Technology Could Change The

Face Of Annual Library Book Sale

By Nancy K. Crevier

The slowdown in book donations to the Friends of the C.H. Booth Library for resale at the annual Book Sale is always anticipated this time of year, said Friends volunteer Denise Kaiser, and is the main reason that the group has scheduled special Book Donation Days (Sunday, April 29, this year) for the past four years.

“We wanted to make sure that people doing spring cleaning or preparing for the winter holidays brought their books to us, instead of Goodwill or the landfill,” Ms Kaiser said.

The Book Donation Days are scheduled regardless of the inventory, she said, and this year there is actually a greater stock of inventory than they had last year at this time.

“Where things have been quieter is on the ‘pickup’ front,” Ms Kaiser said. “People would call us when cleaning out a house before a move or after a life event. Those calls,” she said, “have been fewer.”

The housing slump may be one reason that fewer pickups are requested. Fewer sales mean fewer moves, and less motivation to clear space.

Technological advances may be behind the lessened donations, though. There has been a decided slump in donations of DVDs and CDs for the book sale this year, said Julie Starkweather, another volunteer with the Friends. “[Technology] is hitting us straight across the board,” she said, estimating that there are nearly half the normal DVD and CD donations at this time as in previous years. “With downloads for streaming [movies] and MP3 downloads or iPods, we’re getting fewer [donations]. People aren’t buying DVDs and CDs,” Ms Starkweather said.

The C.H. Booth Library’s decision to join with e-book borrowing system Overdrive this past spring also makes it simpler for readers to choose reading books electronically over buying print books.

According to an early April 2012 report by Pew Internet and American Life Project, an initiative of the nonprofit “fact tank,” Pew Research Center, 21 percent of American adults have read an e-book in the past year, up from 17 percent in December 2011. Four times more people are reading e-books each day that they were two years ago.

E-book readers are avid readers, said the report, reading on average 24 books over 12 months, compared to 15 books over 12 months by non-e-book readers. At least one device for e-reading is owned now by 28 percent of Americans 18 years of age and over.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that the majority of readers, whether using an e-reader or a print book, prefer to buy over borrowing.

As more books are purchased for and permanently stored on e-readers, fewer print books are available for sharing — or for donating to book drives.

Cheryl Edelen and her husband William are “e-book aficionados.” They own Kindles, and Ms Edelen has the Kindle app on her iPad. Between them, they belong to five book groups, as well as a Foreign Affairs Discussion Group. “So we download many books,” Ms Edelen said. That is especially true, said Mr Edelen, when a book club selection is not readily available at the library.

“Some time ago, I culled our books for the book sale, with the notion that I don’t need to store much more than reference and sentimental books, a few how-tos, and travel tomes. Novels are gone,” Ms Edelen said, “and recently I purged the cookbook shelf, as I do more recipe searches online.”

The Edelens have already given most of their CDs to the book sale, transferring the music to iPods. The few print books that they do buy now, Mr Edelen, said, are as gifts to non-e-book owning friends — but they also purchase e-book gift certificates for friends who own electronic devices.

In the future, this couple will have fewer and fewer print items or music items to give to book sales, as is probably true of many other local residents.

That residents will be transferring print data to electronic devices and thus having fewer books to donate is a thought has passed through the minds of Friends’ volunteers, said Toni Earnshaw. “We have been worrying about it for the last few years. What if donations keep dwindling? What if we throw a sale and no one shows up?” she mused.

“There is a sea change,” longtime Friends Book Sale volunteer Peter Stern said of e-reader technology. “The nature of reading will change, and that will be commensurate with how libraries, money, sales are affected,” he predicted. “It will tumble one over the other,” he said.

Changes Are Coming

Not to be a doomsayer, Mr Stern added that he does not expect the book sale will ever die. But he does expect to see changes.

Certain types of print books will most likely remain popular with readers, he guessed, such as tactile children’s books and rare and antique books. “Five years down the line,” he said, “the sale may be smaller. We’re going to have to make decisions on how things are going to go with it,” he said.

Mr Stern reflected on the impact a smaller sale would have on the financial health of the library. In past years, the Friends of the C.H. Booth Library has made more than $100,000 from the sale, much of which goes to support the library. A drastic cut in the income generated by the book sale as e-reader ownership affects donations in future years could be a blow to the library, Mr Stern said. “We would have less money to give to the library at a time when the library will need more money to build up e-book libraries,” he said.

Still, Mr Stern said, it could be a generation down the road before the greatest changes occur in how people read — and buy books.

Ms Starkweather agreed that changes are coming, and has already seen changes in reading habits in her own family. “My own adult children don’t collect books like our generation did,” she said.

Dwindling Inventory

The Friends’ other fundraising enterprise, The Little Book Store, located on the main level of the library, has also been impacted by the popularity of e-readers, said manager Marge Gingolaski. The Little Book Store offers gently used books for resale, year around.

“My inventory is very low, especially the hardcover books,” said Ms Gingolaski. “Whether it’s because of people buying e-books and not hardcovers, I don’t really know, but I suspect that has a great deal to do with it,” she said.

It is not to say that there are not great deals to be had at The Little Book Store, she emphasized, but she is concerned that more and more of the donations are not the most current books. “People just aren’t purchasing the number of current books that they used to, and then donating them to us [when they have finished reading them],” she said.

Ms Earnshaw holds out hope that print books will still retain value to many readers, and that the bargains provided by the Book Sale will continue to draw the throngs it has over the past 36 years. If everyone in a household owns an e-reader, purchasing books for everyone on the devices can quickly add up, Ms Earnshaw pointed out. “It may be that people still want that bargain [that they can get by buying actual books at a sale],” she said.

‘A Hard Copy

Kind of Guy’

Resident Robert Brand is just the kind of reader whom Ms Earnshaw hopes will continue to support the Friends of the C.H. Booth Library. An active member of three book groups, reading up to ten books each month, Mr Brand was an early Kindle user — but returned to print books.

“I guess I am the ‘hard copy’ kind of guy,” he admitted.

He is also one of the increasingly rare movie fans who does not subscribe to Netflix or similar streaming website. “Watching a movie on a 50-inch flat screen TV makes many evenings extra delightful,” Mr Brand said. The Friends probably should not count on this particular Newtown citizen to contribute to their DVD collection for the Book Sale, though. Mr Brand delights in the bargains he finds by borrowing from the library’s extensive DVD collection.

“Where will we be three to five years from now?” asked Ms Starkweather. “We really don’t know. This,” she said, “is a little like watching the horse go away for the car.”