Social Libraries

Singapore's district libraries, termed Community Libraries, are more like Community Drop-in centres. With books. People do go there to read but also just to cool off in the air-con (which is set a couple of degrees too low for long-term comfort), feed babies, read newspapers, do homework with school mates before splitting up to go home, use the wireless Internet access and to borrow books. I go there for the books and sometimes to work, purposes that place me in a minority.

Bishan library is a funky building with a really good collection of books. There are glass protrusions from the front elevation which you can sit in, but it's all hard walls and floor so they're not that great to use. The other odd design decision was to dispense with stairs up to the 2nd floor and use a long ramp. You have to walk further and it's more tiring than stairs. I'm all for accessible buildings but is this a glimpse of the future where all stairs are converted to long, switchback ramps? Maybe they were planning for when we will all own Segways.

Eating, drinking, smoking and using mobile phones are all banned in libraries but Bishan has a decent cafe on the ground floor which annoyingly has the monopoly on the nice tables and chairs. Its round company logo is such a direct rip of Starbucks in a brown color scheme I half expected the place to be called StarBooks. So if you want a nice table and chair you have to stump up for a coffee, espresso or smoothie. It's relatively expensive. Most of the school kids buy a coke and make it last a whole homework session.

I popped into my old library in England a few months back and was struck by how much it had changed since I first used it when it opened 25 years ago. Half of the upstairs was converted into an Internet cafe and the lady handing out tickets casually stated the building was no longer fit for purpose but couldn't be replaced because it was protected. Singaporean libraries are also caught in this transition. Clientèle split roughly into thirds; some just want a cool building to sleep, read a paper or do homework, others want books and the rest just want Internet access. In Sembawang library, you have to watch your step as people plug laptops into power outlets at pillars and just sit on the floor.

All of which highlights the problem with modern libraries. Fifty years ago, they existed as valuable civic amenities when people couldn't necessarily afford books or homes with space for big study tables. Where else could you access a wide range of research and reference material? Librarians were knowledgeable researchers and libraries were impressive civic structures to store physical books. The Internet makes information weightless and volumeless. Library designers are slow to acknowledge they are going the way of high-street banks. Banks used to be impressive stone buildings intended to induce trust and to protect cash. Now there are often just a row of ATMs with most transactions occurring online.

Big Dummies' Guide to Singapore

Maybe I should write a book. It's said that everyone has at least one book in them, although after objective consideration of the slice of humanity I interact with, I lean towards the less ambitious observation by Seth Godin that everyone has at least one blog post in them.

This train of thought was triggered while in the library by a lady sat opposite lady reading one of those yellow and black How To books called "Baby Massage for Dummies". I remember the time when they were the "Big Dummies' Guide to xxx", but perhaps a marketing strategy which belittles your customer's knowledge has limits and the publishers toned it down a notch. The title re-arrangement also avoids the possessive and hence the need for an apostrophe which Lynne Truss made socially embarrassing, is mocked by typographers, has their mis-use cataloged and has a society for their protection.

At least "Big Dummies' Guide to ..." is clearer grammatically. "xxx for Dummies" leaves itself open to syntactically correct possibilities such as "Crash Testing for Dummies", "Standing Still for Dummies", "Modeling Clothes for Dummies". It looks like Wileys, the publisher, had the same thought as there is a "Breastfeeding for Dummies". While I mock the genre slightly, there are over 1,300 titles in the range including Kabbalah, Einstein, Parrots, Adoption, Prostate Cancer & Florida.

I saw the other day that thebookseller.com is holding its annual poll for the oddest book title of the year. At #2 was "How to Write a How to Write Book", that is "Writing Dummies' Guides for Dummies"? Note, they do have Technical Writing, Writing Copy, Writing Children's books, Writing A Romance Novel and Screenwriting but there's clearly an opportunity for someone.

Now I suppose you are wondering what the full list of bad book title contenders were? Okay, here they are:

• I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen
  
• How to Write a How to Write Book
  
• Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues
  
• Cheese Problems Solved
  
• If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs
  
• People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood
  

Tough call.