Don't misread the point of a library

It is a haven for children who are bright, inquisitive and want to explore fiction and factual books

It seems like only a couple of years since I gave my friend Isabel one of my children's books. She was a good reader, according to her mother, and she was certainly appreciative, laughing at the right bits and asking intelligent questions about the characters and where they came from.

Like many children, Isabel liked telling as well as reading stories, and her mother, the writer Louisa Young, encouraged her to write down those about her favourite character Charlie Ashanti, a boy who could talk to lions. Mother and daughter began to work together as a family team and the result, Lionboy, the first part of a trilogy, was recently offered to publishers.

It seems as though it is going to be rather successful. In the teeth of hot competition, Puffin acquired Lionboy for what has been described as "a substantial six-figure sum" and plan to make it the sensation of the autumn. Bidding has begun for film rights and American publishers are queuing up, chequebooks in hand. Already the joint authors are being profiled in the national press. Isabel seems about to become a bestselling author – not a bad achievement since she's only 10 years old.

Delighted as I am for both of them, news like this can be disconcerting for the professional writer. Over the past decade, one of the cliché complaints of any writer over 40 is that publishers have started behaving like record company executives and become obsessed with youth, newness and good looks. Experience is something of a liability. A glance through the pages of any magazine devoted to the business of books will confirm that the ideal author is a good-looking graduate with, if possible, some kind of funky and promotable background.

With Isabel's success, this process moves to a giddy level. The more ambitious literary agents will shift their attention from university magazines and creative-writing courses to literacy hour at primary schools. Parents will be devoting sharper editorial attention to their children's stories. The Writer's Handbook will become required reading for literary-minded preteens. Authors visiting schools and libraries, as I have been doing in Northern Ireland this week, will become edgily aware that today's enthusiastic readers could now be tomorrow's professional rivals.

Alarming as the trend may be, it is also a well-timed reminder of the power of fiction. This week the Government announced a 10-year plan for libraries – in itself something of a breakthrough after years of neglect under Tory governments – pointing out that more people visit libraries every week than attend football matches or the cinema. There are over 400 million library visits every year.

But numbers are declining and there are fears that the image of libraries is more 1950s than the 21st century. The answer, according to the Department of Culture, is to improve the way they are designed and make them more user-friendly and populist. Lottery funding already helps to pay for internet access in all public libraries; now there shall even more computers with lessons being offered in the arts of texting, sending e-mails and surfing the web. Like the flasher bookshops, libraries will have coffee bars and be open during the evening.

Sales trends will also be reflected on the shelves. Specialised, sophisticated or oddball titles will be replaced by the blockbusters and bestsellers of the moment.

There is something distinctly ominous about all this – the emphasis on new technology, on reading as a life skill and, above all, on the sacrifice of books deemed to be of minority interest in favour of crass, lowest-common-denominator crowd-pleasers that can be found in the local newsagent's. The essential point of a library is precisely that, unlike an internet café or a money-minded bookseller, it is not concerned with turnover, consumer trends and market share. It is a haven for children, such as Isabel Young, who are bright, inquisitive and creative and want to explore a wide variety of what fiction and factual books can offer.

In the rush to play the capitalist game in which the footfall of customers is the only indicator of success, it is the serious, bookish child and adult – who want libraries to offer what the outside world of gossip and instant gratification cannot – who are in danger of being betrayed.

In the past few years, there has been a trend among local authorities towards stocking a smaller number of titles that will be displayed more attractively, but the truth is that populism can be taken too far. A book that is only taken out once or twice a year may still be worth keeping on the shelf.

While community groups eager to learn about websites are important, as are the illiterate, socially excluded and generally hopeless, one of the primary functions of a library is to offer bright, inquisitive and eccentric readers a lifeline of literature. This view may be deemed élitist or traditionalist, but it is none for the worse for that.

terblacker@aol.com