Some people recently have said that “you can get everything that’s in a library from the internet” now, so we don’t need libraries.

As someone with many decades of experience with both libraries and the internet, and everything both of them have to offer, I’m calling out this statement as 100 percent FALSE. Let me explain why libraries will always have more to offer than the internet does now, and ever will.

Don’t think I’m dissing the internet. I practically live on it. I’ve been online since the early 90s. Since before there was a World Wide Web. Since “the internet” consisted of university and corporate hubs, Usenet, bulletin boards and IRC chat. Since I had to access it with a dial-in modem I stuck my (landline) phone receiver into, and 2800 baud was an upgrade. I build computers. I was writing code in the 1980s. I learned HTML in one weekend and put up my first website in 1997. I’m so good at researching online, that I joke, “if I can’t find it, it’s not on the internet.” It’s almost true.

“Social media” is NOT “the internet”. If every money-grubbing, algorithm-driven, ad-serving social media platform went down today, “the internet” would still be enormous, fully operational and open for business. I love the internet.

But it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what libraries–of all kinds, not just public ones–offer.

First of all, for everything that libraries do in services, assistance, teaching, community events and so on–all those things involving direct human interaction–the internet is mostly useless. Yes, you have things like online conferences and classes and telehealth and whatnot, and those help more people participate…but they aren’t substitutes for face-to-face in-person reality. And they never will be–especially for children.

As far as information: the internet only has what has been digitized and made available online. This is a tiny, tiny drop in the ocean of books, periodicals, news, factual information and records that exist off-line. Whether you can get something online depends on
(a) whether somebody wanted to take the time to digitize it
(b) whether somebody wanted to pay to digitize it and pay to make it available online
(c) whether there is enough general interest in something to put it online

Millions and millions of books never are available online. Children’s picture books in particular aren’t easily available online (full disclosure: I convert picture books to ebooks). Old and classic works aren’t available online. Millions of classic comics aren’t available online. I could go on and on.

Public records? They’re online but only go back so far. Then you have to go look at the paper documents, or microfilm, in person. And some things will never be put online for confidentiality reasons (and you wouldn’t want them to be).

Online materials are ephemeral. I can’t tell you how much has been lost because someone just didn’t want to maintain a website or database anymore, or someone died, or the ISP pulled the plug.

Yes, you can find a lot of incredibly helpful information and how-to material online. I always look for YouTube tutorials for projects. Full disclosure: I’m not just a Wikipedia user, I’m a Wikipedia editor.

But online information isn’t curated in any way. You’re on your own. If a library buys, say, a DIY book for home repairs, they’ve chosen it based on reviews and ratings and actually looking at the book. You don’t know whether that YouTube video or webpage is correct or crap. Increasingly, much of these are AI generated and not only crap, but full of dangerous errors.

But here’s the most important thing: whatever the internet does have, IT’S NOT FREE.

You don’t get an internet connection for free. You have to pay for it. Or somebody pays for it and you mooch off them. Plus, you need a device to access the internet on. My Xfinity-Comcast costs $911 a year JUST for high speed internet–no cable TV or phone. I can access the internet on my phone…sort of…but my cell phone isn’t free, either.

Then when I get online, not everything there is free. More and more, you pay a subscription fee to access video, news, journal archives, academic papers, podcasts and other things. $5.99 a month, $12.99 a month…it adds up fast.

What does all this cost you at a public library? Practically nothing. You can even access the internet at the library. You can get it all–for practically nothing.

I say “practically nothing” because, as I’m sure someone is saying, “but it’s not free because we pay taxes for it!” Yep, we do. How much do we pay for the Beals in taxes?

Let’s set the school budget and school state aid aside and just look at the town budget and the town revenues: property tax, excise tax, fees, and so on.

In FY25, the town side of the budget (everything except the school budget) was $18,409,475. The Beals Memorial Library’s budget was $268,000, which is 1.45 percent of the total town budget. The town’s revenue from all sources was $18,966,002. Of that our property and excise taxes made up 85.7 percent. So these taxes paid for 85.7 percent of the Beals’ budget. This means that 1.41 percent of property and excise taxes went to the Beals budget in FY25.

So, for every $100 in property and excise tax you paid, $1.41 funded the Beals. In my case, I paid $2,660 in property taxes and excise tax. So I paid $37.51 to fund the Beals.

I would have paid more than that to rent, on a streaming service, the several DVDs I checked out at the Beals absolutely for free, including one I got on interlibrary loan. They aren’t available to stream for free anywhere. Add that to everything else I got from the Beals, including things I used in my work to earn money, and that $37.51 is the best investment in my budget.

So…$900+ a year for internet service, vs $37.51 for the Beals Memorial Library, which has both full internet service plus access to a wealth of things that aren’t, and will never be, online…which one seems like a bargain to you?

The internet is great–as far as it goes and for what it can do. But libraries are priceless. And libraries are way, way cheaper than the internet. You have to use both of them, a LOT, to really appreciate that.