Quote:
Originally Posted by Larla
For instance, I looked through six different libraries and found that Romance books varied from 10% to 40% of the entire ebook offerings for a library with 20-25% being the average.
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Are your percentages of total books or of total fiction books?
This can make a real difference for libraries that lean mostly towards one of the two main categories (fiction or non-fiction). Even a library like Orange County, FL (one of the bigger with non-resident cards that don't require an in-person application) that has 63% fiction overall, Romance is 31% of all books, but 46% of fiction.
It's even worse for recent purchases...in the last 30 days, 450 books were purchased, with 280 fiction, 170 non-fiction. But, a whopping 71% (199) of the fiction books were Romance.
Brooklyn Public Library (with about the same number of total books) has similar percentages, including recent purchases. Fairfax, VA, though, with only about 25K total books, has a much lower percentage of Romance/Fiction (30%), and even less in recent purchases (24%). For $27/year, Fairfax is a hidden gem of libraries with easy to acquire non-resident cards.
Last, the numbers are also skewed because I noticed that if you add up fiction plus non-fiction, the result is far less than the total number of books in every Overdrive library I've checked (each has at least 25K total books). So, some books must not be classified as either.