I live in rural upstate New York, where the two closest libraries are almost a 15 minute drive away. The libraries offer book discussion clubs, occasional film nights, local history repository, pre-school story hours, lectures, meeting places for the Scouts, and senior citizens, even knitting groups and board game nights. These services are not on the radar in the Kindle and Wikipedia discussions, but encourage a wide range of patrons to value the library.
]]>It wasn't something that attracted young people back then, and still isn't. You don't see the English majors so much as those who are voracious readers in a wide range. We have fundraising groups that hold occasional large used book sales once or twice a year. Some libraries have a space where they can open a book barn for sales a couple of times a month in the warmer months. While it's no longer the golden age of incredible finds, the sales keep the book supply circulating.
The used and rare book trade took a big hit with the advent of online selling, having been hit with a flood of cheap books undercutting sales by professionals. The rare book trade is getting older and greyer, as are their customers, and neither are being replaced. The flooding of the market may be finally slowing, so that prices can stablize to a level that can support professional booksellers making a living. But where that market is going at a time when e-readers are starting to be serious competition for the physical codex, is anybody's guess.
]]>I have heard a number of highly annoying tales of councils that are spending less money, keeping council tax low, increasing their cash reserves by more than in previous years (aka, running a larger profit), and yet still closing libraries. None of them have been my council, so I don't have any direct say in their actions, but the people responsible for such actions need to be unelected - there is no economic justification for that sort of thing!
(Curiously, these have mostly been Labour councils, not Tory ones. I cannot reconcile this with the stated political positions of the parties)
I would like to get to the bottom of exactly what's going on with PLR here. Do you have/can you get any more details on where the money is coming from, aside from the final figure?
]]>Labour councils in England are typically elected by poorer, more urban communities relative to conservatives (wealthier, suburban or rural communities). Poor/urban will in turn mean more people using social services at the same time as fewer people paying council tax, so they have more demands on their income and less money per capita.
Now, unlike the USA, British local government is directly funded from central government revenue to the tune of 40-60% of their income -- it's a central grant. But that grant is being squeezed. And never in a bazillion years would it occur to Eric Pickles to divert money from Labour voting areas to ease the pain of Conservative voters, in other words, to use central government control over local government revenue as a party political lever. (That never happened. Not once. Especially not in the 1980s and 1990s, cough, Thatcher, cough, Poll Tax, cough Dame Shirley Porter, cough.)
NB: Please read the previous paragraph through your irony-viewing goggles.
I've got a bit of sympathy for a council caught in this cleft stick. The bastards in Westminster are deliberately squeezing you because you are a member of the opposition party and they've got your balls in a fiscal vice. You have a buttload of infrastructure that needs repair -- roads leading to hospitals, for example, or schools -- lots of wages to pay, and a desperately poor council estate that is in danger of collapse if you don't keep maintaining it. You have a statutory duty to house the homeless, and you've got too many of them because your residents are poor and, increasingly, unemployed and not making their rent payments. Where are you going to make cuts -- road maintenance? Schools? Juggling homeless people through hostels (and note that you'll be crucified if you drop either of the latter two)? Or libraries? Which are an easy target and besides, free up valuable capital because they're useful real estate.
The need for libraries is a long-term requirement, and too many councillors are fighting fires from day to day to look beyond the end of the current financial year. Especially Labour councils. Because the central government beatings will continue until the voters learn the error of their non-conservative-voting ways.
]]>Even though here, funding comes from national to state to local (in most cases), decisions at the national level can still bubble down to the local level, so what we get are the state and local leaders who decide that there isn't enough money at their level because they aren't getting as much federal money overall, so things will have to be cut, and whoops! Less money for libraries, sorry. So hours are cut and staff is cut ... and yet state and local cash reserves are building up for some reason.
It is a shame.
]]>If anyone wonders why I am so depressed about America's future this image is why
Funnily enough a lot of my Facebook friends thought it beautiful in some way regards
Rex
]]>And then a couple of years ago I discovered that my public library not only had a JSTOR subscription the I could access, but that I could use it online. As long as scientific journals and other periodicals and reference information are pay-walled by their publishers, libraries will have a useful virtual presence, even if budget cuts reduce their physical presence.
]]>No it's not!
The breakdown in publishing is: 30-70% to the distribution channel (wholesalers/retailers or Amazon.com/Apple), the rest going through the publisher. But the author trousers between 7% and 15% of net receipts, so when the dust settles it should work out at a roughly even split of the profits between the publisher and the author. The author's agent is paid a 15% commission by the author, which gives them an incentive to shake down the publisher as hard as they can.
Upshot: the novelist makes a much higher proportion of the cover price than a musician does. On the other hand, sales are much, much lower -- probably an order of magnitude lower.
Give me a paying base of 10,000 folks paying AUS $20 a year, or maybe 30,000 folks paying AUS $7 a year (or around £5 a year and I'd be rather happy because I could then hire editorial/design/other support staff and self-publish a quality product. (The overheads of going from a finished and submitted manuscript to an actual book are non-trivial; it's not just a matter of throwing a Word file at Amazon.)
]]>No.
The system was rigged to favour coalitions. That's not the same at all. In a system with three major and two or three minor parties, this should in theory result in consensus-based government. (Major: Labour, Lib-Dem, SNP. Minor: Conservative, Green, Socialist. Yes, we have three and a half socialist parties, the greens, and a couple of die-hard conservatives. Hell, we have more pandas than Conservative MPs.)
Anyway: if any one party in the Scottish system gains an absolute majority (as happened for Labour, early on, and now the SNP) it amounts to a ringing public endorsement and a genuine mandate, rather than merely indicating that fewer people voted against them (see Tony Blair's win in 2003, in which less than 20% of the total electorate voted to return a Labour majority in Westminster).
]]>The main library in Amsterdam has been hugely busy the times I've been there, but it's national capital, a university town and the library's a quick bike ride from anywhere. As far as I can tell, the smaller district libraries are still open and being used too.
]]>