The New York Public Library has abandoned its plan to renovate its landmark building in Midtown. There will be no hybrid lending-and-research library behind those stone lions on Fifth Avenue, no towering glass atrium looking out on Bryant Park. The dumpy Mid-Manhattan Library, across the street, will not be sold. No books will be banished to New Jersey.

What will happen instead, according to the library: A more modest, cheaper, quicker and, by the looks of it, smarter plan. The Mid-Manhattan Library will stay put and be made beautiful, with computer labs and adult-education space. Closed rooms within the glorious Beaux-Arts main building will be opened to the public, and a new, permanent exhibition of treasured manuscripts and artifacts will be created. Book storage will be expanded into space under Bryant Park, where a 19th-century reservoir once sat. And, the library’s officials say, this plan is affordable.

The library’s reversal was motivated by the best of reasons — what its president, Anthony Marx, aptly called “the facts.” They include a budget that had swollen to $300 million and beyond, a sagging economy, and unexpected difficulties in building a new circulating library in the stacks beneath the Rose Reading Room. Beyond those particulars lay the intense derision the project had inspired among some critics, a cluster of lawsuits, and the skepticism of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was leery about the proposed sale of the Mid-Manhattan Library.

Though the now-abandoned plan was widely mocked, the library’s earlier goals, its need to raise money and stay relevant in the digital age while doing something about its white-elephant buildings, the Mid-Manhattan Library and its neglected Science, Industry and Business Library on 34th Street made sense at the time. But circumstances changed and Mr. Marx is right not to dig in, even though the library had already paid $9 million to the architect Norman Foster to design the new space.