Quote:
Originally Posted by 4691mls
Given how long the waiting lists are for popular books, even if libraries are allowed to keep acquiring brand new books how many people are actually getting to read the book within the first 90 days anyway?
If each person has a 21 day maximum checkout and keeps the book the whole time that's only about 4 people per copy. (sure, a few people might return it sooner).
Anyone who really wants to read the book RIGHT NOW is probably going to buy it even if the library acquires it hot off the press. And anyone who is willing to wait on a long hold list will probably also be willing to wait an extra 90 days for the initial library acquisition.
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Except the embargo is for multiple licenses. I’m not going to use crazy numbers but let’s say a library gets 5 for a hot new book. Let’s also say that these are likely voracious readers so 2-3 of each set will always finish in under two weeks (which is the base borrow time from what I’ve seen) and 2-3 will need to extend their hold.
That starts eating away at potential sales pretty quick especially when you multiply it out across all the libraries that get the book. It’d be hard to get an exact figure since we’d be dealing with library systems rather than individual libraries within those systems. But let’s say a single library produces 25 people in those 90 days and there are 200 library systems (I suspect there are way more this is giving each US state a grand total of four which is pretty laughable for numerous states) that’s 5,000 sales. So not a huge number but again I’m estimating way low on the library systems. Now multiply that by the number of new books each week for a major publisher like Macmillan with multiple imprints in their system this isn’t going to be an insignificant number either. But I’ll put it at 25 to account for slow times of the year, I can reasonably reassure you that this is still lowballing it. This now jumps the lost sales to 125,000. And now there are 52 weeks in a year which balloons the figure to 6,500,000 lost sales. Finally let’s assume each ebook was selling for 2.99 since most people on this forum seem to insist on the traditional pricing of books being absolutely ludicrous for ebooks. That’s 19,435,000 in lost revenue.
Hardly a small figure now, even if you want to cut off 1/4 of it and attribute those borrows which lead to sales from word of mouth which wouldn’t have happened otherwise and library borrowers who were never going to buy the book in the first place.
Yes I assume that for each book that comes out there’s going to be that many people waiting to borrow it. But the number of readers is always going to be more than the number of producers. So I think it’s a fair assumption.