British Council in Cairo shuts down its library

Owing to high cost of maintenance and advent of Internet, the British Council will close its library in Cairo which kept feeding the intellectual minds for more than seventy years.

Owing to high cost of maintenance and advent of Internet, the British Council will close its library here which kept feeding the intellectual minds for more than seventy years.

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Manager of the library, Paul Smith, attributed the closure to the little number of visitors adding that Egyptians are no great lovers of books.

He said that currently the library has 2800 members while it costs around $542 thousand annually to run it and therefore keeping it open will not be the best way to use Britain's tax payer's money.

The five thousand books of the library which was inaugurated back in 1938, will be donated to educational establishments.

Smith said that the decision to shut the library is a kind of surrender to the power of the Internet.

The funds that used to be allocated to the library are expected to be transferred to Internet-related activities, he added.

Nevertheless, the British Council intends to continue its activities as 27 thousand people head to its centre to learn English every year, he said.