Guwahati: There was a time when picking up a book meant walking into a library — rows of silent shelves, a hush in the air, a due date stamped on the last page. In Guwahati, that’s changing.In one corner, cafes are putting reading rooms on the menu. In another, of all places, a police station turns its corners into makeshift libraries, pulling in the one crowd every institution is chasing: the young reader who would rather be scrolling.Sunil Jaiswal, who owns one such library cafe in the city’s Geetanagar area, has watched this play out at his own tables. “Incorporating books and reading corners offer a way to create an atmosphere that goes beyond food and conversation,” he says. “A shelf full of books turns a commercial space into an informal community space, where customers browse a book without the expectations often faced at the library,” he adds.A traditional library demands quiet, a membership card, and a system. A cafe with a bookshelf asks nothing of you. You order your drink, you sit down, and you pick up a book if you feel like it. There is no wrong way to read.Around six to seven such cafes have opened across Guwahati, and their shelves run deep — Assamese and English titles alongside Bodo, Hindi and Bengali, fiction next to reference texts.At Noonmati, Rupjyoti Debnath has built one of the city’s biggest private collections. “Our cafe houses a collection of more than 3,000 books, featuring works by renowned Assamese authors such as Mamoni Raisom Goswami, Homen Borgohain and Hemchandra Barua, among many others,” he said.“While the collection includes books in different languages, a majority of them are in Assamese, offering readers an opportunity to explore the state’s rich literary heritage, culture and traditions.” He sees the timing as deliberate. “A reading corner inside a cafe may not replace a library, but it can provide an easier entry point for someone who might otherwise spend their leisure time scrolling on a phone,” he says.Across town, the Panbazar Police Station tells a stranger version of the same story. Set up to bring citizens closer to the police, its library has instead become a haunt for students and young visitors — not personnel.“There are around 700 books by writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Salman Rushdie, Lakshminath Bezbaruah, Satyendranath Sarma and Jawaharlal Nehru and more. While there are books in English, the majority are in Assamese. This collection will be of great help to anyone who comes here to study, especially youngsters who are slowly drifting away from books,” says OC Shankar Jyoti Nath.The vision was broader than any single reader. “The initiative was also envisaged as an informal space where citizens, particularly students and young people, could spend time reading while becoming familiar with laws, literature and other subjects. Police personnel, too, were expected to use the facility during their breaks,” he says.