Wake County Public Library is choosing not to purchase Fifty Shades of Grey because it does not meet our selection criteria.
While there is currently quite a bit of publicity surrounding this title, it is unlikely to have the long shelf-life on which we are currently focusing.
Also, it is…
My home/current county is pretty great.
Iiiiiiiiiii kind of think that this comes across as snobby and elitist? But I would like to hear from some of my librarian friends.
Yeah, I think this is pretty shitty, to be honest. I have no particular love for the 50 Shades thing—I haven’t read it, and I probably won’t—but all the backlash against it ends up sounding like, “Ew, moms getting off” to me, and this is no exception. All of their purported reasons for not carrying it are nonsensical. They’re going to stop carrying debut authors and books that haven’t been well-reviewed? Cool. That leaves a whole lot. Also they want to carry books that reach “a more general audience”? So dudes, basically. Because the 50 Shades trilogy is taking up space that could be inhabited by the precious few* books written for dudes.
Here’s a theory I’m still working out: When people hyperbolize hatred of Twilight and 50 Shades and chick lit and any popular books whose audience is comprised solely of women, what they are hating is actually women. Do I wish that the quality of the lady phenomenon novels was higher? Yes, ma’am. Do I wish that they didn’t seem to promote creepy abusive relationship models? Of course. Do I think the way we talk about these books is fucked? That in it is an undercurrent of “Women readers are stupid and don’t know what’s good for them”? I certainly do.
*Read: infinite.
If they were just like “no these books are dumb and you’re dumb so we’re not carrying them” it’d be one thing, but they mention that they carry fucktons of other books like that. So it’s not like they’re shaming ladies for wanting word boners, they’re just refusing to carry fucked-up books.
I can’t really be mad at people for refusing to stock books that encourage and romanticize abusive relationships.
katiecoyle has obviously never worked in a library. like, I totally get what you’re saying, but “They’re going to stop carrying debut authors and books that haven’t been well-reviewed?”
um. yes? because it is literally impossible to read every book in the universe, and therefore all we have to go by to judge whether or not a book is good for the collection is reviews.
though 50 Shades is probably an exception here because of the whole media frenzy. I mean, there comes a point where a book is so so so popular that you can’t not satisfy the demand for it, even if it is a shitty book.
anyway. the library where I work wasn’t planning on buying it. I was kind of pestering them to, because when the inter-library loan waiting list for a book is over 1,000 names long…it kind of sucks when you have to tell someone they’re number 978 in the queue. apparently the reason why we weren’t planning on getting it was because it’s shittily-written fanfiction and we didn’t want to spend money on that. but then someone donated the whole series to us, and so we added them to the collection.
so basically idk, there’s a delicate balance between buying popular fad books and buying books that will stand the test of time and still be read 10 years in the future. and many libraries do not have a lot of money and have to make what they think is the best decision for their community. so. yeah.
Yeah, honestly public libraries have really limited resources, and they have to be very choosy about where they spend that money (and you should realize that a lot of times publishers will charge libraries huge amounts more for a copy of a book than they would somebody who buys it off the shelf; there’s a good chance they’re not paying the $10-$20 you would if you grabbed it at Barnes & Noble, but possibly more like upwards of $100). So they have to decide: do they want to stock the short-term fad book that everybody wants right now but will sit on the shelf forgotten after about a year? Or do they want to invest in a copy of Little Women to replace the one that got stolen (again)?
Involuntary Kegels: I just saw this on the county library FAQ and I’m dying of happiness