Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

In case you missed it, last month Forbes published an op-ed that stoked so much public outrage that the editors felt compelled to delete it. Libraries, it argued, should be replaced by Amazon to save taxpayers money. Yet Panos Moudoukoutas’s piece was based on a common misconception: that libraries are only repositories of books, whereas in truth, they provide myriad other services—and generate an enormous return on investment. To bust the myth that libraries could ever be replaced by a for-profit enterprise, we hit the stacks ourselves and spoke to librarian Amanda Oliver about the services that libraries don’t get enough credit for.Go beyond the episode:Read Amanda Oliver’s stirring defense of the libraryHere are some of the Twitter highlights in response to Moudoukoutas’s op-ed (be sure to grab some popcorn)Read Ray Bradbury’s 1971 essay, “How, Instead of Being Educated in College, I was Graduated From Libraries,” fittingly published in the Wilson Library BulletinExplore the DC Public Library’s Punk Archiv