A hopeful and ingenious inspiration. ( )

Although the language can be dense at times, the book offers a look at some quirky and crazy ideas for making libraries more relevant for modern times. I thoroughly enjoyed this exercise in speculation. ( )

If you believe Amazon is the model of the library of the future, this is the book for you. Everyone else will be frustrated by the authors' misunderstanding of what a library actually is. Much of the book builds upon their assumption that libraries are mere accumulations an dispensers of texts, and that the interesting developments of the future will be how much of this can be converted to digital formats, or how to apply the warehouse storage and retrieval technologies of Amazon. Those are indeed questions, but finding the appropriate answers requires a deep understanding of what a library is. Unfortunately, neither author has any practical familiarity with libraries, although they do write about them a great deal, and by all accounts count themselves as fans and supporters. But they have nothing more than an outsider's view of what the library, as institution, actually is. Both are members of the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which collectively (with their colleague, John Palfrey) has inadvertently done much to undermine the value of libraries qua libraries rather than as information dumps, and of librarians. Although Harvard possesses one of the great legacy libraries of the nation, the university has adopted a policy that libraries are too important to be run by actual librarians. Librarians are adequate as functionaries, but major decisions must be made by dilettantes like Berkman Center members who have no actual experience in library administration. If they are serious about thinking the big thoughts about libraries, they should have fewer Internet geeks and law professors, and add some real librarians to its list of directors. Otherwise they'll continue to produce manifestos like this book, full of spirit and energy, but with little actual connection to libraries rather than to the delivery of texts (not the same thing).

That said, the book is well intended if naive, and does contain a few snippets of interesting observations. The writing style is a bit bombastic and overdone. Sentences should rarely go on for six lines, but that seems to be the norm here. ( )

This book does a fantastic job of tearing up the old cultural map by exposing the assumptions we make when we categorise something as ‘library’ or ‘book', opening up connections, excavating the whole cultural process of authorship, readership and exchange and testing the limits of what libraries and books can be. It’s playful, poetic and provocative. ( )