I’ve been getting a lot of former library books in readable and shelvable condition on the secondary market (i.e. AbeBooks and secondhand book stores). I can’t speak to how well they are circulating––I don’t generally read bestsellers––but I’m getting a lot of books at a fraction of the price compared to even Amazon discounts. The last time I went to the library to try to get a particular book (on wind energy system design) via ILL I was told it would be 6+ months, so I went online and bought it for ~$12 including shipping compared to $41 new at Amazon (discounted from a $65 retail).
Ours is in part a de-facto community center; they’ve got several large conference rooms people can check out for meetings and stuff (one of the meetings I saw was a neigborhood association, for example) and the library uses for its outreach programs- D&D on Saturday mornings, Kids Game Day on Thursday afternoons, and all sorts of other stuff.
The other half of the building is print books and computers. The requested book section (where people request books from other branches) is always jam-packed with books, even if the actual local collection isn’t huge by the standards of branch libraries of my youth.
Our library system has some interesting things- a seed library, for example. And they’ve got makerspaces as well.
Libraries seem to be doing ok, they’re just pivoting to stay current, and while they’re not as focused on printed books, they’re still leaning heavily into the repositories of information and knowledge aspects. They even do some research of their own on things like local history, genealogy, entrepreneurship, and , as well as some just nice community outreachtype stuff.
I read ebooks. I’ve paid for out of state cards at two libraries that use Baker and Taylor’s “Boundless” ebook system, those libraries bring Houston and Queens.
Amazon and BN do not license ebooks to public libraries. In the U.S., Boundless was probably number 3 in this market after Overdrive and Cloud Library.
Houston’s Boundless collection is small compared to its Overdrive collection. But Queens appears to me to have about half their ebooks with Boundless and half with Overdrive.
I do not have any Illinois library card, but that state seems to use Boundless a lot:
Libraries cull books all the time. If a book hasn’t been checked out in X period of time, or a book has fallen off the best-seller list and they only need one copy now instead of six, the ones that are resalable come to us at Friends of the Library.
They are currently culling the books on CD because fewer people have CD players in their cars, and they aren’t being checked out as much. Again, this is a case of “it hasn’t been checked out in a while, or we don’t need this many copies.”
Many books, especially those for children, have a trade edition and a library edition. The latter has a sturdier binding.
I used to work for Winnebago Software which made library automation software mostly for school libraries. Winnebago was bought by Sagebrush*. Sagebrush sold the library automation software to Follett which was Winnebago’s main competitor.
I dealt a fair bit with MARC records.
Brian
* about a year later Sagebrush decided to buy the next version of software rather than develop it in house. 16 developers downs to 6 (and some other positions eliminated) I was one of the 10+ let go.