Bookstores Down - Libraries Up

Vicki Culler shops for discounted
books at the Friends of the Public
Library in Cincinnati.

Bookstore closings have provided an opportunity for high-end library models that should cough up cute cash and increase dynamic library traffic.

As reported in The New York Times by Karen Ann Cullotta, the sad closing of bookstores has provided an opening for many libraries to reinvent the town square with best sellers and coffee --- and, I might add, a certain milieu or AMBIANCE :)

Tonight's post also provides an inside peek at a library's business plan, strategy and structure.

This, then, by Karen Ann Cullotta, NYTimes:

Libraries See Opening as Bookstores Close


At the bustling public library in Arlington Heights, Ill., requests by three patrons to place any title on hold prompt a savvy computer tracking system to order an additional copy of the coveted item. That policy was intended to eliminate the frustration of long waits to check out best sellers and other popular books. But it has had some unintended consequences, too: the library’s shelves are now stocked with 36 copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
Of course, librarians acknowledge that when patrons’ passion for the sexy series lacking in literary merit cools in a year or two, the majority of volumes in the “Fifty Shades” trilogy will probably be plucked from the shelves and sold at the Friends of the Library’s used-book sales, alongside other poorly circulated, donated and out-of-date materials.

“A library has limited shelf space, so you almost have to think of it as a store, and stock it with the things that people want,” said Jason Kuhl, the executive director of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library. Renovations will turn part of the library’s first floor into an area resembling a bookshop that officials are calling the Marketplace, with cozy seating, vending machines and, above all, an abundance of best sellers.

As librarians across the nation struggle with the task of redefining their roles and responsibilities in a digital age, many public libraries are seeing an opportunity to fill the void created by the loss of traditional bookstores. They are increasingly adapting their collections and services based on the demands of library patrons, whom they now call customers.

Today’s libraries are reinventing themselves as vibrant town squares, showcasing the latest best sellers, lending Kindles loaded with e-books, and offering grass-roots technology training centers. Faced with the need to compete for shrinking municipal finances, libraries are determined to prove they can respond as quickly to the needs of the taxpayers as the police and fire department can.

“I think public libraries used to seem intimidating to many people, but today, they are becoming much more user-friendly, and are no longer these big, impersonal mausoleums,” said Jeannette Woodward, a former librarian and author of “Creating the Customer-Driven Library: Building on the Bookstore Model.”

“Public libraries tread a fine line,” Ms. Woodward said. “They want to make people happy, and get them in the habit of coming into the library for popular best sellers, even if some of it might be considered junk. But libraries also understand the need for providing good information, which often can only be found at the library.”

Cheryl Hurley, the president of the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher in New York “dedicated to preserving America’s best and most significant writing,” said the trend of libraries that cater to the public’s demand for best sellers is not surprising, especially given the ravages of the recession on public budgets.

Still, Ms. Hurley remains confident that libraries will never relinquish their responsibility to also provide patrons with the opportunity to discover literary works of merit, be it the classics, or more recent fiction from novelists like Philip Roth, whose work is both critically acclaimed and immensely popular.


Read and learn more

Get this Publishing/Writing Blog on your Kindle :)))

Libraries Help Grow the Publishing Industry

My recent posts RE e-lending libraries and some of the intrigue generated due to the still-developing posturing of the peripherals of this new media business ... has brought to life the role that libraries have always played in the publishing industry and will continue to play in the digital lending era.

Here is a librarian's point of view (and a good one it is :)) written by Greg Hill, director of Fairbanks North Star Borough libraries, in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner:


Libraries are active partners with the publishing industry

Read more: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner - Libraries are active partners with the publishing industry
FAIRBANKS — Samuel Pepys, the great English diarist who chronicled London life in the 1660s, was a sucker for an interesting book. In Pepys’ day, book buyers purchased the loose pages of manuscripts and had them bound themselves. For example, on July 8, 1664, Pepys wrote that he’d gone “to the binder’s and directed the doing of my Chaucer … and thence to the clasp-maker’s to have it clasped and bossed.”

Librarians love bookstores, of course, and that affection’s largely returned by booksellers, who’ve long known that thriving libraries inspire readers to buy books.

Last month Publisher’s Weekly had an article about a Library Journal survey showing more than “50 percent of all library users report purchasing books by an author they were introduced to in the library. This debunks the myth that when a library buys a book the publisher loses future sales. Instead, it confirms the public library not only incubates and supports literacy, as is well understood in our culture, but it is an active partner with the publishing industry in building the book market, not to mention the burgeoning e-book market.”

Librarians certainly buy a lot of books for themselves. I spend a little extra to buy new books locally and support our local booksellers. When used books are hard to locate, I turn to BookFinder.com. For example, my friend Leon showed me how engaging his 1938 copy of Judge James Wickersham’s “Old Yukon: Tales, Trails, and Trials” was recently, and I craved my own copy. BookFinder.com revealed a bookstore in Massachusetts would part with theirs for $6.99, after I threw in another $3.99 for shipping. Now, it’s mine.

The Judge’s book has the entire May 1903 issue of the Fairbanks Miner, with an exclusive with Felix Pedro and a tall “Tanana Tale,” about a miner who claims to survive falling in the Tanana River at 70 below, getting lost, and staving off starvation by eating the tail of his lead dog.

“I gave Doughnuts the bone out of his tail,” he explained, “and after gnawing it a while he came on into the Fortymile with me.”

Few events are so pleasing as books in the mail. The pleasure’s heightened when they arrive wrapped in tissue paper. My new “Old Yukon” measured up, and was further wrapped in pages from a New York Times several weeks old. Several eye-catching articles popped out, including one by Jess Bidgood about the Occupy Wall Street Library, also known as the “People’s Library.”

Read and learn more

The Writers Welcome Blog is available right on your Kindle :)))

Libraries and E-Book Circulation and a Kindle Flaw

E-books have surpassed all expectations of popularity and have actually gained prime beachfront status in the book real estate landscape.

Libraries are now lending out e-books and some publishers are trying to figure out how not to be taken too much advantage of...while concurrently maximizing their e-book profit...Harper Collins is trying to accomplish this by limiting library, e-book circulation to 26 checkouts before the e-book goes up in a puff of electronic smoke.

It seems all this new tech has really simplified and made processes much more efficient...but, nobody has figured out just how to make any money from all the new shitsky!

Aimee Levitt , of the St. Louis Riverfront Times, has this to say:

Publisher Attempts to Limit E-Book Circulation, Libraries Fight Back

It's a brave new electronic world we live in, where blogs like this one that you're reading have replaced daily newspapers, e-mail and Facebook updates have replaced letters and phone calls, and the heavy stacks of textbooks that used to weigh down schoolkids may now be replaced with e-readers.

Only problem is, nobody's figured out how to make money on all this yet, and everybody's afraid of being taken for a sucker. That's why last week HarperCollins Publishers announced that every e-book it sells to a library can only be circulated 26 times. Then it will disappear into the electronic ether. (E-books purchased before last week, however, can continue to be checked out indefinitely.)

Librarians, naturally, were not pleased. Two librarians in the Philadelphia area, Brett Bonfield and Gabriel Farrell, have organized a boycott of HarperCollins, which encompasses more than 30 different imprints. They argue that libraries don't have the funds to keep purchasing e-books; depending on the check-out period, a book that circulates 26 times would only last a year to a year and a half, less time than many printed books.

Read and learn more

Are They Ebooks or Digital Books?

I never thought about this question before, but, a distinction is emerging. E-books are thought of as licensable entities that come with possible restrictions and digital books are digitized library collections. Lorcan Dempsey, who writes Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog (on libraries, services and networks)explains the difference in more detail:

I was in a meeting with a group of folks from research libraries the other week. I was interested in a particular terminological issue: 'ebooks' and 'digital books' were each being used in conversation. I asked was there a pattern of consistent use here. 'Not complete consistency' was the answer, but there was certainly a tendency to use 'ebooks' for materials available for license from external providers, and a tendency to use 'digital books' for materials digitized from library collections.

So, in this context, it is easy to see how each expression has a different - if overlapping - set of associations. Ebooks may evoke an environment currently fragmented by provider platforms, with restrictions on use, and managed in a licensed e-resource workflow. They are for reference, information, reading. Digital books may evoke a digital library environment, an aspiration to provide higher level research services based on text mining, entity identification, and so on, and various funding and cooperative initiatives which aim to increase the corpus. The Monk Project or the international Digging into Data Challenge are examples of a direction here.

Over the next few years, it will be interesting to see how these environments evolve as ebooks/digital books grow in number and usage. Ebooks and digital books - to continue to use these ambiguous terms - will become more important in the practice of research and learning. There are at least three big drivers in the environment the group above was discussing. The first is around moving physical collections to the cloud as libraries balance service between local collections, shared offsite collections and digital collections. There are early discussions about policy and service frameworks within which libraries can reduce their print inventory and the opportunity costs associated with it (see here for example). The second is around the demand environment, as books in digital form offer a better fit with research and learning workflows which are increasingly network based. The increasing availability of books in digital form supports patterns of discovery, analysis and use now common with other resources. Think for example of the practice of 'strategic reading' (or 'reading avoidance') where researchers are found to prospect the literature broadly in a digital environment, searching, consulting abstracts, scanning for terminology, diagrams and so on (interestingly described by Renear and Palmer here). For many purposes, people will prefer the digital versions and will shift use. This is not to say that people will not continue to read physical books, but it is interesting to consider the pattern of adoption (and continued development) of the journal literature. The third is around the environment of supply, where there is major current activity. The post settlement Google Books institutional product offering, Amazon's attempt to 'iPodify' books, the rise of the iPhone, and a range of other developments point to rapidly changing opportunities.

So the relationship with the book literature is going to change in significant ways, which may make the ebook/digital book distinction advanced above less relevant. In fact, Google Book Search already moves beyond it in important ways. And libraries are exploring various syndication models (with Amazon, for example, or Kirtas) or in collaboration with publishers such as the the Cambridge Library Collection, for example. Fragmentation, of technical platform, of format, of business model, and so on, will complicate service provision..

This poses major questions for libraries at all levels. From a (current) workflow point of view, we will see a shift of more activity out of the 'bought' materials workflow into the 'licensed' materials workflow. From a collections point of view we will see a rebalancing between local, shared and third party print and digital provision in ways now being worked through. There are bigger issues, already with us with the journal literature, about the curation of the scholarly record, about sharing of materials, and about assuring the type of access that is compatible with use and re-use in research and learning.

I think that libraries may be underestimating the impact and pace of change in the book world ...

More On Book Reviews...The ALA (American Library Association)

This post explains how to get your book reviewed by the American Library Association (ALA) and into libraries.

Q. I've just written/published a book. How do I get it into libraries? Doesn't ALA tell libraries what books to get?

A. Please be aware that individual libraries are responsible for their own collections. There is no one place that distributes books to all libraries -- and that includes ALA. Although, some main libraries purchase books for their branches as well as themselves. And some libraries purchase their books through such distributors as Baker & Taylor, Ingram Book Services, Emery-Pratt Company, and other book suppliers and wholesalers. At best, ALA can review your book in its publication, Booklist. For more information on telling libraries about your own book, first access the ALA Library Fact Sheet 5 - Marketing to Libraries, which lists strategies for informing the library community about your product or service. Then access the ALA Library Fact Sheet 3 - Lists of Libraries, which lists companies and groups that sell library mailing lists and mailing labels, and includes a suggestion (at the end) on how to compile a list of e-mail addresses for libraries. You might also want to contact book distributors directly to see if they would be interested in providing your book to libraries. You can find directories of library vendors, including book distributors, on the ALA Library Fact Sheet 9 - Library Products, Services and Consultants. If you are a publisher wishing to donate books to libraries, please see ALA Library Fact Sheet 12 - Sending Books to Needy Libraries: Book Donation Programs for groups and organizations that accept and distribute book donations to library and other recipients, as ALA does not provide this service.
Q. How do I submit my book to ALA's Booklist review periodical?
A. See the Inside Booklist web page, which provides submission guidelines and contact information.