Book- Business Lingo

The Truth About E-books in Librariesby James LaRueAs the director of the Douglas County,CO, Libraries, I spend a lot of timethinking about how libraries and publishersrelate to each other, and aboutwhat might improve our interaction inthe digital era.To start with, I think we librariansneed to provide publishers with informationlike the following:Public libraries in America today buyabout 10 percent of the total commercialpublishing output; and closer to40 percent of children’s materials.Which books? The answer has four parts.We buy:♦What our patrons ask for. Librariesaren’t “free”—they’re paid forby the community. That’s who wehave to satisfy.♦♦♦What’s pushed by advertising.Whether library buyers are professionalstaff members at individuallibraries or centralized collectionprofilers, they try to anticipatedemand. Public demand oftenresults from advertising. Print runsand publishers’ marketing budgetsare generally reliable predictors ofthe number of copies we’ll need.What’s reviewed. We tend to buywhat’s well reviewed in mediawe trust unless demand trumpsa review. Books that wind up inlibraries are typically featuredin such periodicals as Booklist,Library Journal, School LibraryJournal, and Publishers Weekly.What distributors carry. It’s somuch easier to deal with one intermediarywho can wrap up reviews,ordering, discounts, and delivery.It’s easier to write one check forsix publishers than to write six.As a result, relationships betweenlibraries and publishers haveweakened over the past 20 years.Instead of talking with publishers,we talk with our distributors, andwe tend to buy heavily from theBig Six (Hachette Book Group,HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers,Penguin Group, RandomHouse, and Simon & Schuster).Combined with recent challenges tolibrary budgets (which tend to lagbehind the general economy in bothreduction and recovery), that meansit’s been difficult for independent,small, and self-published works toget into our collections. We don’tknow nearly as much about them;our patrons rarely ask for them, and ittakes more work to deal with them.28 | IBPA Independent | September 2012