Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
Sometimes it comes down to who can sell their narrative the best. Certainly, there is the any stick to beat a publisher with crowd who are cheering on the library.
Looking at the Atlanta-Fulton County library budget, the over all budget is some $27 M with $2 M of that for book acquisition. Apparently, a fairly new thing is to lease new books, i.e. rather than buy a bunch of books, the libraries lease most of their copies of the latest buzz book and once the buzz dies down send most of those copies back to the leasing company and only keep a few copies for the permanent collection. This is for hard copy books.
I do wonder given that libraries are only 1.2 percent of the publishers business, how many ebooks we are talking about. I suspect we aren't talking large numbers. It could very well be that we are talking about very small numbers of ebooks and patrons.
|
Yes I’d agree public perception is very important. Of course so is what is lost in the battle. With libraries being such a small part of publishers sales, that boycotts generally tend to break down in numbers over time, and that a certain percentage of library patrons were never going to buy the book vs knowing libraries aid in discovery it might be more advantageous to publishers to cut the cost of some of an authors backlist or the first in a series (which is already an in use practice) to try and make up for the lost discovery.
I’ve said it before it’s pretty readily apparent that in the large scale libraries need publishers more than publishers need libraries. And just to be sure I’m not trying to vilify libraries or say I feel they’re useless. I’m speaking just in terms of the business transactions between them and publishers.