For the past three years, staff and budget from the New York Public Library have been cut, said NYPL spokeswoman Gale Snible in an email. Last summer, the library was facing $ 40 million cuts.

Fearing that their branch might be closed, employees from the Mott Haven Library Branch started a petition to save the library. “I signed mine and my daughters name,” said 43-year-old Colen Moore, who often visits the library together with daughter Keisha, 8. “I don’t want it to close,” she said.

In June, NYPL published a press release, stating that the city restored $36.7 million of the planned cuts and that all 90 locations of the library will stay open and lay-offs can be avoided. Still, visitors of the Mott Haven Library are worried. Allison Reynolds, a first grade teacher at P.S. 154, thinks the library is too important for the community. “I don’t even know where the next one is,” she said.

In times of Kindle & Co., libraries try to make themselves even more accessible to people than before. In an article dedicated to the 100th birthday of the New York Public Library in May this year, former library president Paul LeClerc said books were important and that the library pushes itself to embrace “21st century technology” including service apps for library customers.

Amazon announced last month that it increased the “potential visibility of library e-books” by making them available for Kindle users. At the same time, Amazon said it will make Kindle books available at “more than 11,000 local libraries around the country.” This could lead to customers borrowing e-books, but it might also lower the need of going to a library.

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