James LaRue - myliblog

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 ...

Introduction Some months back I did a webinar on Odilo , an automation vendor (including an ILS, discovery, ebook acquisitions, hosting and delivery) with its roots in Spain. It has been present and growing in North America since 2012. I’d like to revisit the company, because I think it offers some compelling advantages to some of the offerings in today’s market. Indeed, that market, with very few exceptions, has been stagnant in some important and disturbing ways. Where we are in 2015 The fundamental issues of libraries and ebooks haven’t changed much since 2010: the Big Five and a few distributors still dominate the market, and their pricing and licensing models (lack of ownership, loss of discount, poor integration) have made libraries all but inept in this new space. We buy fewer books just as the number of new volumes (especially outside the Big Five) is skyrocketing. Random House prices for many new titles - now reliably at 6-8 times greater than consumer - erode...

One of the challenges of my new consulting career is finding the succinct summary of just what it is that I do. Here's my latest attempt: I'm a full time public library thought leader. I've decided that the profession I love (librarianship!) is at a tipping point. With some attention on just the right things, I think we can earn long term mind share and support. The point isn't just to benefit libraries, it's to benefit the communities we serve. Libraries just happen to be an extraordinarily effective way to do that. So just what, exactly, are  the "right things" to focus on? Right now: planning. After PLA (where I offered some free consulting to the library world, and met some fascinating people), I spent some time thinking about processes to move quickly and precisely to true "strategic" planning -- not just a list of stuff to do, but a narrow focus on the things that matter most. trend tracking. Really, this is just a subset of plann...