An economics professor sparked widespread online outrage and ridicule over the weekend after writing an op-ed piece for Forbes titled “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money,” The Washington Post reported. As of this writing, the piece had been removed from Forbes' website. In the piece, Panos Mourdoukoutas of Long Island University argued that recent changes in the worlds of technology and commerce have rendered libraries mostly obsolete. The ubiquity of “third places” such as neighborhood coffee shops has diminished libraries' use as a community gathering space, he said. Streaming services have eliminated the need for library-based TV and movie rentals, and e-books have “turned physical books into collector’s items, effectively eliminating the need for library borrowing services.” Since public libraries are financed with public dollars, Mourdoukoutas argued that replacing them with brick-and-mortar Amazon bookstores would save taxpayers money. Mourdoukoutas’s piece is notable less for the arguments it contains than for sparking a backlash that was loud and fierce. It’s worth considering why so many people reacted to Mourdoukoutas’s op-ed the way they did. Fortunately, data from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) offers some clues. As it turns out, lots of people use their local libraries. In 2016, “more than 171 million registered users, representing over half of the nearly 311 million Americans who lived within a public library service area, visited public libraries over 1.35 billion times,” the IMLS reports. For the typical library, that works out to about 4.4 visits for every single man, woman and child living in the region served by the library.
