Can I get away with calling this Cracked article "incendiary"? Probably not, you're right. It was written by someone who openly admits to having shredded thousands of library books. Maybe hundreds of thousands, in the dead of night, under the cloak of secrecy.

 

Why? Because the library ordered him to.

 

Understandably, this article has raised a lot of hackles and sparked some pretty heated discussions online. A lot of people cannot stand the thought of a single book ever being destroyed. And even if you are less dogmatic about it, it's hard not to cringe when Davis mentions "a beautiful, dusty, illustrated volume of Shakespeare printed in the 1700s, a calligraphic message from its long-dead owner inscribed on the inside cover" being fed into the shredder. But that is what is happening, all around the world.

 

Here is a series of cruel facts:

 

In the case of the author's employers, they decided to make more room by sorting the library's collection by how long it had been since the book had been checked out, and pulped in reverse order. 

 

It turns out that something like a 1700s edition of Shakespeare doesn't get checked out very often, so out it goes. BRRRRRMP. (That's my impression of the sound a shredder makes as it destroys a 300 year-old edition of Shakespeare.)

 

It's terrible, but it shows you where our priorities lie as a civilization. Just look at the size of the sports arenas built with municipal funds all across the country. If we collectively liked books more than we like sports, those would be colossal libraries instead. But we don't, and they aren't.

 

The only possible bright side I can glean from this article is that the eBook industry may end up being the salvation of physical books. Even though most people think that the Kindle will destroy physical books, think of it this way: when a library orders a new eBook, they don't have to pulp an old cool book to make room for it!

 

Also, you should go hug a librarian, because they are the ones who are trying to guard our future against the rapacity of the present. If they could save all the books, they would.