian Press
April 19, 2012

They say all good things must come to an end — even the most awesome things.
Shortly after midnight on Thursday, 32-year-old Toronto-native Neil Pasricha posted what might be the last entry on his blog 1000awesomethings.com, which has surpassed 45 million hits after a little under four years on the web.
Pasricha’s whimsical odes to the often under-appreciated awesome things in everyday life — like laughing so hard you cry (No. 538), picking the fastest checkout line at the grocery store (No. 501), or the moment of relief when hiccups cease (No. 635) — also spawned a series of bestselling books, starting with The Book of Awesome, first released in April 2010.
But after years of counting down the most awesome things online day after day after day, Pasricha finally closed in on the end of his mission. On Thursday, the time had come to finally reveal the most awesome of the 1,000 awesome things.
It was bound to be a polarizing pick no matter what he decided on, but Pasricha’s final entry may leave some readers puzzled. Which is fine with him, since he’s hoping the open-ended final awesome thing inspires people to reflect on all the positive things in their lives.
“The No. 1 awesome thing, overall, is: anything you want it to be,” Pasricha said in an interview.
“Unlike every other post on 1,000 Awesome Things that are about small pleasures — like finally peeing after holding it forever (No. 529) — this post is the last one and ... it’s meant to be different than the other awesome things.
“The awesome movement isn’t going to stop. By saying it’s anything you want it to be I’m implying that you get to choose, you get to take it as far as you want, you get to fill in the blank.
“Awesome goes on forever.”
While many of the popular blog’s entries ring true with most readers, Pasricha quickly learned that awesome means very different things to different people. He said he receives about 100 emailed submissions a day suggesting awesome experiences in life, which range from flying in first class to Dubai to more simple pleasures like having a baby grab your finger or falling in love.
“That’s exactly my point, (with the final entry), the most awesome thing is what’s awesome to you,” he said.
Pasricha was inspired to start the blog after a rough patch in his own life that left him desperately needing to look on the bright side.
“Life just hadn’t been that great lately, I was in a marriage heading in the wrong direction, my closest friend was battling severe mental illness and I really thought I needed a way to focus on the positive some how,” said Pasricha, who later got divorced and lost his friend to suicide, two difficult chapters in his life that became awesome entries; getting to the light at the end of the tunnel (No. 567) and smiling and thinking of good friends who are gone (No. 829).
“I (first) wrote a little snippy post about broccoflower, the strange, mutant, hybrid child of nature’s ugliest vegetables, broccoli and cauliflower, and I went to bed and it put a smile on my face. That’s why the next day I logged on and I wrote about the last crumbly triangle of potato chips at the bottom of the bag, (and later) I wrote about finding money in your old coat pocket.
“I was making myself happier.”
The first few posts he wrote were mostly for his own personal amusement, but eventually his visitor counter was going up by tens, dozens and hundreds per day. He got a nice boost in readership when the popular links site Fark.com directed visitors to awesome post No. 980, about the joys of old, dangerous playground equipment.
A year later, things really blew up when he got a strange call claiming he had the best blog in the world.
“It sounded totally fake but I flew to New York City and I walked the red carpet with Martha Stewart and Jimmy Fallon and I went on stage and accepted the Webby award for best blog in the world,” he recalled.
“Then I came home and 10 agents were in my inbox saying, ‘We’ve got to turn this into a book!’”
His books went to become bestsellers in Canada and the United States and got written up by press around the world. Meanwhile, he kept soldiering on, counting down closer and closer to the end of his awesome journey.
He admits there were some clunkers along the way.
“There was one night I was out really late at work, I think I went to the bar with some friends, I got home ... and I had about a minute to write an awesome thing. And I wrote one called Ducks (No. 806),” he said.
“Because they can walk, fly, and swim. Ducks 3, humans 2. AWESOME!” he wrote in the pithy post.
Even as the site and the books grew more popular, Pasricha decided to keep his office job working for Walmart and kept ads off the site.
“I’ve worked for Walmart for the last six years of my life and I absolutely love it there, I think there’s a lot of awesome things about work,” he said.
“And I always felt personally that ads took away from the website and I didn’t want my creative process to be affected. I really wanted to come home and just write for writing’s sake, I didn’t want to have to bill Colgate $20 because they put an ad for minty fresh toothpaste on the bottom of my (post) about squeezing the last drop of toothpaste from your tube (No. 904).
“I just wanted to have fun with it. I don’t know if it was the right or wrong decision, but it’s the decision I made.”
As for wrapping up his impressively long streak of blogging, Pasricha said he’ll miss the letters he received from readers. But he’s keeping the website up, hasn’t ruled out more updates, and says he hopes it continues to inspire.
“All the Book of Awesome really says is we’re surrounded by thousands of awesome things every single day, it’s just up to us to notice them.”

Mad Men and the triumph of television over books

John Doyle: Television, Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Mar. 26, 2012 12:00AM EDT

Last updated Wednesday, Mar. 28, 2012 5:20PM EDT 

By the time you’re reading this on Monday, the fifth season of Mad Men will have begun. At the time I’m writing this on Friday, I have no idea what will transpire on Sunday’s two-hour episode. Timing is important (geography matters too – AMC declines to acknowledge that Canada exists) and there is little point in yours truly speculating about the early twists and turns of this season.

No, the novel is not dead: Writers react

 

It is appropriate, though, to speculate why Mad Men matters. On the cusp of its return I was reminded of an incident from what seems, now, like the long-ago. About 15 years ago, when I was writing for The Globe’s TV magazine, I also wrote an occasional book review for the paper. After I wrote a negative review of a mediocre Canadian novel, a friend of the book’s author, this person a terribly distinguished Canadian writer, complained to the then-editor of the books section. The complaint was, as reported to me, a pithy and haughty question: “How can you have someone who writes about television review a book?”
For some months after this, any book review I wrote also contained the vital information that I have a BA and an MA from University College, Dublin. Readers were informed that the MA was in Anglo-Irish Studies. Just to reassure them that I was familiar with book-reading and such.
The distinguished writer’s complaint was rooted in a snobbery that still exists. Television is stupid. Books are serious. This is now the most ridiculous of notions. The very idea that some hack writer, churning out the clichés of Canadiana, is a serious artist, while the creator of Mad Men and his team are airheads, is not only dated, it is wrong. (By the way, in the matter of distinguished Canadian writers, Canadian Semi Chellas, who wrote the movie The Life Before This and co-created the excellent series The Eleventh Hour, is a main writer on this season of Mad Men.) Mad Men stands as an example of how cable-TV series have replaced the novel as the most significant storytelling form of our time.
The novel’s rise as the principal literary form, from the mid-18th century to the mid-20th century, depended on twin virtues transcending mere storytelling or entertainment – its sociological importance and psychological depth. Typically, important novels offered a portrait of social distinctions, social groupings and social values. And, typically, the focus on one central character or a small group of people allowed for insight into how people feel, react, change and grow. Mad Men achieves both virtues with aplomb.
The series is a portrait of an age of change, one that seems shockingly distant because it is so close to us, and so much of its surface details (the typewriters, the telephones, the smoking and heavy drinking) appear antique. At the same time, it is about the psychological growth of its core characters. Don Draper is an archetypal character of American fiction, someone who literally reinvented himself by taking another’s man identity. But we spend more time with him in the multiple seasons of Mad Men than we would ever spend with a character in a novel. His growth, mistakes and the meanderings of his mind represent both the sociological and psychological depth of the series, more nuanced and authentic than any contemporary novel could deliver.
As any undergraduate studying the English novel knows, the novel rose to prominence because several factors unfolded almost simultaneously. There was a new middle class hungry for its own art forms. Technology made the production and distribution of books cheaper and easier. In the case of cable TV, technology has made such channels as HBO, Showtime and AMC viable for a new, small but paying audience hungry for tough-minded TV. The invention of the DVD disc has meant that an entire TV series or multiple seasons could be delivered easily and cheaply to consumers who could then savour a series much as they used to savour a novel. The parallels between the mid-18th century and now are striking.
Of course there are people who will cling to the view of television encapsulated in the 1976 movie Network. That is, everything on TV is about ratings, the audience is easily manipulated and sensible people should simply ignore the medium. Or there are those who cleave to the view of television expressed in Neil Postman’s widely read 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. The book essentially says that TV demeans and diminishes all discourse in the culture.
Both views come from the pre-cable era. They came before The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, Rome, Homeland and so many other culturally significant series. They came before such series replaced the novel as the most important vehicle for sociological and psychological truth. Frankly, the views expressed in Network, Amusing Ourselves to Death and, indeed, the snobbery of that distinguished Canadian writer, now seem as outdated and antique as the office equipment on Mad Men.

Strobel: Beware of angry librarians

Let the revolution begin!

By Mike Strobel,Toronto Sun

First posted: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 04:28 PM EDT | Updated: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 05:11 PM EDT

TORONTO - I crawled out of my sickbed long enough to see the screaming headline LIBRARIANS HOLD CITY HOSTAGE!, then dived back under the covers.
Shhhhush!
The librarians?!!
Yes, fellow citizens, the librarians. Toronto has 2,300 of them. Unless you have been dead or making out in the science fiction section, you know their CUPE Local 4948 is on strike.
They’ve thrown off the shackles of the Dewey Decimal System and are on the rampage.
On one hand, you say, “Great, now I can finish that copy of War and Peace.” On the other, you gasp, “Librarians have gone to war?!”
A lovable cynic I know thinks it’s because they emerged from their bibliophilic burrows for the first time in ages and the unseasonal heat fried their brains, made them militant.
Local 4948 says it’s on strike for better job security for part-time staff.
Either way, it’s the first library walkout in our megacity’s history.
Librarians even stayed at their posts during the 2009 strike by nearly 25,000 other city workers.
So this rebellion is as shocking as library science ever gets. But I don’t think it has anything to do with part-time job security. I think it’s social upheaval.
For eons, librarians have been a species in the genus geek. Males are typically meek, pasty, bespectacled and a bit light in the loafers. They wear their hair stringy. Females are meek, pasty, bespectacled and sensibly shod. They wear their hair in a bun.
Those are scientific facts, but we’ve cruelly twisted them, made them demeaning. Hollywood is the worst.
It’s A Wonderful Life, for example. In the alternative universe Bedford Falls, the one where George Bailey had never been born: George’s friend Violet is a sleazy club dancer, his mom is a snarly widow, his brother’s dead, his bartender’s a sadist, Uncle Billy is in an insane asylum, his former employer Mr. Gower is a poisoner and his beautiful, vivacious wife, Mary, is...
George Bailey: “Please, Clarence, where’s my wife? Tell me where my wife is.”
Clarence, the guardian angel: “You’re not going to like it, George.”
George Bailey: “Where is she? What happened to her?!”
Clarence: “She became an old maid. She never married...”
George Bailey: “Where is she? WHERE IS SHE?”
Clarence: “She’s... she’s just about to close up the library!”
(George tosses Clarence aside and runs off.)
Oh, the humanity! The horror! Mary’s a spinster librarian!
Pop culture is full of such images. So you can see their problem.
Playboy tried to help, running pictorials of buxom lasses pretending to be librarians. Other porn picked up the crusade.
To wit, such novels as Nympho Librarian. Subtitle: “The prim miss took off more than her mask of respectability behind the stacks — with any man who asked.”
Whew. But the key word is still “prim.” It just reinforces the image.
Besides, it’s fantasy. I’ve never met a nympho librarian, though god knows I’ve looked.
Librarians’ only real hope of emerging from the shadows of the reference section is full-blown insurgency.
Even lefty filmmaker Michael Moore understands the volcano, sexual and otherwise, that bubbles in every librarian:
“They are subversive. You think they’re just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They’re like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn’t mess with them.”
Mayor Rob Ford should pay heed to that. You can take on burly garbage collectors, fat cat bureaucrats and sun-baked road crews and everyone says, “Yesss!”
But you can’t win against pet-rescuers, people in wheelchairs, children, circus clowns, panda bears...or librarians.
You can bet the other city hall unions know this, as they too prepare for walkouts. It’s sort of like Saddam Hussein using kids as human shields before the first Gulf War.
This could get ugly.
Already, on the librarians’ picket lines, they’re singing “Row, row, row your boat.” Sends chills.
I foresee St. Margaret of Atwood swooping upon the mayor’s office, brandishing Moby Dick like it were Thor’s hammer.
I hear the battle cry: “Give us what we want, or we’ll make you read Ulysses!”
Keep your wits, Mr. Mayor.
Or the meek and pasty shall inherit the earth.

Our New Culture of Compulsive Communication

This article hit a nerve with me.  I was at a launch of a new program last week and the woman in front of me checked her smart phone it seemed every two seconds.  I find it pretentious when people have to have their cellphone on the table at a meeting or even in a social setting. 

Like the author, I only use my cell phone for emergencies and while travelling.  People know where to reach me by email or a landline.  It is nice to be out of contact for awhile and have others solve problems themselves.  Am I a dinosaur? Probably to younger people, but it is definitely less stressful!

 

LYSIANE GAGNON

From Monday's Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Mar. 26, 2012 12:01AM EDT

At my gym last week, I saw an extraordinary scene. A man was working out on a stationary bicycle, reading – a book! Not your ordinary bestseller taken from the rack at a Wal-Mart but an old book, with small script and thin paper. I stopped short of congratulating him for being a survivor of a dying species.

Indeed, many things are dying. In the art museums, I used to buy those lovely cards and envelopes with reproductions of masterworks. But they’re not made any more, because people don’t write letters any more. All you’ll find in museums are postcards.
Of course, like everyone, I write my routine thank-you notes by e-mail. But there are occasions when a more personalized, handwritten letter is required – when you extend your sympathies after a death, for instance; an e-mail is just too coarse for such messages.
I remember the café-terrasses of the last century, filled with people who read newspapers or books. When the person they were waiting for arrived, they quickly folded their newspaper or put their book aside, so they could have a real conversation.
Nowadays, they go on clicking on their BlackBerrys. In restaurants, two couples out of three put their cellphones on the table before sitting down. The digital age has erased elementary politeness. How can you engage in a phone conversation while the person you’re sitting with is reduced to looking at the ceiling? Or maybe she’s busy herself talking on the phone. Why do you even bother to meet?
I’m mesmerized by this new culture. How can all these BlackBerry types have so many friends available on a full-time basis, ready to chat endlessly at any hour of the day? Don’t these people work? When I call my friends, I’m usually greeted by voice mail. How can those students who recently demonstrated in Montreal against a slight raise in university fees afford these costly toys?
Even in a city of high culture such as Paris, the Opera House is planning to reserve a section for those who want to tweet while listening to the music. This need to tweet all the time and everywhere has become a compulsion.
The mere idea of being reduced to 140 characters when you could write so much more on e-mail is bizarre – but, of course, this doesn’t have to do with a love of writing or even with a need to communicate. What it reveals is a pathological incapacity to be alone with our thoughts for more than a few minutes. And this is not counting the criminal behaviour of text messaging while driving – a habit much more dangerous than drinking two glasses of wine before taking the wheel.
In a recent letter to La Presse, a desperate teacher pleaded for a ban on cellphones in the schools. Text messaging, she says, has become the No. 1 enemy of instruction. Students text all the time – in the toilets, in the stairs, in the classroom; they even text to those walking or sitting next to them. This instant, anonymous mode of communication is the perfect vehicle for bullying others and spreading all sorts of vicious rumours.
I’m not totally dysfunctional. I couldn’t live, let alone earn my living, without a computer. I own an iPad, although I don’t use its full capacities. I have a cellphone, but I use it only when I travel or for emergency calls. Am I normal? Maybe not.

The CBC and the Problem of Mediocrity

In praise of British produced television shows.

TUE MARCH 20, 2012 by Will Straw, Communications Professor, McGill 

The only way the CBC will ever produce a world-class piece of entertainment is if the Corporation starts partnering with other media companies.

I spent many evenings this winter addicted to The Killing, a two-season crime serial produced by Danmarks Radio (Denmark’s national broadcaster) and subtitled in English for its successful run on the British network BBC 4. The British success of The Killing sparked a surge of interest in the UK for all things Danish, and the series itself was remade in a U.S. version which debuted in 2011.

All through The Killing, I found myself wondering why English-language CBC television had never produced anything so good or so internationally successful. (The French-language arm of our national broadcaster is a much different and generally happier story.) The familiar argument about English-Canadian television being held back by its small market and smaller talent pool hardly applies here. The population of Denmark is roughly one-fifth that of Anglophone Canada – almost equal, in fact, to the number of French-speaking Canadians. It’s true that The Killing was written by a popular author of Danish crime novels, and that its lead actors had honed their craft in dozens of locally produced and film and television series. Canada is hardly lacking in popular novelists, however, and our professional actors are nothing if not versatile and hard-working.

The CBC’s failure to produce a series like The Killing still puzzles me, but the dream that our national broadcaster might be more like its counterparts in European countries is a familiar and longstanding one. Like many who have grown up with the CBC and cared for it, I’ve dreamed of it becoming more like the BBC – an internationally trusted brand, the go-to place for news and quality programming.

Of course, much of what we think of as superior British television (Prime Suspect, say, or the current hit Dowton Abbey) was produced for networks other than the BBC (ITV, in both cases, with American PBS station WGBH coproducing the latter.) The high achievement of British television runs across the system, with private networks forced to fulfill stringent public service obligations and to buy their programming from clusters of independent production companies. The independent boom in British cinema in the 1980s had much to do with the commitment of the then-new Channel 4 to producing and showing films by upstart young filmmakers (think My Beautiful Laundrette or Young Soul Rebels.)

It’s hard to imagine Canadian private television networks supporting a national film industry in the way that Channel 4 did. The fact that we ask so little of these private networks may be one reason we expect so much of the CBC. Still, there’s no reason not to envision the CBC being more active as a partner in the early stages of Canadian feature film production, then showcasing these films in its schedule once their theatrical runs are complete. More generally, Canada needs a tighter integration of the different parts of its audiovisual production system. When Telefilm Canada, the National Film Board and the CBC fail to see each other as natural partners in that system, none benefits from the skills, assets or successes of the other.

My first suggestion for improving the CBC, then, would be this: that we re-imagine its relationship to other pieces in our audiovisual puzzle, like the NFB or Telefilm Canada. If we remain committed to supporting films and television programs with public money, as I hope we will, we should direct that money in ways that would pull these different institutions into tighter, more effective kinds of collaboration. (This reimagining, I hasten to add, would touch dramatic programming only. News, sports and variety programming are another story.)

At the same time, I would urge the CBC to engage in more international co-production of dramatic programs, spreading its brand around the world and opening itself up to new influences. In return, we might “internationalize” the CBC schedule a little more, countering U.S. influence with a rich, multinational diversity rather than an all-Canadian cultural breakwater. I’d happily give up a little prime-time CanCon in return for a top quality Danish thriller on the CBC on Saturday night. I’d be even happier if I knew Canadian programs were finding their way onto prime time schedules in countries around the world.

Will Straw is the director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

Library strike a messy dilemma for Mayor Rob Ford and negotiators

Published On Mon Mar 19 2012

Robyn DoolittleUrban Affairs Reporter

The sweet-faced 28-year-old public service assistant from Cedarbrae Public Library holds up the bullhorn to rally the troops.
“What do we want?” Tina Gillard doesn’t quite yell.
“A fair deal!” the group of mostly women around her apprehensively chant back.
“Thank you very much,” she replies. “Okay, when do we want it?”
“Now!”
For the 1,200 library workers picketing at city hall Monday — which, to generalize, was a group of pasty skinned men in Gilligan hats, grandmotherly types wearing small-rimmed glasses, and young twentysomethings in ponytails and Converse sneakers — just four Toronto police officers stood watch.
It’s a sympathetic-looking bunch, and CUPE Local 4948 knows it. When the union walked off the job at 5 p.m. Sunday, they did so bolstered by internal polling that showed the public is overwhelmingly on their side.
So the question for the city and its library board is: Do you really want to pick a fight with librarians?
Courtesy Margaret Atwood, Doug Ford learned the answer to that question the hard way last summer.
It’s a precarious optics dilemma for negotiators, one that political experts say both sides need to navigate with considerable care. The Fords risk appearing like book-hating simpletons carrying out a vendetta. It was a storyline the administration’s political opponents were quick to pounce on.
“The Fords are still smarting from having their butts kicked by Margaret Atwood a few months back. To them, she’s a symbol of socialist gulags and Deepest Annex,” said Liberal attack dog Warren Kinsella via email from a business trip in New York Monday.
“By going after libraries — by going after reading, in effect — they are getting back at their latte-sipping, Volvo-driving pinko overlords. I think they plan to let libraries be shuttered for a while, so they can say nobody misses them. But, as usual, they're making a mistake. Torontonians — even the conservative ones — value learning and reading.”
The library union is still riding a wave of public goodwill after last summer’s core service review. Activists successfully framed the debate as an assault on communities and thoughtful people, rather than as an exercise of fiscal restraint. The Ford administration quickly retreated.
But the library union should be careful not to overplay its hand, said University of Toronto politics professor Renan Levine.
“My hunch is that they saw they’re emboldened. They won a fight last year. They won a big fight: little librarians against the big mayor.” But, he cautioned, “there is a difference here, (between) a resident who is upset about a branch library in their area going to close and them helping the workers in that library protect certain workplace and pay rights.”
The fact is, Levine said, some people who use libraries have as much interaction with the people who work there as they do the staff at the grocery store.
Levine said the city negotiating team needs to convince the public the city isn’t out for blood.
Library board chair Paul Ainslie said he thought the city was trying to do just that with an 11th hour offer that he felt was fair and offered considerably more job security than Local 416 was recently given. Ainslie said he was “shocked, flabbergasted … breathless” when the union rejected it.
Unlike the outdoor and indoor workers’ unions, who dealt directly with the city, the library union is at the table with its board, which is split between private citizens and councillors and is chaired by Ford ally Paul Ainslie.
But it will be the mayor who wears a victory or failure. As was shown during police board negotiations, Ford has the sway to loosen the purse strings and facilitate a deal.
John Capobianco, a veteran conservative strategist, said that in the short term, Ford may pay a political price, but there are considerable long-term benefits to not backing down.
“I’m not sure Mayor Ford really wants to pick a fight with librarians … but I also believe that the appetite that Torontonians are having for strikes now is also getting to a point of impatience. The economy is tough. Work shortages are happening. Jobs are frail,” he said.
“I think if he keeps focusing on what’s best for the taxpayers of Toronto he will win on that.”

Is a Library Without Books Still a Library?

• by Kristina Chew
• March 3, 2012
• 8:14 pm

17 comments

California’s San Francisco State University is opening a newly-renovated library that will house only a quarter of the million or so books of its collection. Only books in “high-demand,” recently published titles and books recommended by the university’s departments will actually be on shelves in the library; the rest will be housed in five three-story high units. They can be retrieved in five to ten minutes via a robotic arm that is activated by an electronic prompt.
Deborah Masters, the university librarian, described the old library as a “rabbits’ warren” in the New York Times; the new structure has been updated to include open space as well as multimedia stations, group study areas and a café. Such renovations indeed recognize that libraries, or at least those on college and university campuses, are seen and used as places for students and others to gather and socialize. With more resources such as scholarly articles from academic journals and even books now available on the internet — and with a student population more used to accessing information via computers rather than by paging through books and hefty tomes of bound journals — devoting more of the physical space to multimedia resources makes sense. The library of my own college became so strapped for space that, a few years ago, it launched a project to weed out its holdings, removing duplicate books and bound copies of academic journals that had gone unused for years.
The jury is out about what could be and is lost when a library no longer offers its patrons aisles of books to wander through. Faculty from San Francisco State University’s Creative Writing Department are mourning the loss of shelves. “There’s a trend now where books are being stored in big vats and they aren’t available for us to touch and see,” says novelist Peter Orner. He adds that “I wouldn’t be a writer if, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, I didn’t wander the open stacks.”
The New York Times notes that more than a dozen universities, including five in California, have installed similar mechanized systems.
I truly love books. It really is not the same to curl up in a chair or the couch and activate the iPad, or balance your laptop on your knees. Books don’t need recharging and “navigating” from page to page remains cumbersome. On the other hand, I just as truly appreciate being able to view a library’s catalogue from my home computer and to access books and articles in electronic form a few minutes after I think I’d like to read them. On a very personal note, because the demands of caring for our teenage autistic son mean that I have to be home a great deal and simply do not have the time to stroll around library stacks, being able to access so much from my computer has meant that I can actually continue with my own research.
The very word “library” comes from the Latin word for book, liber. Certainly what constitutes a “book” is changing as more people use Kindles, iPads, their phones and computers to read “books.” Could libraries one day have no books at all or a scant few of the paper and page sort? Or are issues of access and convenience more important?

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/is-a-library-without-books-still-a-library.html#ixzz1o9X11U6x