Libraries reading and attention span

So I was listening to a speech by a favorite author of mine where he talks about libraries. The speech can be found it its entirety through this link:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming

But I'll try and pick a few quotes out that I feel best capture the point I think one can make about schools and libraries.

            

"Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realizing that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open."

and

"Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant."

So I was thinking about how I could apply this to teaching, or at the very least the school system. So far there is one resource that (hopefully) all schools have. That is a library. There are good libraries and there are bad libraries but one thing most of them have are books and computers. 

When I was observing I noticed a class utilizing the library and one thing I noticed was the lesson was largely computer based. Not a book on the shelf was used. Now this is not to say they don't use them, I could never really know that, but it got me thinking about my own high school days. During my time in school we had a library and a computer lab. They were separated by the vast hallways of the school. One couldn't, for instance, hop to the library and grab a book then go the the computer lab in say under a minute. There was generally a long trek involved. This amounted to a lengthy time in the computer labs and not a whole lot of time in the library. I think the only solid lesson we ever learned in the library was how to check out books, something we ended up never using as...well we had computers. I often wonder how the invasion of the digital has affected our way or reading. Students today are given millions of choices formed in compact easy to read, easy to access summaries. The problem is that in the digital age of email, text, and internet everything is so short. I worry that this leaves us with a shorter attention span then ones of earlier generations. I've certainly heard this argument made before. 

So I thought about those quotes and I thought about libraries and reading. It's true that the short formed textual readings of the internet age are probably the preferred medium for children in high school and the young adults we find in college. These quotes, and largely this speech, seem to think they work together but I worry that they are actually at war. I described my library and computer lab with a vast distance partly because I feel like that distance exists in between the two mediums of reading. Partly it's out of convenience. A computer is certainly an easier source of information than a book but are we sacrificing endurance for speed? 

I remember in math class we would always learn the hard way to doing a formula before learning the quick way. My teacher would always say it was so we'd learn to appreciate they easy when once we went through the hard way. We went through something like that with the fry readability in class a few weeks ago. I wonder if by skipping the teaching of research and learning through solid books and going straight to the internet are we robbing our students of the oppurtunity to appreciate the hunt for knowledge?

These are just some thoughts I had this week. What do you guys think? (also in theme with my blog, sorry for the long post haha.)