Download the full article PDF at Virginia Tech Digital Library and Archives

Those of you who are regu- lar readers might remem- ber the editorial for Vol-
ume 53, Number 2, April–June 2007 (http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ ejournals/VALib/v53_n2/openers. html), in which I speculated, What if the library mailed books to your door? Recorded Books has been doing this for years. Netflix is doing it now. Libraries are exchanging books amongst themselves through interlibrary loan. The book- mobile makes the rounds of the city for special patrons. [...] [T]ime and money [...] would be covered if you’d take subscriptions to this service, like Netflix, or alternatively charge an appropriate fee per item to cover roundtrip ship- ping and handling. My guess is that patrons would jump at the chance. [...] It would fol- low a model many have grown enthusiastic about. [...] The library could invest in sturdy, reusable shipping containers in a variety of sizes, enclosing the return postage card with the item, as we do with audio materials mailed to the blind.

I don’t know whether any libraries out there have actually taken up the gauntlet, but at least one commercial entity has. BookSwim: Read Easy (http://www.bookswim. com) offers “unlimited book rent- als shipped free, easy returns & no late fees! [...] BookSwim is the first online book rental library service lending you paperbacks, hardcov- ers and now college textbooks

Netflix®-style directly to your house, without the need to purchase! [...] Even choose to purchase and keep the books you love!”

By the time BookSwim arrived on the scene, there had already been plenty of successful free online book swaps. A service such as this clearly falls within our mission. By failing to explore and take advantage of such opportunities and allowing commercial entities to exploit them instead, libraries may be their own worst enemies. Far more than any shift in cultural emphasis away from books or libraries, it seems to me that the worst threat to libraries is the reluctance of some to think creatively and act beyond their established paradigm, even to serve our patrons better, meeting them halfway in an age of changing expectations.

Seeing that BookSwim offers customers the chance to purchase books they love, I thought about a way that we could satisfy this desire without increasing our work- load overmuch. Recently, I noticed that my library had weeded some of my favorite books on tape, but I was unable to find them at the somewhat frenzied book sale. How many of you have seen a favorite, out-of-print book that no longer circulates much and thought, “I’ll have to keep an eye out for that if it ever shows up at the book sale”? And, feeling this way, how many of you have been successful at finding the item later, once it disappears from the catalog? Many of our online catalogs already provide patrons with the ability to keep lists of books they want to read and place and manage their own holds. What if we added a feature whereby patrons could add their names to a “want list” to purchase a particular title, instead of simply pointing them toward Amazon (and effectively giving their business away)? If a copy of that book gets removed from the catalog, it could go to the first patron on the book sale waiting list, perhaps reserved with a slip that notes the price. The item could be held at circulation like a request, thus allowing the notified patron to look at its condition and pay for it there.

If the patron chooses to pass on the item, the material could go to the next patron on the sale waiting list. This could be especially useful as libraries are repeatedly faced with the task of purging older for- mats and conserving shelf space. It would also provide an easy way to sell extra copies and rentals when they are no longer needed, as well as reference and nonfiction that’s outdated or not circulating much. It would be a boon to both the patrons and the library, allowing patrons a better chance to purchase exactly what they want, while giving the library an easy chance to sell some materials without worrying about the storage or labor needed to add that particular item to the book sale. It might also help discourage patron complaints as the library phases out particular formats, if the patrons who wish to use that format have a better chance to acquire favorite titles for themselves……..

Download the full article PDF at Virginia Tech Digital Library and Archives