The Official Newspaper for Foster County
The Official Newspaper for Foster County
With ebooks, digital streaming, gaming, and social media becoming more prevalent each year, some ask, “Are libraries obsolete?” Definitely not! Of course, being a librarian, you’d expect me to say that.
The first proof comes from the publishing world: Ebook sales have indeed increased over the past few years, but print books have experienced an even larger surge in sales.
Facts according to publishing industry statistics:
• Over 4 million new books were published in 2022, including both self-published and commercially published titles.
• Over 788.7 MILLION print books sold in 2022 just in the United States. This is the second highest number of printed books sold, behind the 843 million copies sold in 2021.
• The largest print category is adult nonfiction, fiction is second. The largest growing section is young adult, which has had sales grow 49% over the past five years.
Certainly someone is reading those millions of books, and many of those books are housed in libraries so that entire communities have access to them.
That leads to my second point – for years I’ve had shelves of books that I read once and then they sat and waited for me to read them again…and waited…and waited until I finally donated them away. If you purchase ebooks, they are read and then sit on a virtual shelf, and those you can’t donate away someday. You spend all that money to buy a book and it gets read once.
I would suggest, instead, making a visit to the library. We work hard to meet the reading needs of our patrons and carry a wide variety of books that can be read by many people. And this makes books happy! If we don’t have it, we are happy to borrow books from other libraries. Additionally, we provide – free to all our patrons – access to a whole collection of ebooks and audiobooks. When you’re done with these, they go back on the virtual shelf for someone else to enjoy. Definitely a win-win!
Libraries are traditionally the homes to thousands of books, but modern libraries provide more services to their communities. Over the coming months, I’ll be introducing you to some of the things we do as we work to fulfill our mission. We hope you’ll stop and see us sometime soon.
