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Interesting topic. I believe a public library that did not choose to buy large numbers of books in genres that their patrons wanted to read would soon find itself in trouble.
I also do not read romance novels, but I do read other types of fiction as well as history, biography, and many other subgenres of non-fiction. The same is true of my husband. We both use our local libraries extensively; for the most part, I borrow e-books and he borrows hard copy books. One thing we have both noticed is that new titles in popular fiction take much longer to get (wait lists) than the non-fiction titles. When I look at hard copy books in the library, the books that seem to be the most worn (and therefore likely to have been circulated and read most often) are the romance novels and other light fiction.
I'd personally love to see more serious non-fiction titles (and I'm lucky to have library cards from two extremely large library systems so I can't really complain), but I can't blame any library that chooses to buy more of the books that more people want to read. I have no doubt that circulation stats have a bearing on funding, if only in the sense that they need to show how much the library is being used. If there's a choice between Book A that 30 people will read and Book B that 7 people will read, A will and should be bought. Even the largest library systems have only so much money to spend.
Just my $0.00.
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