When Brad Neuberg opened the San Francisco Coworking Space in August 2005, he named something that had, by reasonable definition, existed for generations. The public library — reading desks, electrical sockets, silence norms, occasional strangers working in proximity — met every functional criterion for shared independent workspace. Nobody issued a press release.
The post-pandemic data makes the gap between practice and category hard to ignore. The Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey recorded a sharp rise in work-from-home rates from 2020 onward, with 42 percent of employed adults doing some or all work at home on days they worked in 2020, compared with 24 percent in 2019. Workers without dedicated home-office space — renters, people sharing households, own-account workers without employer facilities — needed somewhere else to go. Coworking memberships at WeWork or Regus were an option for those who could afford them. Public libraries were open to everyone else.
The usage figures are not invisible, though they circulate in library-sector reports rather than labour-market analyses. The American Library Association reported, in its 2022 State of America's Libraries, that in-person visits had rebounded substantially following COVID-19 closures, with libraries frequently citing laptop and workspace demand as a driver. The UK picture is comparable: the Office for National Statistics' survey data on remote and hybrid working in 2022 and 2023 showed persistent home-based work rates well above pre-pandemic norms, and the Libraries Connected annual survey for 2021–22 documented increased use of library wifi and workstation facilities relative to pre-pandemic years.
What the library never acquired was the vocabulary. Coworking, as a category, arrived with pricing structures, access-control hardware, and investor decks. The library arrived with the Dewey Decimal System and a rate card of zero. That asymmetry meant it fell outside both the BLS Contingent Worker Supplement's frame of reference and the McKinsey Global Institute's 2016 independent-work count — neither instrument asked where knowledge workers sat when they worked.
The independent worker in a library is not an anomaly to be explained; she is a baseline against which the novelty of the paid coworking industry can be measured more honestly.
Elsewhere in Coworking