Libraries and Learning
Books (Still) in Print
January 10, 2017
People have a lot of odd beliefs about books. Nobody reads books anymore – except they do, overwhelmingly. Well, maybe old folks still read books, but not kids – though actually kids are much more likely to read books than people over 65. Well, but that’s because they’re reading ebooks. Nope. People of all ages still prefer print. The Gallup poll making the rounds is just the latest in a long string of surveys and studies that never can quite put an end to the commonly-held belief that “people don’t read books anymore.”
A lot of academic librarians, seeing their circulation figures decline since the internet was invented, have concluded that students don’t want books anymore. Some of the decline in circulation is thanks to the increasing convenience of finding scholarly articles. It wasn’t all that long ago that finding a book on the shelf was a lot easier than tracking down articles using indexes and abstracts, scraps of paper and a lot of patience. Some of the decline is because so many of the factual questions people used to look up in books can be answered with a Google search. And sometimes, a book placed on the shelf never leaves it. Rather than clutter up the library with books nobody wants, many librarians have started licensing collections of ebooks. Not only do they save space, they surely are more likely to be used. Except . . . maybe not.
My former colleague and pal Amy Fry has studied circulation of print and ebooks where she works at Bowling Green State University’s library. Looking at books acquired between 2008 and 2014, nearly three quarters of print acquisitions had been checked out at least once. Okay, not a hundred percent, but it’s a higher percentage than many librarians would guess. During that period, the library acquired (or licensed) twice as many ebooks as printed books, but the printed books added during those years were far more likely to be “checked out” – meaning circulated or reshelved versus clicked on to read a description, look at a table of contents, or download a chapter. It’s worth noting that two-thirds of BGSU students live off campus and the university offers a number of fully online degree programs.
I’ve resisted licensing loads of ebooks because I’m at a residential college, so getting to the library isn’t a hardship, and because I prefer the rights we have with print (such as being able to loan books to other libraries – interlibrary loan and ebooks don’t mix). We hand-pick our books with the help of faculty in the disciplines, and the books they want us to have are often not available in ebook packages. So far our students haven’t begged for digital editions, and though they take up less space, they aren’t cheaper. I’m grateful to have an in-depth analysis (and a significant literature review, to boot) to back up my hunch that ebook packages aren’t necessarily the way to go.
Here’s another library conundrum: given how much each academic lib