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Originally Posted by Tony1988
I guess the whole freeloader qustion is based on a couple of things.
How many people checked out books from the library as opposed to buying BEFORE ebooks??
I am guessing more people bought.(and still do i am sure)
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Ehhh, evaluating it by "how many people" may not be the best statistic. People who buy a lot of books are often also high-volume library users, and whether they buy or not may depend more on their financial means than their preferences. I was a very high volume reader but nearly exclusive library borrower before I graduated from college, for example.[/quote]
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How many physical copies of a new release did librarys have BEFORE ebooks??
I am guessing less.
How many people were on a waiting list for a physical copy?? I doubt over 200.
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This is hard to quantify. I KNOW I regularly see 7-8 copies of one bestsellers sitting on the hardcover shelf at one library branch in my town (and I would expect that to be reproduced in every large branch in this county). Meanwhile, the digital consortion that serves my entire STATE may have 15-20 copies of a popular bestseller in ebook. Yes, there may be 200 people on the wait list, but they're churning through pretty fast and that consortium covers a much larger population than my county library system.
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See where this is going?? If libraries have more copies of a new book. More people than ever on waiting lists for these new books. Penguin and many publishers are scared of losing sales. Yes the library is paying to keep these digital copies. But how much sales is it taking away?? How many people would have bought the book BEFORE ebooks or before libraires started carrying so many copies of the books.
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I nearly always get the top bestsellers (King, Roberts, etc) from libraries (digital or hardcopy) for 2 reasons:
1) the library always buys them in bulk. I can guarantee once the original run is done, 6-12 months after release, they will be reliably available on the shelves (for digital I just put my name in and get in line).
2) I can stand to wait to read top bestsellers, it's the favorite authors I purchase, and there isn't as much overlap there as you'd think.
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I do understand that there are more "avid" readers out there right now because of ereaders. So how many of the waiting list people are before ereader readers and how many jumped on the ereader boom and are now readers?
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Even the new "avid" readers tend not to be on the scale of the old "avid" readers. My husband might have gone from 1-9 books/year to 20-30 books/year but I read hundreds of books/year.
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I also understand that ebooks sales are up but physical sales are way down also. How much of the physical sales lost was due to people getting ereaders and waiting for a copy of an ebook to become available from the library??
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This may actually have more to do with the economy than preferences. Ebooks are cheaper than hardcovers, but library loans are free.
And anyone who thinks that library loans on Overdrive are "frictionless" are welcome to try to browse for a book they might like on Overdrive* and then check it out as an epub/pdf and tell me all about the relative frictionlessness of it all
* of interest in my experience with Overdrive at the Md and DC libraries: categories include "Fantasy", "Science Fiction and Fantasy", and "Science Fiction", all with interlapping listings; no way to refine category searching; listings without plot descriptions of any sort, or nearly meaningless plot descriptions; search can only filter one format at a time (so you need to do separate searches for pdfs and epubs, unless you allow every format and end up with audiobook listings too); only 10-25 hits per page; series without all the volumes; ease of selecting the wrong format; limits on number of holds;d long waitlist times; incredible slowness especially when loading and refreshing wishlists; random problems with ADE when downloading/transferring especially to a full ereader; oh, I could go on. Searches on specific titles/authors are much better, but I'm a browser by nature. Kindle lending is easier at the download end but the browsing experience is the same.