The Bookseller.com

7th January 2009

Tim Coates is a former managing director of Waterstone's, who has become a well-known advocate for improvements in public-library service. He blogs at goodlibraryguide.com.

Libraries direct

27.11.08

For 150 years we have all assumed that public libraries are a 'good thing' for books. It is time to question that assumption. Why should a publisher allow free loans of books that can be sold? Why should a bookseller permit free government subsidised trading of goods and services in a way that clearly contravenes European competition law ?

While public libraries were part of a genuine attempt to support and promote the use of books for the good of society, for its education and wellbeing, to introduce the taste for reading and the pleasure it brings, then fine; publishers and booksellers could persuade themselves that libraries are a good thing. But our public library service no longer sees the encouragement of the reading of published work as its central role. Government subsidy is no longer granted for that purpose. Nowadays libraries are community centres and the measure of their success is simply the number of people who visit them. A 'library' which offers free viewing of a football match is a much more successful library than one which offer dull shelves of old and boring books.

The people who do sell to libraries and receive large shares of the tax funding are computer software companies. If you go to the 'Library and Information Show' at the NEC next April you will see row after row of purveyors of electronic gadgetry and web manipulation. UK publishers don't even try to interest public libraries in books. Bill Gates has an open field. Tim Hely Hutchinson and Marjorie Scardino do not show up.

And if you were to go in a library you would see how truly dull and dismal are the selection and presentation of the miserable books on offer.

The supply line from publisher to library is so long and boring that it takes all the magic away on the route. Printer to distributor to wholesaler to library supplier to council service centre, via consortium, to library, many months after publication or sell by date, makes a truly boring display.

UK public libraries buy £90m books each year, which makes them publishers' 3rd or 4th largest customer. Libraries should spend £200m to satisfy the demand for books within them. Whose job is it to persuade them to spend that money? A big fat well paid publishers' sales director? No politician thinks it is their role to increase the spend on books: so there is no point waiting until they do. For 20 years UK publishers have allowed this market to be taken away from them and just at the moment when they could do with the business, they have no idea how to go about securing it. Is there a delegation of publishers seeking out Andy Burnham's review team? I doubt it-- and if there is it wouldn't surprise me if their agenda comprises only ebooks..

Publishers should either close down the public library service, because it is certainly operated with their consent, or wake up and service it and sell to it properly with all the verve and enthusiasm of which they are perfectly capable.

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