Libri report

Great excitement on the normally placid jiscmail library list lis-link, caused by the publication of a report by an organisation called Libri on the state of Britain's public libraries. Libri, hitherto unknown to many in the library world, were funded by the Laser Foundation to produce the report, which looks at the state of the public libraries in Hampshire.
The report's author, reputed to be a former Waterstones executive, concludes that public libraries should be more like bookshops and are grossly over-manned. This isn't necessarily so; while there's a lot that public libraries can learn from shops in general and booksellers in particular, there remain some important differences between a library and a bookshop. As for staffing, library staff do a lot more than stock work. The job is, in a hackneyed phrase, not about books but about people.
The bookshop boom of recent years has not entirely been a good thing. While it has made a number of people wealthy, the increasingly monopolistic grip of Waterstones and others have further threatened the already difficult position of independent bookshop. Buying a book now is more and more a homogenous and dull experience: a chain book shop in Brighton in no different from one in Penzance.
There's been a lot of press coverage:
See some of it:
The Guardian
The Independent
Daily Telegraph
and the BBC