"This past weekend, Forbes published and then took down a
controversial article. “This article was outside of this contributor’s
specific area of expertise, and has since been removed,” said Forbes, after significant backlash.
The article in question? An op-ed arguing that libraries are a waste of
taxpayer money and should be replaced by Amazon stores.
Libraries do seem to be outside of author Panos
Mourdoukoutas’s areas of expertise; he’s a professor who specializes in
world economy. (A popular tweet suggested that Mourdoukoutas paid for
the privilege to be published on Forbes, though it turned out to be an error;
he’s a paid blogger for Forbes.) But both the article itself and the
backlash against it point to a profound anxiety centered on libraries
and the question of whether they should be up for debate.
If we take it as read that public libraries exist and are
good and important, then we’re saying that the services they provide
are basic rights that it is our government’s responsibility to
safeguard. If we suggest that libraries shouldn’t exist — that they’re a
waste — then we call into question the rights that they protect.
Enter Mourdoukoutas’s now-deleted op-ed, whose central thrust was that the roles traditionally performed by libraries — lending books, of course, but also serving as community gathering places — are now performed better by “third places” like Starbucks and bookstore-cafes. And since Amazon’s brick-and-mortar bookstores are equipped with easy access to the comprehensive Amazon database of books around the world, the article concluded, Amazon bookstore-cafes are superior to libraries."
