There's nothing to celebrate in this article. The people whose needs public libraries primarily exist to serve have little need or use for the books in question, while to serve the needs of more specialised users the UK already has a network of national libraries and good academic libraries which, compared to public libraries, are relatively well resourced.
To quote from the article in the Guardian this weekend: "The campaigners, including Jackie Kay, Michael Symmonds Roberts, Simon Armitage and Jeanette Winterson, as well as the former Hacienda DJ Dave Haslam, argued that the book collections were as important as the fabric of the building, rivalled only by the British Library"
Clearly, their intentions are the best, but their premise - that this 'central library' should somehow be comparable to the British Library - is flawed, and likely to result in additional costs to the city council, for no discernible benefit as the outcome remains more or less the same.
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