New Books Coming Soon

USA Today has a long article previewing the Fall 2007 books. Big names on the list include John Grisham, Tom Brokaw, Phillip Roth, Steve Martin and Eric Clapton. We will buy some from the list but not all. Let us know any of the titles on the list that you would like for us to purchase and we will weigh our selections with that information.

Why don't we just go ahead and buy them all? It is a cost driven decision. We have so many dollars for books and when that runs out we are done for the year. The Friends of the Library help us all year long with money for library materials, to the tune of several thousand dollars.

We rank near the bottom of the pile when we compare our library materials (books, magazines, video's, DVD's, children's books, tapes, etc.) funding to other public libraries in Kansas. On the annual Read Index which ranks Kansas Public Libraries on a variety of factors including Collection Expense Per Capita, we rank 16th out of 18 libraries in our group. I expect that our relative position will improve this year with our expanded building in operation since the size of the library is one of the ranking factors. But book budget-wise, 2008 will not be a banner year for funding. We are shaving our Materials Budget just a little to expand our hours from the current 40 hours per week. How much we expand our hours is in the hands of our city commission. The newest commissioner, Darrell Unruh has pressed the city manager and the other commissioners to come up with $31,000 more for the library so we can expand our hours. The issue will be revisited late this year as unreimbursed flood related expense is better known.

So, typically we add between 2,000 and 3,000 new items to the colleciton every year out of the 175,000 plus published yearly. About 10,000 fiction books are published in the US with a few dozen being the ones everyone wants to read. The stinkers cost as much as the prize-winners but far outlast them on the shelves. It is somewhat a guessing game and some years not even John Grisham produces a winner.