Reports that library services will be cut have been met with orchestrated outcry. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport softened us up for the bad news by revealing that the "proportion of adults visiting a library" had decreased from 48.2% to 39.4% in the four years to 2010. What they didn't say was how many non-adult people had begun to use libraries and what kind of effect that might have been having on adults in search of a quiet read.

Most of the discussion assumed that lending books was what libraries are for. This is so much not the case; some of the finest libraries in the world chain their books to their reading desks. The public lending library is a recent invention, a response to the spread of literacy to the working classes who had neither money to buy books nor space to store them. A library or bibliotheque (the word is derived from the Greek for bookshelf) is first and foremost a place to keep texts, whether written on papyrus, vellum or paper. It is, secondarily, a place to read them. The Royal Library of Alexandria had, besides bookshelves, a loggia, where readers could walk to uncramp their stiffened limbs, and a cafeteria, as well as an acquisitions and cataloguing department, and most university libraries today follow a similar plan.

Ed Vaizey, minister for culture, has implored us to think of libraries as a cluster of services rather than as buildings, which is fair enough, but libraries are also houses for books and documents; as such they are some of the most beautiful built spaces on earth. The original Bodleian is now much too small to serve the needs of Oxford University, but any suggestion that it should be sold off to finance hi-tech library services within the university would be resisted angrily by all those people who have ever passed through the Schools Quadrangle. There are more comfortable places to read than Duke Humfrey's Library, but none more atmospheric or thrilling. When I give my bag to the concierge and trot up the stone stairs, I get the same feeling as a football fan heading for the turnstiles.

Bodley is very special, but so is any building that was built to store books and manuscripts, whether monastic or princely or academic or corporate. It may be dark and inconvenient, but it is as much a creature of its own historic moment as Venice's Biblioteca Marciana, which was built to a design of Sansovino in the mid-16th century. The Marciana was built to house the precious collection of Cardinal Bessarion; the illuminated manuscripts, the beautifully printed books and the building together make an integrated artefact. To be sure, methods of cataloguing and conservation should be modernised, but to remove its books and its walnut bookcases and gut the building would be as barbaric an act as burning the library of Alexandria.

When Hackney council opened a new central library, it was decided that the John Passmore Edwards Free Library in Hoxton was redundant. The beautiful Grade II-listed arts and crafts building designed by HT Hare was gutted, the upper floors turned into flats, the lower into a studio theatre. The library with its books, monument to a moment in British history and to a valiant attempt to redeem one of the most disadvantaged areas in London, was obliterated. Even before the proposed cuts, 200 libraries in Britain have already been closed, and their buildings demolished or converted to other uses. When any library is destroyed, a climactic era in the life of its community is blotted out of memory.

Your local library may not have been designed by Sansovino or HT Hare, but it still warrants preservation as a place to store, conserve and consult materials relating to its place in history. The people who need to see what can be found nowhere else will find their way to it, without its being shifted to the shopping mall. Family historians are a whole new group of people who have had to discover how to use libraries, and librarians have responded to their demands, not as all-singing, all-dancing social entrepreneurs, but as librarians.

As the era of the book draws to a close, we must keep our libraries and their contents together as cultural entities in themselves. Libraries should not be expected to spend money on multiple hardback copies of Stieg Larsson and Danielle Steel to lend to a populace who could buy the paperback for less than the price of a packet of fags. The core job of a local library is to acquire and conserve letters, diaries, books (especially books with marginalia by local celebrities), plans, minutes, parish records, maps, local newspapers and pamphlets, posters and photographs. In an overcrowded, muzak-infested, video-saturated world, a reading room is an oasis, to which we may all repair, even if it is only to read a newspaper. As such it shouldn't be filled with noisy children.

Libraries shouldn't be expected to take over the function of schools. Schools on the other hand could take some of the pressure off libraries. The best place to put your lending services, language courses and computer literacy classes is not in pubs or supermarkets, but in the massively under-utilised buildings of our schools.