Friday, January 19, 2024

The Dirty Little Secret Of Libraries

They are just like bookstores: they buy books they think their customers want to read.

Librarians and booksellers both buy books. Booksellers buy from publishers, librarians buy from bookstores. Both have the same aim: to put books on shelves that their clients will want to read.

Basically, it’s all about the free market. Why do conservatives hate the free market?

Assuming, of course, the reported numbers are even correct. In this age where everybody spits numbers claiming to prove everything is true, and Donald Trump and his followers make up numbers as easily as others draw breath, I wonder if this “study” has any validity at all. How many polls reportedly say one thing, and the underlying numbers say another? Ramaswamy has written three books. Which one did he not find? And what’s the turnover in these libraries? How often do they remove books on politics/current affairs, to make room for new ones? 

And Kamala’s two books are aimed at young people and children. Those are more likely to remain in library collections, and are in no way comparable to books by Pence or Ramaswamy. Which is another problem with this “study.”

Just how valid is this “snapshot”? And why does he hate the free market?

1 comment:

  1. As I recall someone pointed out a book by one of the minor lawyer-liars in the 1990s era impeachment of Bill Clinton wrote a book which got on the NYT best-sellers list was certainly not being bought by people who intended to read it. Maybe that's what is so confusing to this dolt. You'd think the billionaires who mass-buy Republican-fascists onto the best sellers list would donate the soon to be land-fill to libraries but, no. They don't even care that much about it. When I worked in a library we had one instance I recall of a Bircher who wanted to donate crap like that to the library but he insisted they be put on the shelf. I was able to point out the written policy that all books that are donated to the library are the property of the library and the librarian would decide if they were added to the collection. He didn't leave the crap with me.

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