Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
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.
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Are those history books driving up the average price mainly academic monographs and the like? Not really the right kind of fare for a city public library, no? I'd imagine the same kinds of history carried by a big retail bookstore and likely more palatable to the average history buff are a good deal cheaper. Maybe not $7.99 CDN admittedly, but perhaps $19.99.