Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries
untranslatedjp.substack.com
untranslatedjp.substack.com
Many events aren't even book related-- see events for Lego building, homework help, even Dungeons and Dragons events.
I wonder if there's a resurgence across the world where libraries are places of community sharing.
People are just now noticing them. This is a great thing and I hope it sticks.
I believe people are getting sick of every interaction being monetized and are finally seeking out spaces where you can learn and interact with others without that threat.
Shhh... you're going to get libraries monetized.
State: https://www.zlb.de/veranstaltungsuebersicht/
And this is by no means special. I'm pretty sure this is the case for most major city libraries in Europe.
Other than that lots of people do their work or homework there, hangout in the outside spaces, book rooms for community meetings. With some more budget, I think there's a lot to be said for these to become default community activity/collaboration spaces.
- audio books on little devices to plug headphones into, which have cheap rechargeable batteries that seem to be mostly dead - collections of children’s toys in a toy room that after a few years are missing most of their pieces - large collections of DVDs - computer labs full of computers that are old/slow and then need all kinds of restrictions due to a handful of antisocial people using them for inappropriate things, leaving them nearly unusable for anyone else - fancy 3D printing labs containing hardware without enough volunteers to teach people how to use it, and with hardware going obsolete or unmaintained/broken - a seed bank that had obviously not had any seed packets taken out in years
My local library is eliminating a section of books in order to build a “sensory room”. Nothing against sensory rooms, but I’m not sure it was a good trade for yet another skip full of books. (There is a YMCA next door that would be a more appropriate place for a sensory room - and indeed it has one.)
On a recent library trip, despite all that, the dehumidifier was not working and I saw signs of permanent humidity damage to books in the archive. This is the one thing libraries should be doing: preserving books.
Just last week new stats came out [1] that library attendance by young people in the Netherlands is going up again, so possibly!
[1] https://nos.nl/artikel/2630399-meer-locaties-meer-bezoekers-...
I feel there is, but I am not yet seeing anything concrete.
It's nice that library is welcoming young people, though not sure if encouraging their smartphone addiction is the right way to attract someone.
*main reason for complaint wasn't kids staring at phones and playing games, but shouting swear words during gaming on phone and playing it loudly without earbuds, when I am visiting with small kids who are interested in actual books
Relying on libraries to be de facto homeless shelters is bad for everyone compared to the alternative of dedicated facilities. It's worse for homeless people, worse for the library and staff, and worse for patrons.
What level of spending would you like to see?
Prison, which was being used for that purpose, costs California $127k a year https://www.lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost
Just the bed at a Californian state hospital for mental health treatment costs at minimum $150k+ a year. https://www.dsh.ca.gov/Hospitals/
And both systems are already overcapacity
Taking homeless people to jail because they're homeless just seems stupid and pointless, not to mention harmful to the person going to jail.
Shelters have the issue where people don't want them near where they live (for often justifiable reasons) but obviously they have to go somewhere.
We did it with state institutions, which were supposed to be replaced by community mental health centers but that never happened. And then we did it with jail overcrowding reduction, where we didn’t set up adequate recidivism reduction programs.
Before the recent pivot to tough on crime, a lot of sentencing reform was started by Republican led states, simply because jail costs a lot of money.
There's already plenty of invisible homeless people living out of a car that shower in the gym. They aren't a public nuisance and there should be structures where someone like that can get help from.
But the actual homeless problem are the drug addicts and beggars that are a public nuisance. There's no solution to that problem other than moving them against their will, is there?
It shouldn't be a crime exactly to set up a tent in a park because you're homeless, but if you then refuse to get help from society to fix the underlying issue, that's not acceptable. Can't have it both ways.
If you wanted to find a shelter bed for every single person on the street in a major city like San Francisco right now, that’s not possible. And that’s just the physical space, not even the medical staff or caseworkers you would want to handle those. And you need those in jail too, because corrections officers can’t and don’t want to manage mental health episodes.
Californian jails were at 200%+ capacity as recently as ten years ago until courts ordered that constituted cruel and inhumane punishment. Now most counties are around max capacity.
In some states like Washington, mental health is so under capacity that even the willing do not have spaces to be admitted into, even accounting for the people whose insurance would pay for something like that.
If you appear to be sleeping, staff will check on your welfare, and wake you up.
https://www.spl.org/about-us/policies/community-use-agreemen...
Ask google "is the ethos of libraries to help the homeless"
Here's what it says: The core ethos of libraries is to provide universal, equitable access to information, resources, and safe spaces for all members of a community, including people experiencing homelessness. While public libraries are not specifically designed to be homeless shelters or social service agencies, their foundational commitment to inclusivity means they naturally serve as a vital lifeline for marginalized populations.
This has always been the case.
The problem with reimagining the role of publicly funded institutions and ascribing a new "ethos" to them that is not supported by the public is that funding gets cut and libraries get shut down.
If you want to know the original ethos of libraries, it was to disseminate knowledge at low cost to members of the community. Not to be socially inclusive. Not to make people feel welcome. Not to provide "safe spaces". But to provide access to knowledge. By subverting this ethos, we have also subverted a lot of the funding model and political support, which is why libraries are having a difficult time right now.
People sleeping in every car park at parks and beaches etc
I'm a night person with bad insomnia so I often go for drives or walks at night and a lot of my favourite places to go are now heavily populated by people sleeping in their cars
The homeless situation isn't quite that bad where I am in Perth's suburbs, but there was a guy living out of his 4WD in a local shopping center carpark for a while. He had a prominent sign about his situation asking for money, but to his credit he was offering to do things in return (he helped a family member with a deflated tire once). Many of the homeless in Perth city seem to be mental health cases though, where a skilled job providing an income that could support themselves is unlikely.
It is unreasonable to allow library patrons to make it unsafe for anyone, particularly children, but that has become the de facto standard in many areas. There are a lot of libraries I would not allow my kids to be in by themselves.
https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/public-libra...
Libraries have become obsolete as the public’s media consumption patterns have changed. The premise of the public library system was that knowledge would be made freely accessible so that it couldn’t be gatekept by elites. In practice, however, most libraries have turned into the fiefdoms of the librarians who manage them; these librarians will appeal to the access-to-knowledge premise the institutions were built on only to turn around and tut at patrons who expect the facilities to be clean, quiet, and dedicated to accessing knowledge.
Librarians don’t want to be put out of the job, so they have redirected funding into operating as community centers. Patrons also abuse the spaces to use them as remote offices and daycares. All three practices result in a degraded experience for those who are still interested in using libraries as libraries.
On the one hand, a quiet, unobtrusive cafe in the library seems nice.
On the other hand, I like the library precisely because it has so little of the advertising/commercial bullshit of every day.
A cafe AND a bookstore trying to sell you stuff feels over the line.
I'm finding that libraries in the UK outside of big cities are resembling those in the article, just nowhere near as popular, and with a more pedestrian book selection
The first example, Takeo City library, wasn't opened by Tsutaya in 2013. That's a public (government) library that already existed from 2000, remodeled, and when reopening in 2013 they partnered with Tsutaya so they could have a small books/stationery shop in the library. There's a Starbucks too... I think Tsutaya might be managing part of the library, but it's not like they opened a library.
Seems like it's a program that Tsutaya is doing around the country, some sort of public/private arrangements where they do management and they add a small shop. I have mixed feelings about it, and I hope the libraries don't depend on Tsutaya's funding. For me libraries should be a totally public endeavor, and their decisions on policies or titles shouldn't be on risk because of funding pressure.
A couple links in English...
https://www.publiclibrariesnews.com/users/guest-posts/the-cc...
https://publishingperspectives.com/2015/10/in-japan-a-gorgeo...
Tsutaya has been trying to re-invent itself because yea, it's main businesses, video rental, video/DVD sales, and music CD sales died to digital/streaming. It's not clear it's succeeding. It's unclear how they are doing. They pivoted to bookstore + starbucks + luxury stationery + lifestyle goods. Recently they've been trying co-working spaces "Share Lounge", you can pay by the hour or get monthly subscriptions. Whether this will prevent them from dying is not clear at all.
As for libraries, yes, turning them into community centers sounds great!
That said, I think the blog post is jumping to lots of unfounded conclusions.
That said, the only Tsutaya share lounge I've seen was basically a glorified Starbucks, which is not so appealing.
Its ironic
> Walter Mitty: Are you going to take it?
> Sean O'Connell: Sometimes I don't. If I like a moment, for me, personally, I don't like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it.
> Walter Mitty: Stay in it?
> Sean O'Connell: Yeah. Right there. Right here.
it only takes one to ruin a beautiful spot.
it also means the only people to see it are ones worthy enough to have found it on their own. I like that. I would share with like minded others but only if I trust them.
shame I find it hard to motivate myself to grow my social circle, there should be a club maybe I should make one, but noone would want to join it lol not knowing what cool stuff we could share
I mean I even discover things that would blow my mind and then I realise most people would say something like " oh thats odd or naughty I dont like you or that", as in maybe I find a river with huge lilypads that I can take a nap on. I just know the most of the readers would be annoyed for some reason and might even do something that would bring negative attention to it and get the river closed or studied or something that would remove it from the environment. I just feel surrounded by narow minded idiots, and a few highly intelligent psychos.
I feel that in some cases I would only share info if I was paid but then noone would never even think to ask me.
Which is weird. As I could do with a dollar for a cup of coffee. Who knows. I probably wouldnt even do it for money.
There is a private engineering library I visited in TN (anyone can drop in during business hours) that aims to preserve books that engineers used before everything became computer assisted.
At least in California, libraries often have a community run used bookstore whose proceeds are used to help the library run community programming.
Wouldn't have ever thought of it as a meeting place for user groups but they are starting to actively encourage it. I saw it as a very positive development. During COVID they advertised that anyone could use their parking lot for the free Wi-Fi. They must have had the coverage cause the rather large parking lot was packed. They must have tuned it because I sure can't get coverage in most of the parking lots of the fast food franchises where most of their customers these days only use drive-thru.
That reminds me that there is a library that I believe became a bit viral on social media and now it seems like it receives so many visitors to the surrounding area and it is still quiet, but it is funny because it seems way more crowded and there's way more movement that I remember in the past.
That's why with this post, I sort of wonder whether this is something that these towns really want to have. I am under the impression that in Japan, they generally want visitors, but then they probably end up with issues from people not knowing what to do and even behaving badly.
One thing that I don't like about American culture is that people are a little too hesitant about adding 'retail' into publicly-owned spaces. There's a reflexive attitude of that being A Bad Thing, even though most Americans who visit, say, Japan, really appreciate the various shops and kiosks they have in transit stations over there.
I also really enjoyed in Germany when at the top of some hike there'd be an inn+restaurant, something Americans seem to treat as nearly anathema.
My local library has an indepenently run coffee kiosk out front, the Council (local govt) own the facility and lease it to the operator, and presumably have some lease terms about allowable signage and branding.
I'd probably feel differently if it was a mega franchise like Starbucks or McCafe right at the entrance of a civic building.
I would too. It would be in the government's interest to chose an operator and lease out space, but only if it were done in the most fair manner possible. I have no clue about such matters, I confess, but I would not want to see the idea politicized; as in only certain people can apply, or preferences given to certain classes. Perhaps a little contentious in the short run, but in the long term it would be better.
And yes, alas, if it's Starbucks that has the best deal, then so be it. In fact, playing devil's advocate, what IF Starbucks said we'll give you 100% of our profits from this location on the sale of beverages?
Probably best that the library gets the money from leasing the space, and let's the local operator earn whatever they can.
This means you can't for example have both the train operators and the food places pay rent to some third party that owns the station, it has to be the transit company owning the station to benefit from the footfall to it
> If you are, I suspect you already do this: when you travel abroad, you find yourself walking into a local bookstore.
> I do it everywhere, not only in Japan but also abroad. My shelves hold some Chinese and Russian books even though I cannot read a word of them. A bookstore is one of the best places to understand the local culture: what people there are curious about, what they worry about, what they love.
This sounds more like a fetish for physical books to me? I find it bizarre myself, books are just knowledge containers, if you can't read them...what's the point?
Lots of fun to be had wandering about, and unless you're looking at a thing where the script is really indecipherable you can kinda figure out what the topic du jour is even in foreign languages.
It's fun to look at book covers and imagine what's in the contents too.
For you, that's the case. Books can also be a souvenir of a time and place or a person or even just an objet d'art.
One example is the family bible that's passed down from one generation to the next. That book might contain handwriting of your grand parents recording the birth of your mom. Surely you can see how that might be special to somebody?
A personal artifact is a much different thing from some random book at a bookstore (personally, I'd rather explore the sights, take photographs, and make my own memories, not come back with someone else's). I also personally own thousands of books, they are a pain in the ass, and every day I consider liquidating most of them in favor of ebooks. I have too many to even consider treating them as art.
My favorite is Kolejka, a Polish game about queuing at nearly empty stores during communism.
Found myself in Taitung (along the much less densely populated, remote east coast) with several inches of rain forecast. Spent the day at the Taitung County Public Library [0] and it was a very pleasant public space which had more tourists than patrons!
Shots of the interior for anyone interested (surprisingly Scandinavian): https://youtu.be/gq8xlk_JEG4?t=108
Very boring indeed (but the covers are nice I guess).
Is Taiwan similar?
Happily in practice it has turned out to be great, and the combined space operates really effectively as a community ‘third space’. Obviously because of the private sector aspect of this there’s a significant risk in terms of how sustainable it is, but moderated somewhat by the council owning the actual building both live in.