Quote:
Originally Posted by BadBilly
Tell them if they're not going to sell to libraries, you're not going to read their titles. Then you have to stick to it.
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You could be sending more of a mixed message that you think. The message I am hearing is that you both buy books and borrow them. Most such people are liable to buy if borrowing is too much hassle and/or the library only has a non-favored form factor. It's just not plausible that a whole lot of people who both buy and borrow won't buy if they really want the book. As for sticking to it being a problem, your mention of it shows that a lot of people who say they will may give in if they really want the book. And why else would you buy it? True or false, that's how the publishers will hear it.
IMHO, I've got a clearer personal message for the publishers
. I
never buy non-reference books published in the United States. The rare non-reference book I buy is invariably one never published in the US (primarily books by Hong Kong author Nury Vittachi). So the only way they can possibly get my patronage is indirectly, through sales to public libraries.
By the way, this is not just a big commercial publisher issue. When I go to search.overdrive.com, I have particularly bad luck with non-fiction university press books. Even well-reviewed apparently popular ones like
The Astaires (Oxford) or
Brigham Young : Pioneer Prophet (Harvard) cannot be found. University presses don't seem to 100 percent boycott Overdrive, but must be be either not releasing most titles to Overdrive, or pricing them more than any library will pay.
And this isn't because Overdrive is just interested in bestsellers. Overdrive has
800,000 titles for libraries to pick from.