The British Council Library, Mumbai is set to close its physical premises this year-end. It'll shift to an online avatar. No more browsing and spending time immersed in the company of books. Personally I think it's a great loss. My father used to cite it as an example of serendipity. He would be looking to research a subject and serendipitiously find a really good book on the very topic, on the returned books counter. You don't even have to consciously look for it. Sometimes a book 'attracts' you to itself and happens to be the very subject that interests you greatly. I had that experience (again) today.
The returns counter, to me, is a source for tapping into the collective consciousness of the reading public. It has the pulse of what interests people. A more refined subset of wants and desires, than is reflected by Google's Zeitgeist.
Besides nothing beats the advantage of sitting down with an armload of books and poring over their pages, till you find the perfect book. Now we can have home delivery from an online catalogue. But we won't know what we're asking for untill we read it!
A sad turn of events in the life of a great social institution.
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