When US business site Forbes ran an article about libraries, they probably weren’t expecting it to be contentious. Obviously, they didn’t know library Twitter very well. Now they do. The article was taken down by Forbes two days after publication following an outpouring of Twitter rage from librarians and library lovers. Lesson: if you want to start a Twitter pile on, trash libraries.

In the piece, Panos Mourdoukoutas, an economist and academic from Long Island University, suggests that public libraries ought to be replaced by Amazon stores, as this would save tax dollars. Mourdoukoutas says libraries were valuable to communities once upon a time because they had free books, videos and DVDs, were a comfortable place to read and hold events, and because you could get help from ‘friendly librarians’. His view is that these functions have now lost their value. Libraries are obsolete because there’s Starbucks if you want to read a book, use the internet, meet friends and have a coffee, and there’s Netflix if you want to stream movies. In any case, Mourdoukoutas argues that ‘technology has turned physical books into collector’s items’.