James LaRue - myliblog

I know you do. Everything changed in 2010. Patrons handed library staff their shiny Christmas present: Kindles. “Make them work!” Despite the many predictions of a paperless society, eBooks really hadn’t caught on. But suddenly it was possible to carry 15 or 20 or 100 books around with you in your preferred font type and size. That same year, 2010, also marked the beginning of a big shift in the publishing landscape. At that time, there were about 300,000 new titles published a year by “the Big Five” (Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster). There were roughly 60,000 new titles per year published by small and independent publishers who just couldn’t match the distribution system of the major publishers. There were about 10,000 so-called vanity press titles a year. Today we call them “self-published,” even though the platform usually belongs to someone else — Amazon, Apple and Barnes and Noble, probably. Almost overnight regional, small and ind...

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 ...

Today I talked with the staff of the Kenosha (WI) Public Library about intellectual freedom issues. (Thank you, director Barb Brattin, for the opportunity!) There is a sense - not just in Kenosha - that things (our society, our norms of political contest) are changing. There are some things we thought we knew that are suddenly not so certain. So, the role of the library is .... ? I said that we should do what we have always done, what is still most urgently required: gather, organize, and present to the public the intellectual content of our culture. That content comes from several sources. Mainstream publishing has been the key pipeline for at least a generation of library users. But I also pointed out that there are now far more numerous and potentially more powerful wellsprings of content production. Small, independent, and self-publishing now completely overwhelms the 350,000 annual titles of our Big Five publishers and three or four distributors. Today, there are over 1 mi...