This post suggests a historical precedent for the current challenges of digital transformation and public libraries: the shift from feudal to merchant power in the middle part of the second millennia.

In his books Technics and Civilization Lewis Mumford writes about how technics (the total technological capacity of a society) and capitalism developed and influenced each other.  Early in his book he talks about the nature of feudalism and how control of the land gave certain wealthy people domain over businesses like “glass-making, coal-mining and iron-works, right down to modern times.”  However, “mechanical inventions lent themselves to exploitation but the merchant classes.  The incentive to mechanization lay in the greater profits that could be extracted through the multiplied power and efficiency of the machine” (26)

Feudal land owners may provide a useful, if unlikely, historical analogue to public libraries.  Both were defined by their specific location; their physical geography and relationship to people nearby.  (Obviously the analogy has nothing to do with the nature of the relationship as feudal leaders subjugated their neighbors for profit while libraries seek to uplift their community.)  

Does Mumford provides a warning for the present application of eBooks in public libraries?

“The handicraft industries in both Europe and other parts of the world were recklessly destroyed by machine products, even when the latter were inferior to the thing they replaced: for the prestige of improvement and success and power was with the machine, even when it improved nothing, even when technically speaking it was a failure.” (27)

There is a chance that libraries and communities will adopt eBooks as a technology even if the thing it is replacing is better due to perceptions of prestige.  Mumford provides precedent to suggest that even if society decides to replace libraries with eBooks there is no guarantee that eBooks will provide a better service to the community than what came before.