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IT may be just a coincidence, but Mr Cunliffe's suggestion that the Ilkley Library should make at least a passing reference to the Ilkley Literature Festival seems to come at a time when the very future of local authority libraries seems uncertain.

For one thing, council mandarins now get very upset when ignoramuses refer to their high-tech, state-of-the-art learning and media resource centres as mere libraries. Such a linguistic gaffe displays a pitiful lack of awareness of modern public service provision. There is far more to libraries than a few dusty old unopened tomes, gathering dust on the shelves.

Libraries shelves are now groaning with videos, DVDs, CDs, computer games, internet and e-mail interfaces and every other technological distraction designed to make us forget that the products of the local authority education system are too weak from the lack of PE to be able to lift books and too far behind educationally to read them.

If it doesn't have flashing lights, splurging blood and screaming sounds indistinguishable from the real thing, then our children will look elsewhere for their sedentary entertainment.

The last thing council bosses want in libraries are books: they cost a fortune and have to be replaced when they run out. Promoting the Ilkley Literature Festival could be a counter productive step as far as City Hall is concerned. On the other hand, it could be suggested that the trend over the last few years has seen the gradual disappearance of the Ilkley Literature Festival and the emergence of the Ilkley TV Celebrity Festival.

Writing books is not enough. Unless you can be filmed as you verbally abuse the staff in a restaurant kitchen, make housewives swoon in an overheated greenhouse or play driving fast cars with two other middle aged schoolboys, then forget trying to promote your book in Ilkley.

When enough people stop using the library on the basis that there are no books in there which were written after 1954, City Hall can close it down on the basis that the money used to keep it open can be far better wasted elsewhere.

1:27pm Thursday 11th October 2007

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