Walking up Madison Avenue during January\u2019s polar vortex, I turned the corner onto 39th Street and hit a line of puffy coats, tote bags and young people with wired headphones. I had no idea what they were waiting for until I reached Fifth Avenue and saw that the line ended at the New York Public Library\u2019s front door.<\/p>\n
We had opened the library for a large-scale reading party<\/a> for the first time. A data analyst had come from Queens to read poetry. A teacher had made the trip from the Bronx. More than a thousand people filed in. There weren\u2019t enough chairs, and we ended up turning hundreds of people away. I ended up on the floor with a romance novel involving a barista pining over a beefy hockey player.<\/p>\n This was not an anomaly. More New Yorkers are borrowing books from the New York Public Library today than 15 years ago; borrowing is up 27 percent since 2010. And yet America is facing a book-reading crisis.<\/p>\n I\u2019m the chief librarian at the New York Public Library. In nearly 30 years of leading libraries across four U.S. cities, I\u2019ve seen this decline up close. To be sure, one part of the solution is finding more effective ways to teach children to read in the first place. But teaching people to read and building a world where they can do so are different problems. Throwing our phones in the lake can\u2019t bring about that world, but designing the conditions for reading will.<\/p>\n In the 19th century, America began to build a national network of free public libraries in nearly every community. And then almost overnight, Google could answer any question, and Amazon could deliver any book. Who needed a building full of them?<\/p>\n Instead of disappearing, libraries remained indispensable, just not for reading and books. In community after community, local libraries filled society\u2019s gaps. Computer classes, voter registration, literacy programs, social services, job training. It was important work that came with little new money. The first thing to get squeezed was the books.<\/p>\n Then came a harder truth. Libraries themselves were throwing up barriers to reading. In 2019 the Chicago Public Library<\/a> found that its overdue fine policy had created a two-tiered system. In the city\u2019s lower-income South District, one-third of cardholders were barred from borrowing because they owed $10 or more in fines and fees. On the more affluent North District, that share dropped to roughly one-sixth. A few dollars could lock an 8-year-old out of the library.<\/p>\n That October, Chicago became the largest city in America to eliminate fines for overdue materials<\/a>. Three weeks later, returns of overdue books were up 240 percent<\/a>. Within a year, 111,000 patrons<\/a> renewed or replaced their library cards. From 2019 to 2021, major library systems across the country \u2014 including those of Dallas<\/a>, Denver<\/a>, San Francisco<\/a> and New York City<\/a> went late-fee-free.<\/p>\n When the Covid pandemic closed library doors, we told ourselves that reading would simply move online. For wealthier communities with home broadband, it did. For communities where people have slower internet service or none at all, it didn\u2019t. Only when libraries reopened, when people could walk in and pull a spine off a shelf, did the numbers start recovering.<\/p>\n When libraries reinvested in books, the gains were larger. The Harris County Public Library in Texas invested early in digital lending when many systems had not. Checkouts grew from one million to seven million<\/a> in seven years. At the New York Public Library, as part of a special, limited-time program this past January, we turned on unlimited digital access<\/a> for Rachel Reid\u2019s Game Changers novels, including the best seller \u201cHeated Rivalry.\u201d Normally, readers would have had to wait months for such a popular title to be available for their e-readers. Instead, 40,000 people downloaded the books in three weeks, and thousands of new patrons registered for library cards.<\/p>\n Other countries have gone further. Last year Denmark\u2019s government<\/a> announced a plan to eliminate the highest book tax<\/a> in the world, citing its reading crisis as the reason; Argentina exempts books<\/a> from tax, alongside bread, milk and medicine; Italy introduced a policy in 2016 that gave every 18-year-old a 500-euro cultural voucher<\/a>, and 70 percent of it was spent on books<\/a>; France, Germany and Spain<\/a> followed with vouchers of their own.<\/p>\n America did not build its library system by accident. In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin founded the Library Company<\/a> because he believed a free country required citizens who could think, reason and govern themselves. A century and a half later, Andrew Carnegie (and later his foundation) funded 1,681 libraries<\/a> across the country, this time as free spaces built on the condition that towns would maintain them. By 2010, there were over 17,000<\/a> public library branches and bookmobiles. A democracy needs its people to read, and it is society\u2019s job to make that possible \u2014 the same reason we have public schools, water systems and the electric grid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Walking up Madison Avenue during January\u2019s polar vortex, I turned the corner onto 39th Street and hit a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[14809,91665,91664,91666,128,130,129,17329,66],"class_list":["post-208661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-books-and-literature","tag-education-k-12","tag-libraries-and-librarians","tag-new-york-public-library","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-taxation","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}