Have libraries had their day? I hope not. When the last library shuts its doors, boards up its windows and tips its final load of dusty hardbacks into the skip, it will be a desperate day for all who love literature.

Libraries are breeding houses for books, fermenting chambers for readers. Sure, Borders is cheap, and broadband is speedy, but without places where we can gather, browse and borrow free, our reading culture will be cut off at the source and all the Richards and Judys in the world won’t be able to save it.

More often than not it is in a library that we first grasp the thread that leads us into the maze of books, where we can spend the rest of our lives happily wandering. Despite being lucky enough to grow up in a home stuffed with books, it was the novels that I clutched on my way out of Woking library that gave me the first illicit thrill of real reading. The thought that after finishing this Enid Blyton or Judy Blume there were shelves more of them waiting was just too exciting to bear.

And it’s not just children who use libraries: between July 2006 and June 2007, 315 million books were lent. We still use the Public Lending Right’s figures on the most borrowed authors as a barometer of popular taste. Last month many column inches were devoted to the news that the American thrill factory James Patterson had knocked Jacqueline Wilson off the top spot.

Libraries have provided CDs, DVDs, audiobooks and access to the internet for years. They received a further rebranding in 2002, with the first snazzy multimedia Idea Store.

All well and good. But Margaret Hodge’s suggestion that to survive they must become loyalty card-toting, coffee-vending, Amazon-sponsored supermarkets is ludicrous. Libraries need books. Books need libraries. And we need them both.

Tom Gatti is associate books editor at The Times

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