How Much Does Obama's Summer Reading List Cost Your Library?

Laura Crossett and Jennie Rose Halperin posed this interesting question, so we looked into it.

Turns out—no surprise to those following ReadersFirst--not so very much in print but a lot in digital.

Read their post here.

A few highlights:

Former President Barack Obama recently released his highly anticipated annual summer reading list. We love a good list, but it got us thinking about what it takes for libraries to offer these books to their patrons. We’ve written about Obama’s books before – The New Yorker reported that 949 copies of his latest memoir cost the New York Public Library $51,962, the equivalent of 3,000 print copies.(!) Play the games on Ebooks for Us to learn more.

The print books cost an average of $16.38 each – $225.84 for all fourteen titles. The library owns those books – it can keep them for as long as they hold together. The average cost of each ebook, when licensed from Overdrive, came to $54.57. And as a reminder, that $54.57 is a license–it gives the library the right to lend the book for two years (or for a number of checkouts, with both number set by the publisher).

As one of the authors on Obama’s reading list (and indie press/intellectual freedom advocate!) Hanif Abdurruqib titled his book, There’s Always This Year. But instead, we have to paraphrase Bob Marley, another Obama favorite: “Them [big publisher’s] Belly Full, but We Hungry.”

How long will we stand for this?