I was thinking about libraries the other day, and somehow my mind went back much further than I expected.
I went back to being a student.
I remember how much time I used to spend in the library. Not necessarily because I always had a specific assignment or something I desperately needed to find. Sometimes I was there simply because it was a place where I could sit, read, think, and disappear into something for a while.
There was something about being surrounded by books that made it easy to lose track of time.
I’d start with one subject, find a book, and then discover another book sitting next to it. I’d flip through it just to see what it was about. One reference would lead to another. Before I knew it, I was reading about something completely different from what I had originally come there to find.
At the time, I didn’t think much about it.
I was just spending time at the library.
Looking back, I realize I was learning something about how knowledge is discovered.
Sometimes you find what you’re looking for.
And sometimes you find something you weren’t looking for at all.
Those were often the things I remembered.
Then there was Barnes & Noble.
I remember spending time there with friends, sitting around with coffee and books scattered across the table. We’d start talking about a book, but the conversation rarely stayed about the book for very long.
One idea would lead to another.
Someone would disagree.
Someone would tell a story from their own experience.
Someone would bring up another book.
And before long, we weren’t really discussing the book anymore. We were discussing life.
Nobody was necessarily trying to accomplish anything.
We weren’t rushing through a list of things to consume.
We were just there.
Looking back, I think that’s part of what made those moments special.
We were surrounded by knowledge, but we were also surrounded by people.
Years later, when I traveled frequently for work, I noticed something similar in a completely different place: airplanes.
I remember seeing people reading newspapers.
A physical newspaper was almost a social object.
Someone would open it and spread it across the tray table. You might notice the business section and ask if they were finished with it. Someone else might want the sports section.
“Are you done with sports?”
It was such a small interaction.
But sometimes the conversation didn’t end with the newspaper.
You might notice the article the person was reading. Maybe you knew something about the subject. Maybe you worked in the same industry. Maybe they had a completely different perspective.
A stranger sitting beside you could suddenly become someone you were talking to for the next hour.
I don’t remember every conversation that started that way.
But I remember the possibility of them.
The newspaper wasn’t just delivering information.
It was creating an opening.
I think that is what I find myself missing when I think about libraries and books today.
Not simply the paper.
Not simply the shelves.
Something around them.
A bookshelf, for example, used to tell you something about a person.
Think about visiting someone’s home years ago. Maybe there was an Encyclopedia Britannica sitting on a shelf. Perhaps there were books about history, gardening, photography, travel, music, or astronomy scattered across the coffee table.
Before the person ever told you anything about themselves, their books had already said something.
You might pick one up and ask, “Are you interested in this?”
And suddenly you had a conversation.
You might discover that the person had traveled somewhere you’ve always wanted to visit, that they were fascinated by history, or that they knew everything about gardening while you knew absolutely nothing about it.
Of course, sometimes you saw enough books about something you had absolutely no interest in and quietly thought, Maybe I’ll sit over here.
That was useful information too.
A bookshelf was almost an accidental biography.
It gave you a little window into someone else’s world.
Today, someone can read a hundred books without anyone around them knowing.
Their entire intellectual life can fit inside a device that looks exactly like the device everyone else is holding.
Something that once invited conversation has become invisible.
Maybe that is why I have always liked libraries.
There was never any guarantee that you would find what you were looking for.
And somehow, that was the beauty of it.
You could walk in without a plan.
You didn’t have to buy anything.
You didn’t have to subscribe.
You didn’t have to click an advertisement.
You could simply sit there.
A library was one of the rare places deliberately created for curiosity without consumption.
It essentially said:
“Come in. Take your time. Learn something.”
And there was something else about libraries that I didn’t appreciate when I was younger.
They put different ideas next to one another.
You could be looking for a book about one subject and find something completely unrelated sitting beside it.
You could discover an author you had never heard of.
You could encounter an idea you disagreed with.
You could change your mind.
Or you could decide that you were right after all.
The important thing was that you encountered it.
Research itself used to feel different.
If you wanted to understand something deeply, you didn’t simply type a question and receive an answer.
You found a book.
Then another.
You discovered that two authors disagreed.
You found a reference in the back of one book that led somewhere else.
You searched through old newspapers.
You might sit in front of a microfilm reader, scrolling through page after page of newspapers from decades ago, looking for one particular article.
And while looking for that article, you might find something else.
A photograph.
An advertisement.
An editorial.
A story you weren’t expecting.
Something that changed the way you understood the period you were researching.
You could look through archives, letters, photographs, films, academic papers, and books written by people from different countries and different generations.
And sometimes the accounts didn’t agree.
One historian would say one thing.
Another would disagree.
A newspaper from the time might tell a different story.
A letter might reveal something neither historian mentioned.
A photograph might raise another question.
That disagreement wasn’t necessarily a problem.
It was part of the point.
You weren’t simply trying to find the answer.
You were trying to understand why there were different answers.
There is an old idea that the conqueror writes history.
Perhaps there is some truth in that. People with power certainly have more influence over what gets recorded and remembered.
But history is also remarkably persistent.
A letter can survive.
A newspaper can survive.
A photograph can survive.
A book can survive.
Someone else’s account can survive.
An archive can preserve something that someone, at some point, may have preferred to disappear.
That is one of the things I find beautiful about libraries and archives.
They can preserve a book without endorsing it.
They can preserve an opinion without agreeing with it.
A biased newspaper may not be a reliable account of an event, but it can tell us something about what people believed at the time.
A controversial book may contain ideas we strongly disagree with, but it can still tell us something about the person who wrote it.
A minority account may be wrong, but it may also contain something the dominant account missed.
Understanding something does not require agreeing with it.
Sometimes understanding requires seeing the disagreement.
And then the world changed.
The newspaper moved to the screen.
The encyclopedia moved to the internet.
The books moved into our phones and tablets.
The library became something we could carry in our pockets.
And now, increasingly, we can simply ask an AI.
There is something extraordinary about that.
Large language models can summarize enormous amounts of information in seconds. They can explain difficult subjects, translate languages, connect ideas, and help someone navigate a subject they have never studied.
They can give someone a place to begin.
That is an incredible thing.
And I use these tools myself.
But sometimes I wonder about what happens between the question and the answer.
When I ask an AI a question, I’m not looking at a shelf of books.
I’m looking at a synthesis.
A very powerful one.
But still a synthesis.
Which sources were used?
Which weren’t?
Where do experts disagree?
Was something uncertain?
Was something omitted?
And then there is the simplest problem of all.
The answer can be wrong.
An AI can produce something that sounds completely convincing and simply isn’t true.
That doesn’t make AI useless.
It reminds me that a fluent answer is not necessarily the same thing as a factual answer.
And perhaps that is why the original sources still matter.
There is another thought that keeps coming back to me.
We talk about AI filtering “noise.”
And I understand why.
The internet is filled with misinformation, fabricated content, manipulated images, AI-generated videos, and things that are simply untrue.
We need ways to navigate that.
But the word noise makes me pause.
Because sometimes something that looks like noise is actually evidence.
A biased newspaper may not tell us the truth about an event, but it can tell us what people believed at the time.
A controversial opinion may not be correct, but it can tell us what someone believed.
A minority account may not represent the majority, but it may contain something the majority account missed.
A poorly written article may be full of inaccuracies, but it is still a historical document.
The challenge isn’t simply deciding what to remove.
Sometimes the challenge is learning how to understand what we’re looking at.
And that is where I think libraries, archives, books, and original sources still matter.
They allow us to see the pieces.
To compare them.
To question them.
To disagree with them.
To form our own conclusions.
Perhaps what concerns me most isn’t that AI will replace books.
I don’t think it will.
What concerns me is something more subtle.
We are making knowledge invisible.
The person sitting next to me on an airplane may be reading a fascinating book, but I will probably never know.
The person sitting across from me in a coffee shop may have spent the morning researching something I’m deeply interested in, but there may be no clue.
The person whose home I visit may have an entire intellectual world stored electronically, but I won’t see it sitting on their coffee table.
Two people can sit next to one another for hours, each surrounded by an enormous amount of information, while having no idea what the other person is interested in.
We may know more than ever.
But we may be seeing less of one another.
And perhaps that’s a small thing.
Or perhaps it isn’t.
Because some of the most interesting conversations in life begin with things neither person planned.
A newspaper.
A book.
A photograph.
A question.
A comment about something someone happened to be reading.
We discover something about each other because what we are interested in is visible.
Today, our interests are increasingly personalized, private, and invisible.
I don’t think the answer is to go backward.
I don’t want to give up the ability to ask a question and receive an answer in seconds.
I don’t want to pretend that technology hasn’t made learning dramatically more accessible.
It has.
And I think AI will make that access even more extraordinary.
Maybe the future doesn’t have to be a choice between AI and libraries.
Maybe we need both.
Let AI help us find the book.
Let it explain the difficult chapter.
Let it translate the document.
Let it connect ideas we might never have connected ourselves.
But then, when something matters, perhaps we should still open the book.
Read the original.
Look at the archive.
Read the account that disagrees.
Look at the old newspaper.
Scroll through the microfilm.
Ask where the information came from.
Talk to someone who sees it differently.
And sometimes, don’t follow the answer you were looking for.
Follow the thing you accidentally discovered along the way.
I think that is what I miss most when I think about those years.
I miss the hours in the library when I had nowhere else to be.
I miss sitting with friends at Barnes & Noble, coffee on the table and books around us, when a conversation about a book somehow became a conversation about life.
I miss the stranger on an airplane reading a newspaper who might have become a conversation simply because I wanted the sports section.
I miss bookshelves that told stories about the people who owned them.
I miss the feeling of finding something I wasn’t looking for.
But maybe what I really miss isn’t the paper, the shelves, or even the books.
I miss the possibility of discovery.
The possibility that I might walk into a library looking for one thing and walk out thinking about something completely different.
The possibility that a book could introduce me to an idea.
That an idea could introduce me to a person.
That a person could introduce me to a perspective.
And that perspective could change the way I see something.
We have become extraordinarily good at finding exactly what we are looking for.
But there is a strange beauty in finding something you weren’t looking for at all.
Maybe that is what libraries have always given us.
Not simply information.
Not simply answers.
The freedom to wander.
And perhaps, in a world where an answer is now only a question away, that is precisely what we need to preserve.
AI can give us an answer in seconds.
But sometimes the most valuable thing we can discover is the question we never thought to ask.
Sami Joueidi holds a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and brings over 15 years of experience leading AI-driven transformations across startups and enterprises. A seasoned technology leader, Sami has led customer adoption programs, cross-functional engineering teams, and go-to-market strategies that deliver real business impact.
He’s passionate about turning complex ideas into practical solutions, and about helping teams bridge the gap between innovation and execution. Whether architecting scalable systems or demystifying AI concepts, Sami brings a blend of strategic thinking and hands-on problem-solving to every challenge. © Sami Joueidi and www.cafesami.com, 2025. Feel free to share excerpts with proper credit and a link back to the original post.
