My Library Idea

As many people know, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has proposed, among MANY other things, closing down 11 branches of Philly's Free Library system. This is in the face of huge current and looming budget deficits, projected to exceed a billion dollars in the next five years.

Mayor Nutter has always been a HUGE supporter of libraries, so I have no doubt he deems them necessary, but he's still taking a lot of heat for this particular part of his cost-cutting/revenue-increasing proposal. He's especially taking heat for removing reliable, free access to the internet from poor neighborhoods, and people are (correctly) making the argument that the elimination of modern libraries makes the digital divide harder to overcome. Furthermore, people use library computers to do everything from attaining some technological literacy to searching for jobs.

What's interesting is that most of the arguments against the library closures are about the computers, not the books (Nutter has said he will increase bookmobile service to neighborhoods losing libraries, though bookmobiles, while better than nothing, are more suited for sparse rural areas than dense urban ones in my opinion). I'm wondering if there isn't another halfway compromise the city could make:

Free internet cafes. What if the library opened up a branch with NO BOOKS? What if there were smaller branches of the Free Library of Philadelphia that were essentially public internet cafes? They would be smaller and less expensive to run, and still provide what seems to me to be the majority of the benefits that protesters are worried about losing in these branch closings.

Now, I'm a big fan of books too, but during what must be a relentlessly pragmatic period (in a city that already has more libraries per capita than almost any other major American city, by the way), maybe library-based free internet cafes (heck, you don't even need the cafe part) would work well as a compromise.

Thoughts?