Coates, a former managing director of the Waterstone’s bookstore chain, said in the April 28 Guardian that in 1979, libraries loaned two-and-a-half times as many books as those sold in stores, but now the figures are roughly equal at 700,000 books annually. His report recommends that public libraries triple their acquisitions budgets, increase opening hours by 50%, and redecorate and refurbish their facilities to become more attractive to the public.
However, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals was quick to contest some of the report’s conclusions. “Mr. Coates paints a picture of a public library service in terminal decline. It isn’t,” CILIP Chief Executive Bob McKee told the Guardian. “But the public library service is still a huge operation: nearly 60% of the population are members, libraries lend 377 million books a year, and yet the whole service costs less than 2 pence in every pound councils spend.”
In an hour-long debate with Coates on BBC Radio’s Simon Mayo Show April 27, CILIP Head of External Relations Tim Buckley Owen pointed out, “Bookshops extend their opening hours in the expectation of increased revenues and profit. If libraries open late, they just see their costs increase.”
Some local libraries are contrasting their own performance with the report’s gloomy forecast. Guernsey’s Guille-Alles Library boasted to BBC News that its young adult borrowers were up by 5.2% since last year, while libraries in Powys, Wales, bucked the trend by increasing circulation statistics for the past four years.
“It’s a bit like that old obituary, ‘Rumours of my death are greatly exaggerated,’” Powys County Librarian Tudfil Adams said in the April 28 Western Mail. “The death of the book was predicted when computers came in and now more people are buying books. And what we want is to encourage more people to borrow them as well.”
Posted April 30, 2004.