Our local public library tends to have more problems with the children’s books than they do with the adult sections. Some series, like Captain Underpants are very popular, but the library doesn’t have the money to library-bind all of the copies it needs. So they circulate paperback copies, which get torn up pretty quickly and need to be repaired or replaced.
Question for librarians: How much is the cost to replace relative to the cost to buy through Baker & Taylor or send it to a bindery?
Tell me about it. :rolleyes:
I have suggested many times that the level of original cataloging required by this system is beyond nuts, especially given the few people we have available and allowed to do it, but I have a feeling at this point it’s about personal control of the inventory.
As far as replacement vs jobbers vs binderies - that gets tricky.
Jobbers will only sell us stuff that’s currently in print, and on their inventory lists of the publishers and specific authors/genres/types of books they deal with. They have HUGE lists, but they don’t have everything. Children’s books especially go out of print LIGHTNING fast, and often are not ever reprinted in HC, only as flimsy paperbacks. Sometimes you get lucky, and the jobber will list certain titles as part of their “pre-bound” inventory, but that’s even more limited than their other inventory. We get a lot of small paperback romances pre-bound into HC this way, otherwise they’d get destroyed pretty soon.
I don’t know precisely how the price breakdown goes for replacement costs if WE purchase it from somewhere - In addition to the actual purchase price of the item (which can be up to 60% more than what B&T can get it for), I don’t know whether accounting tries to keep track of everything officially as far as time seaching and purchasing it, courier time, patr-time labor, and what-not. I’m thinking in terms of hassle and cost, it would be easier to get anything possible through a jobber, rather than do it ourselves.
I would imagine either of those options are still cheaper than sending things off to a bindery. As far as I know (I am NOT a TS librarian, so they’ve got arcane resources I may not know about) we don’t have any bindery services immediately or competitively available to us.
As far as original cataloging, we’re starting to get most of our books pre-catted through B&T now, and the quote I’ve heard most often is 5 cents extra per copy to have that info added in.
I fail to understand how letting a jobber catalog your new books is ok, but letting someone with a 4-year college degree copy-catalog your replacement copies isn’t. However, I’m not a REAL librarian yet, so maybe I just haven’t gotten my koolaid delivery.
We have ALL kinds of problems with the jobbers, by the way - third edition will have a different crazy Dewey number than 1, 2, and 4, or a biography on the Buddha will have four copies under “Buddha” and one under “Gautama”, we sort into a couple genres (Mystery, Western, Science Fiction) and sometimes you’ll get a long running mystery series where four books for some reason are in general fiction… it’s a freaking nightmare and there’s not a lot to be done about it except to fix problems when you find them, because we’re a big system and handle a ton of books.