Retorts

Long Live Libraries

I read with gratitude and pleasure the robust reply by Mike Hamblyn to the suggestion that the Internet can replace libraries [Viewpoint, July]. I might humbly suggest a couple of further reasons for the retention of paper versions of books and documents:

• If a pile of library books is unavailable, how can I disguise the unaesthetic, dust-enticing gap between my mattress base and the floor?
• My puny musculature is unable to hold a computer monitor in front of my eyes, a keyboard horizontalish on my stomach and simultaneously breathe productively while managing to curl on a sunny couch in the space left by the cat.

I question, however, Mike Hamblyn's proposal that television is the reason for disruption of communities. TV, in fact, provides a unity of experience and conversation subjects; it was thus with radio once upon a time.

Rather, I surmise that neighbourliness withered with the advent of the supermarket and the demise of the corner shop where locals were encountered and gossip compared.

John Evans, Christchurch