Students, who are nowadays working mainly with provided PDFs to do the reading, miss the fun and crazy practice of hiding the most relevant copies of books within a reference library to have the book for your eyes only.
But: Hiding the books was part of the game!
The library was not yet a third space of meeting and collaborating but a place where books were hidden. When I discovered a misplaced book, I took it to another place, just for fun and to annoy the hiding person.
Friday evening was the busiest time for the weekend hiders: you could see them travelling the shelves with books in their hands looking for hideouts. University platforms with pdfs ended this game and horror of hiding physical books in libraries.
So in this sense, the pdf changed it all. The hiding Gutenberg Galaxy was over. Something new started. Accessibility to literature was a different game back then, 20 years from now and earlier, and using books was an elite battleground of hide and seek.
