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Beyond Privatization
In their new book, Ganesh Sitaraman and Anne Alstott treat libraries as just one model of a public institution that can thrive alongside market-based options like bookstores and provide desirable benefits to society more broadly and equitably than the private sector can do alone.
In one of those coincidences that reveal the spirit of the moment, two books appeared last year within weeks of each other celebrating public libraries. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg expanded on the idea of public libraries as an instance of “social infrastructure”—“a powerful way to promote civic engagement and social interaction”—while New Yorker writer Susan Orlean used the story of a 1986 fire that destroyed the Los Angeles Public Library to riff on the…