Hermione Eyre: We desecrate the nation's libraries at our peril

A disappearance occurred in Waltham Forest this week. An abduction, in fact. The missing, thought to have numbered 239,344, were last seen in St James Library, whence they were dispatched to their final destination, now thought to be Edmonton incinerator and recycling plant.

Waltham Forest council finally admitted on Thursday that they had culled large numbers of books from their library stock (they could not confirm the exact quantity because record-keeping had been so haphazard). Outraged locals are planning to stage a demonstration next Saturday.

I feel a creeping sense of concern that this development represents a wider malaise in our libraries. Excuse me! I used the wrong word. "Library" is thoroughly pass. "Idea Store" and "Discovery Centre" are the new favoured phrases. And where etymological cleansing goes on, real-world changes follow. Two libraries were closed down in Whitechapel in 2005 to make way for the gleaming new Idea Store. But when you go inside it, books are displayed in timidly small quantities, tucked away behind computer terminals and stacks of DVDs. Attendance figures are up (sofas, free internet, caf and crche all play their part here) but the layout belittles reading.

It does not take a huge leap of imagination to link this to the news, released this week, that attitudes towards reading among children in England "are poor compared to those of children in many other countries and have declined slightly since 2001". Our children's literacy levels used to come third on a poll of 45 countries; now they are 13th. Mr Ed Balls responded to these findings by criticising the way parents allowed children to play on electronic devices during out-of-school hours. And yet government policy has implemented exactly the same kind of shift of behaviour on a huge scale, by converting libraries into social and community centres, filling them with computer terminals while reducing the total national book stock of libraries by an estimated 20 million copies.

More is being spent on libraries, but less on books. According the MP Mark Field, the percentage of each pound that libraries spend on acquiring books has sunk from 14 to 8.5. This has had knock-on effects on the book trade: as John Sutherland suggested on Radio 4's Open Book this week, publishers cannot afford to be as experimental as they might have been in the past because there is no longer the guarantee that mainstream authors will be acquired by every library in the country. We have also seen books degraded as objects, and resources squandered: a colleague of mine recently acquired a weighty and magnificent two-volume Oxford English Dictionary from a library that no longer wanted it. The price? A derisory 1.

If you go into one of the new-look Blairite libraries it is immediately evident that someone has tried extremely hard not to be elitist or intimidating. There is no whispering silence (use of mobile phones is allowed in the Tower Hamlets' Idea Stores), no aura of concentration, no musty smell of books, no vertiginous walls of leather spines or ladders sliding on silent casters (the very idea would send shudders through the health and safety team!). There are certainly no marble windows, as in the Beinecke rare book room in Yale. There is, in short, no romance. There is nothing that would signal to a child that reading is a more high status or hallowed activity than, say, going to the gym.

Reading is demanding, especially for children. It requires more attention and concentration than checking your emails or listening to music. If those other options are provided, as they are in our new look libraries sorry, think centres then children will take them, and who can blame them? Reading is the path of most resistance. Ultimately it is the path of most reward, too, but you can't expect a child to know that instinctively when all the cultural signposts around them are saying the opposite.

The new Jubilee Library in Brighton is a large high-ceilinged space, containing tiny little apologetic trolleys of books. The visual spectacle of books which do furnish a room, we're told is entirely lacking. There is no exhilarating sense of the grandeur and scale of literature, of the wealth of reading available.

Working in a well maintained, old-fashioned library is increasingly the privilege of the elite. In washing their hands of small, poky libraries (like the Whitechapel Library, recently sold off) local authorities are essentially cutting their residents off from the past. Old buildings should surely not be reserved for the private sector.

It could all have been so different. We could have had Print on Demand services (where books are downloaded and printed according to readers' demands), longer opening hours, more staff and better stock. Instead, we have got "Big Brother-style sofas" and "plasma-screen displays" (to quote the brochure of a new Discovery Centre in Gosport, Hampshire). But it is too late to wring hands over what we have lost. Especially the missing 239,344 of Waltham Forest.

h.eyre@independent.co.uk