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Originally Posted by ZodWallop
Your opinions would have a lot more resonance if you had first hand knowledge of what you were talking about.
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Because we’ve never been down this road.
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But honestly, I don't care too much about what you think of who is using the word 'snob' anyway.
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I only talked about the use of the term snob and not anyone who employed it. Thanks for illustrating my point!
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Why not? If the library purchases one or two doorstops a month you are fine.
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Lovely! Because doorstops are fungible. So nice that those who like them get a choice of one. Or two. Whereas purchasing mostly romance novels provides both selection and churn for those who like them.
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Why should you care how many romance novels they purchase?
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I don’t, in the abstract. But budgets are finite and the more romance novels, the fewer other books. In fact, I think that romance should account for a huge part of the purchasing budget, because they
are so popular. I also think, however, that a library’s brief should be broad, but that they pursue high circulation figures to the detriment of those who like books with less turnover. I think the balance should be different.
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And in the end the library is buying those books because they are the ones that get checked out the most. So it seems they are doing their job.
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They get checked out the most at least in part because they’re short, quick reads. One Harlequin-type romance could be borrowed, read and returned 10 times in the time it takes to read the latest Walter Isaacson or Simon Schama, say.