waving goodbye to books

The juxtaposition of two newspaper articles on the same page today left me with a slightly disconcerting feeling.
One was the story of people queuing for 24 hours to buy a new computer games controller which has no console and works by the players waving their arms around. Current stocks of the gadget are expected to be sold out by the end of the week.
The second article was the forecast that the promised cuts in public expenditure will lead to the closure of several hundred libraries throughout the country, over 100 of them in London alone.