Ādisōke [Ottawa's New Central Library] | U/C

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by 1overcosc

As a general rule of thumb, in North America 1995 is a significant date of birth cutoff. Generally, people born after 1995 are "full digital"--they generally grew up not playing outside, and never knew a world without the internet or ebooks or cell phones or computers in every house. This group, called Generation Z, has a large number of interesting traits based on this--for example, these people are far more likely to have very bad handwriting (most in this age group do not know how to write cursive at all), and generally, aren't that into paper books.

By contrast, those born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, despite generally growing up in the digital age, still have a large proportion of their numbers reading paper books and writing notes in cursive. And while probably not the majority, old school librairies still have a decent enough following from this cohort.

The death of the traditional library from attrition of paper book people is a long ways off yet.

Even if 1995 is the cutoff (and given that e-books already have a 30% market share that seems a little surprising), those kids will be pushing 30 by the time the new library opens and pushing 70 by the time the building reaches the tear down or renovate stage, so it makes little sense to build a library counting on the long term future of the stacks. Also I wonder how many of the p-book readers are still using the stacks (as opposed to reserving online) so the stacks may go extinct before the paper books do.