Trade and Control

This note is part of a series that critiques the cult of literacy in libraries — exposing how reading, writing, and the book have been crowned as the only valid forms of knowledge, while everything else is silenced, excluded, or reshaped to fit the page. Check all the notes in this section's index.

The Hidden Economy of Libraries

Libraries like to present themselves as non-commercial spaces — sanctuaries outside the logic of profit and exchange. But every library operates within an economy: a system of valuation, acquisition, and distribution. Even if no money changes hands at the circulation desk, every book on the shelf was acquired through decisions shaped by scarcity, selection, and legitimacy.

And in this economy, books are the only stable currency.

Collection development plans are built around formats that can be bought, donated, shipped, traded, cataloged, and stored. Consortia negotiate access to licensed databases. Publishers set prices and control supply chains. Gift policies regulate what can be accepted, and what will be discarded. All of it revolves around printed or printable media — material that fits the infrastructure of libraries.

What doesn't fit is excluded.

Not because it lacks knowledge. But because it lacks exchange value.

The Material Bias of Generosity

Libraries often depend on generosity: of donors, partner institutions, interlibrary loan networks. But even generosity is governed by format. A book can be given. A document can be scanned. A PDF can be licensed. These transactions make sense within the economy of the literate world.

But what happens when a community offers a song? A ceremony? A gesture passed through generations? What happens when a person offers their memory, their pain, their joy — but cannot translate it into print?

Usually, nothing happens.

These offerings are simply not in the right format to be received. There is no donation protocol for breath. No acquisition workflow for oral testimony offered in the moment. No way to "accept" a silence unless someone has already transcribed and explained it.

In a literocentric system, generosity flows only one way — from those who can convert knowledge into text, into ISBNs, into digital objects. Everyone else becomes invisible, or worse, illegible.

Catalogs of Ownership

To acquire is not just to receive. It is to own, to catalog, to integrate. A book that enters a collection becomes part of the institutional body. It is tagged, shelved, numbered, monitored. It becomes legible and retrievable within a controlled system.

But oral or embodied knowledge resists this process. It cannot be numbered without being altered. It cannot be retrieved without being displaced. Its value lies in its context, its presence, its flow — not in its extraction.

This incompatibility is not just technical. It is ontological. It reveals that the library economy is not neutral. It does not simply gather knowledge. It transforms it. It demands translation into a mode of ownership that privileges writing — and punishes anything that refuses to conform.

As a result, collection growth becomes a form of epistemic gatekeeping. Only what can be acquired according to established procedures is considered worthy of preservation. Only what fits can be valued. The rest is excluded, not by policy, but by infrastructure.

Beyond the Book Economy

If libraries are to support real knowledge pluralism, they must question the foundation of their own material logic. They must ask whether the economy they operate in truly serves memory — or merely reinforces the dominance of print.

This does not mean discarding the book. It means dethroning it as the only coin of value. It means building systems that can receive knowledge in many forms — even if those forms cannot be bought, owned, or cataloged in the traditional sense.

To welcome different knowledge systems, libraries must invent different forms of reciprocity. They must learn to accept what cannot be traded. They must learn to honor contributions that are not objects, but presences.

Until then, the gift of memory will remain unreceived — not because it wasn't offered, but because the library never learned how to open its hands.