Occupy Wall Street Libraries

I just found out through Wayne Bivens-Tatum that Occupy Wall Street (and many of the other cities) have started their own libraries.  You can learn how to contribute here.

Personal libraries as the backbone of a sustainable book culture

The other day Joshua Kim complained about the price of a university press book on his IHE blog, and today he has offered some thoughts on how to lower prices.  This is the typical underwhelming stuff of IHE blog conversations about books and libraries, and I only mention it because of a much more worthwhile response to his first post by Tony Sanfilippo about what exactly factors into the pricing of scholarly books.  Sanfilippo currently works at Penn State Press, and is an indie scholarly bookstore veteran.  So he has fought—and is fighting—the good fight.

Tony writes [in part]:

I've been selling books for over twenty years, first in retail with my own academically oriented bookstore and now for a university press publisher, and if I had to point to one thing that I think is causing this I'd point back to readers. We all still read, as much if not more than we ever have, but how much do we value book ownership? How many young scholars are building personal libraries? We're in a vicious cycle where the erosion of the perceived value of a personal library means a smaller printrun sellthrough, which is noted and reflected in the price of the next book that a publisher publishes. We have tried cutting prices in half, but it has never doubled sales. IMHO, these prices are a direct reflection of a cultural shift where people are happy to outsource their personal library to Google Books, their institutional library, or to legal or illegal digital copies. They are also content to take only what they need, so where chapter four used to subsidize the creation of the entire book, these days scholars are content with just using chapter four in their custom published textbook, or on Blackboard®. No one is being required to buy the whole book.

I'm all about the sort of efficiency and free exchange of critical discourse that is touted by open access and mass digitizing ventures, but this is precisely why personal book collections... with all of their idiosyncrasies, limitations, and inefficiencies... need to continue to play an important role in book culture.  Institutional libraries should be supported and expanded, but we cannot expect them to bear the burden of the entire book industry as its primary consumer base.  Nor should we expect them to have the books we need when our lack of personal investment in the book culture is what drives prices up.