Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
Corrected: The libraries are giving some of their customers what the customers want and not what they think the customers should want nothing to the rest of their customers.
It seems to me that the libraries’ mandate should be to meet the needs of all their potential customers to the extent they can, spreading the wealth. I suspect the libraries are willing to go all romance because it makes their circulation numbers look better with titles that are quick reads with lots of churn. But the history lovers also pay taxes and deserve to have books that appeal to them, too. I’m not suggesting a one to one trade off; obviously fewer books that are both longer and slower reads should be purchased, but with data from the Libby app it wouldn’t be all that hard to develop an algorithm.
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I would disagree. If 50% of their customers want to read romance or any other genre, spending 50% of their ebook budget on those books is fair. Not to mention that quite of few of the non-romance books are considerably more expensive and are unlikely to reach the maximum number of loans before the book expires on the maximum term. In the case of the local library system, their budget numbers that I've seen suggest that they spend $44 of each $100 on fiction and $56 on non-fiction (history, biography, etc.). That $44 supplies them with a lot more fiction than the $56 buys non-fiction.
Doing a quick look at the different in cost between the average genre book and history books, I did a quick check on Amazon, Kobo and Google. While those prices are not even close to the prices charged to libraries, the ratio in the examples I've seen are pretty close. When the average published in the last 5 years history book in the list I looked at comes in at over $100 Cdn. and the average fiction comes in ~$7.99 Cdn, you can supply your customers with a lot of fiction books for 1 history book.
And yes, I realize there are a lot of low end, poorly researched and of questionable scholarly value in many of the low end history book. I looked at my collection of books about Gustavus Adolphus for some examples. Since Kobo did have quite a few of those books in Kobo Plus, I borrowed them to compare to some of my hardcover editions. Most of recently authored ones were pretty poor. I probably learned more about Gustavus Adolphus reading Eric Flint et alia's 1632 book series which is what triggered my renewed interest in Gustavus Adophus. Others were poorly formatted versions of old books (G. A. Henty's
The Lion of the North: A Tale Of The Times Of Gustavus Adolphus And The Wars Of Religion as one example) which were mostly copied from Gutenberg's texts.
Sorry if you feel slighted, but libraries spend their budgets to please as many of their clients as they can. The feelings of those of us who prefer less popular genres runs into vox populi, vox Dei.