Libraries

Originally to my mother who is a bibliophile who loves libraries as much as a person can.

This question was posed to patrons of the library today. Can you imagine Seattle without its libraries? I can. It’s actually made very easy by SPL itself. My local library shut down on Jan 25, 2025 until “Late 2026”. My closest library is Green Lake, a 1.5 mile walk each way. If you only go to the library twice every 6 months like I do, that isn’t that big a deal. If you need the exercise or have a bus pass, you can just spend the time. But even when my library was open, I found it to be a pretty minor landmark. Because I have Suzzallo, Allen, Engineering library, Math library, Music library, East Asian library, and libraries I don’t even know about I go there. I’m kinda spoiled for libraries. I do use the online features of SPL quite a lot – the audiobook, an ebook here and there, Kanopy, the newspaper access, and the search feature.

This dystopian vision allows us to consider what kind of world we want to live in.

If SPL went away, I would notice but I would also have UW libraries, bookstores, little libraries, and the internet. I also have a gigantic collection of books that I could easily read for the rest of my life. But my book reading neighbors who don’t have borrowing permission from UW or live too far away would be wrecked. So what would my book reading neighbors do? First off it’s weird to imagine the multi-million dollar libraries sitting empty instead of being used as a public place for reading. If we could use that space, we could even put books in there. I don’t know if anyone steals from libraries. I suppose I could ask a librarian. In this future I would also expect most of the local libraries to go broke. The logic being if it affects Seattle, it probably affects Moses Lake.

This tremendous loss might be a temporary benefit to authors who will find people buying books to read – but this benefit would be short lived. As readers prioritize their choices because they can’t borrow, they will never encounter authors. As the authors find themselves with no audience, they will have to provide free volumes (see Kodansha and Shonen Jump). As those authors take readers away from more established authors, the more established authors will themselves pick up the flashlight (avoiding a certain word here to avoid certain visuals). That’s assuming that piracy doesn’t just explode like it did in 2000 with music. As a response to piracy, you’ll probably see something similar to youtube and spotify pop up – free books with ads or monthly subscription. The loss of hardcover and paperback for digital. And a reenvisioning of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

But this weird dystopia is already afoot. As we head further and further into a digital distribution model that even the libraries embrace, we find ourselves closer and closer to a world without paperback and hardcover. Think about places without local libraries. How do they get books? I am not going to pretend I know. I do know how many books I’ve downloaded because I simply did not see the difference between downloading and borrowing from the library. My digital collection is dwarfed by my physical collection only because I was forced to buy so many textbooks in college in 2000. I never sold them because I felt a strong sense of dread. Because libraries do not stock these type of books, if I sold them I would never have access to them again.

It’s weird to see SPL with their hand out. I counted the emails I’ve received from them asking for money in the past year: 27.

Considering their wording, it sounds like the federal government used to give libraries like SPL a significant amount of money and are no longer doing that. Asking Gemini about this, I got a very wishy-washy answer. Wouldn’t it be nice if SPL just said straight up in a document? Then we could just find a way to bridge that gap. Maybe I should ask a librarian.

It’s weird to see what our society looks like. Because if reducing the funding of libraries across the nation is the plan it’s a short-term one. This feels like a slam dunk sort of thing. Do wealthy people consider libraries to be a critical public good? How much should each person pay into the system? We already pay a substantial amount to the library in taxes. If you saw Coeur d’Alene shutting down its public libraries, would you chip in to save it?

But this isn’t complete without doing some research. From SPL Foundation’s website, I found their Federal Tax Identification Number: 91-1140642. It’s important to understand that the SPL Foundation is not the SPL. The SPL Foundation is the non-profit that begs for money. The SPL is the library funded by the City and the SPL Foundation. Their 990 (which I found independently) is not any help. It does tell us a lot about how SPL Foundation works though. These numbers would help someone determine what the non-profit is doing. Indeed we find names and information about who runs what and who was paid in their top level.

I called up SPL and they hooked me up with a research librarian. He helped me find the information I was looking for. The first asset the research librarian found was the 2024 Operations Plan. This tells us how their money was spent and source. Do you see how there is no federal funding in Figure 3? It’s not a perfectly clear picture. Then he found what he thought was a pretty good document: The Adopted Budget for 2025-2026

Because the numbers from that document add up to the numbers we expect, we can see that SPL is funded by:

The city
The SPL Foundation

We the city of Seattle fund our library with the outrageous taxes we pay. If we had decided to take large federal funding, we would be looking for more funding or cutting services. This might be incorrect. I don’t know what is going on besides these three documents and the conversation I had with the research librarian. He offered to get me in touch with someone who could help. I’m still waiting on that contact.

It’s quite clear that if the city council and mayor decide, they can reduce the library’s budget dramatically and it would be impossible for the SPL Foundation to make up the difference. The result would be similar to the vision above. This would be a disaster. But the email I received from the SPL Foundation is misleading at best. Let’s read the part that I have issue with.

“Recent federal actions pose cuts to library funding. City and state revenues are struggling. And our community partners and staff are feeling the impact of policies that go against our values. A strong public library benefits everyone, and I’m writing today to encourage you to make a gift to the library to keep it strong.”

In this email entitled “Can you imagine Seattle without its libraries?” from Brian Lawrence (CEO of SPL Foundation), we see a pretty obvious tactic being employed – a simple appeal to emotion. SPL’s funding is not being cut at the federal level. There’s no reason to expect the city to cut its funding as the libraries are incredibly popular. The state does not fund the SPL.

The State library is actually in trouble because according to every source I’ve found it gets a lot of federal funding. If the federal government wants to get rid of the Washington State Library (which I didn’t know existed before writing this essay), they probably can. The library is apparently in Tumwater, which is ~70 miles from Seattle, and 5 miles from the capitol of Washington State, Olympia. It appears that their main service are prison libraries. Here in Seattle they have the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library which I walked past every day for years.

Is there any conclusion necessary? Oh I think there’s the obvious one. Yes, yes I can imagine Seattle without its libraries. And no, I don’t need to.

Javantea out.

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