Where do (library) books come from?

[This column appeared in the Dec. 30, 2024 issue of the Post Independent. Link.]

Where do the books in a library come from? How are they chosen?

The short answer is that they come from various business markets. In America’s public libraries, most of our holdings come from just a handful of publishers, the so-called “Big Five.” They are Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan.

On the one hand, the Big Five produce only about 10-20% of all new titles in a year published through conventional publishers. Add in self-published books, and the share of Big Five in global publishing shrinks to around 2.5%.

But the Big Five still control over 80% of the trade book market in the US — and probably higher than that in public libraries.

How do librarians decide which books to buy? There are three main sources:

• Publishers catalogs and purchase lists. Librarians usually buy things through jobbers–distributors who knows how to work with us. Those distributors are biased toward the bigger companies. Big publishers have the most books thus the most potential for sales.
• Librarian reviews, which appear in trade magazines like Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Library Journal. Librarians read the galleys, then recommend which libraries might be interested (medium-sized public library, rural libraries, etc.).
• Patron requests. It used to be that this third category was about the same as the first. People ask about the books they’ve seen advertised or heard an author talk about on TV or radio. Generally, those are books the Big Five put advertising budgets behind. If a publisher prints 150,000 copies, there will be advertising, and readers will ask for them. (The PR starts long before the book hits the stands.) Now, though, some readers have begun to shift into the indie or self-published worlds, usually through Amazon. So our patrons are asking for things that aren’t quite as mainstream as they used to be.

Rolling in small and independent titles and the ever-burgeoning self-published world, we’re looking at somewhere around 4 million new titles every year. Clearly, we can’t really stay on top of that.

Is there bias on the part of selectors? Sure. Someone who raises dogs is going to notice new books on canine breeding and training. Conservative or liberal librarians might buy books reflecting their own world view.

But the next thing to consider is use. The community tends to correct purchaser bias with community bias. If nobody checks out a book, other librarians will clear it out to make way for new materials, reflecting all the internal contradictions, misinformation, and prejudices of our neighbors and times.

A hundred years ago, most public libraries started out with similar collections, often recommended by the American Library Association. But the collections quickly diverged. No community has quite the same reading tastes as another.

Is all of America lurching into ever more fringe viewpoints? Maybe. Change comes from the fringe, after all, not the mainstream. And libraries do track social change.

But I thought the readers of Garfield County might find some insight in a brief backward glance at the use of just one format of our materials: audiobooks. Here’s the big number: we check out over 40,000 audiobooks a year.

The most popular category of audiobooks is adult fiction. The most popular genres are thrillers (representing 22.2% of the use within the category), suspense (representing 15.4%), and mysteries (15.2%). Those three genres account for over half the use of the category.

We check out thousands of children’s or “juvenile” fiction audiobooks. The biggest genre is fantasy (29.8% of the category), humor (16.9%), and mysteries (14%). I sometimes think adults could do with a little more humor.

Young adult fiction audiobooks reflect the changings interests of minors: fantasy is still significant (at 29.8%), but then it’s romance (24.1%). Some adults fear their children’s interest in sex–and young adults definitely think about it. But it’s not just sex. Romance covers a lot more ground, addressing the emotional side of growing up.

Adult nonfiction audiobooks are a little different. Biography (18.1%) tops the list, followed by history (at 11%), science (10.1%), and sociology (8.7%)

Young adult nonfiction audiobooks start the same: 17.6% for biographies, but then 17.6% for sociology, and 10.7% for titles by or about LGBTQIA+.

Spanish language audiobook use breaks down like this: fiction (16.6%), Nonfiction (9.4%), Literature (7.1%), Romance (5.7%) and YA Fiction (5.1%).

What are the grand takeaways? First, library readers in Garfield County mostly peruse what our culture generates: the near monopolistic output of a handful of players. Second, it’s worth noting that the library isn’t grooming spies and murderers. People just like to read about them.

It can take a lot of reading just to begin to keep up with the world. The library is a good place to start.