Like a tired marriage, the relationship between libraries and publishers has long been dull. E-books, however, are causing heartache. Libraries know they need digital wares, but many publishers are too cautious about piracy (盗版) and lost sales to co-operate. Among the big six, only Random House and Harper Collins license e-books with most libraries.

Publishers are wise to be nervous. Owners of e-readers are exactly the customers they need: book-lovers with money. If these people switch to borrowing e-books instead of buying them, what then? Electronic borrowing is awfully convenient. Unlike printed books, which must be checked out and returned to a physical library miles from where you live, book files can be downloaded at home.The files disappear from the device when they are due.

E-lending is not simple, however.There are lots of different and often incompatible (不兼容的) e-book formats, devices and licenses.Most libraries use a company called OverDrive, which secures rights from publishers and provides e-books and audio files in every format. Yet publishers and libraries are worried by OverDrive’s global market dominance, as the company can control fees and conditions. Publishers were annoyed when OverDrive cooperated with Amazon. the world’s biggest online bookseller, last year. Owners of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader who want to borrow e-books from libraries are now redirected to Amazon’s website, where they must use their Amazon account to secure a loan.

According to Pew, an opinion researcher, library users are a perfect market for Amazon. Late last year Amazon introduced its Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which lets its best customers borrow free one of thousands of popular books each month.

Library supporters argue that book borrowers are also book buyers and that libraries are vital spaces for readers to discover new work. Many were cheered by a recent Pew survey, which found that more than half of Americans with library cards say they prefer to buy their c-books.

So publishers keep adjusting their lending arrangements in search of the right balance.

Random House raised its licensing prices earlier this year, and Harper Collins limits libraries to lending its titles 26 times. The story of the library e-book is a nail-biter.

Recently, American President Trump announced his budget. One of the budgets would cut all money to The Institute of Museum and Library services and libraries across the United States. However, as far as I’m concerned, we need to save our libraries.

Libraries provide books and after-school programs for children. They help inspire a life-time love of learning and reading in children of all ages. The knowledge of the books in libraries is not available to the children at school. Without them where will kids with no Internet at home do their homework? Where will kids have a place to study or borrow books after school? Therefore, we need libraries for our kids. We need them so kids can grow up with a place, other than school, where learning and exploration is encouraged. Reading books can benefit children’s minds. Books allow them to imagine.

For adults, libraries serve as a place where they can use the Internet to apply for jobs, get job training, early voting centers as well as book clubs to help make new friends. It can also serve as a place to pick up a book and learn something new. Meanwhile, they can also rent a book and get away from it all.

Libraries save our information for the next generation. When we live in an age of alternative facts, where science is ignored in favor of personal feelings, we need libraries now more than ever. We need them to educate ourselves on the facts. We need them to have strong civic participation.

If you assent to me, you shouldn’t be silent on this issue. You can write or call directly to tell the president to save our libraries. You can also write to both your state Senators (参议员) and your district representative. Let them know this is good issue because all people use public libraries in their daily life.

When I was young, a friend and I came up with a “big” plan to make reading easy. The idea was to boil down great books to a sentence each. “Moby-Dick” by American writer Herman Melville, for instance, was reduced to: “A whale of a tale about the one that got away.” As it turned out, the joke was on us. How could a single sentence convey the essence(精髓) of a masterpiece with over five hundred pages?

Blinkist, a website and an app, now summarizes nonfiction titles in the form of quick takes labeled “blinks” . The end result is more than one sentence, but not by much. Sarah Bakewell’s “At the Existentialist Café” is broken into 11 screens of information; Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” fills 13.

Blinkist has been around since 2012. It calls its summaries “15-minute discoveries” to indicate how long it takes to read a Blinkist summary. “Almost none of us,” the editors assure us, “have the time to read everything we’d like to read.” Well, yes, of course, “So many books, so little time,” declares a poster I once bought at a book market. But I judge the quality of someone’s library by the books he or she has yet to read.

That’s because a book is something we ought to live with, rather than speed through and categorize. It offers an experience as real as any other. The point of reading a book is not accumulating information, or at least not that alone. The most essential aspect is the communication between writer and reader. The idea behind Blinkist, however, is the opposite: Reading can be, should be, measured by the efficient uptake(吸收) of key ideas. No, no, no. What’s best about reading books is its inefficiency.

When reading a book, we need to dive in, let it take over us, demand something of us, teach us what it can. Blinkist is instead a service that changes books for people who don’t, in fact, want to read. A 15-minute summary misses the point of reading; speed-reading with the app isn’t reading at all.