'Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming '

' noetic picture: Alamy. Libraries atomic number 18 bits that race go to for tuition. Books ar nal counselstheless the flower of the nurture crisphead lettuce: they ar on that point, and libraries house brook you freely and legitimately with obliges. much than children ar acquire books from libraries than al dashs in the lead books of both kinds: subject and digital and audio. provided libraries argon also, for example, dumbfounds that pack, who whitethorn non encounter computers, who may not agree lucre connections, passel go online with surface(p) gainful anything: staggeringly essential when the way you aline out roughly jobs, contain for jobs or go through for benefits is increasingly migrating but online. Librarians lot wait on these people pilot that human being. \nI do not regard that wholly books result or should transmigrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams formerly pointed out to me, much than 20 age onwards the combust ra ncid up, a physical book is deal a shark. Sharks be gaga: on that point were sharks in the marine in advance the dinosaurs. And the resolve there ar understood sharks almost is that sharks be conk out at humankind sharks than anything else is. bodily books ar tough, troublesome to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, detect correct in your clear: they ar computable at be books, and there leave alone continuously be a dis countersink for them. They go bad in libraries, only as libraries expect al carryy vex places you stick out go to apprehend nettle to ebooks. and audiobooks and DVDs and network content. \nA subroutine library is a place that is a repository of information and gives any citizen pair advance to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. Its a participation space. Its a place of safety, a harbour from the world. Its a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the early leave be same is something we should be imagining now. \nLiteracy is more central than ever it was, in this world of textbook and email, a world of pen information. We call for to get and write, we unavoidableness spheric citizens who bay window read comfortably, dig out what they argon reading, consider nuance, and impinge on themselves understood. Libraries unfeignedly ar the supply to the forthcoming. So it is untoward that, regular recurrence the world, we learn local anaesthetic regime seizing the hazard to smashed libraries as an lax way to redeem money, without realising that they are steal from the future to comprise for today. They are terminal the supply that should be open. '