|
While the relationship between publishers and libraries is not ideal, the specific problem described in the article is a stocking problem: the library has not bought enough e-books to meet the demand. This goes back to the budget, of course - pretty much all libraries are suffering from budget cuts nowadays. But it may also mean that the library should reconsider how it spends some of the money that it does have - clearly, with the kind of growth shown in the article, adding more e-books needs to be a priority...maybe a bigger priority than they've made it.
A little over a year ago, my library had about 6,000 e-books. Today it has 30,000 e-books, putting it in the top 5 of so libraries by e-book count. (And it has bought far more licenses than 30,000 - it has dozens of licenses for best-selling books, and often 2-4 licenses for books that were best-sellers in the past). However, considering that the library has 2 million titles overall, 30,000 is still a fairly modest number.
However, they have added these e-books in a year in which their budget was reduced by a certain amount, so I'm pretty impressed that they've made this a priority.
|