117. Libraries, Buying eBooks, and Diverse Historicals: An Interview with Librarian Dena Heilik

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Sarah Wendell:  Greetings, and welcome to episode number 117 of the DBSA podcast.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today is Jane Litte from Dear Author and Dena Heilik, who is a librarian, specifically, the department head of Philbrick Hall, the fiction and DVD department at the central branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia.  Dena contacted us about a recent conversation we had on the podcast about purchasing eBooks for libraries and how librarians often struggle to build a good digital book collection for their libraries due to a number of issues.  Dena was willing to answer our questions and discuss some of those issues and talk specifically about the frustrations that she encounters when trying to buy fiction for her library for digital, for digital readers specifically.  And we also talk about the fantasy, science fiction, and historical romance that she loves, so this might also be a bit of an expensive podcast in terms of the number of book recommendations, and I apologize in advance.  Y’all know it’s just as dangerous for me, too, right?  Okay, as long as we’re clear.

This podcast is brought to you by Berkley, publisher of Romancing the Billionaire, the sizzling new Billionaire Boys Club novel from New York Times bestselling author Jessica Clare.  You can find Romancing the Billionaire anywhere books are sold.

The music you’re listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater.  I will have information at the end of the podcast about who this is and how you can purchase it for your very own.  If you’re like me, you’re probably nodding your head along right now, because this is pretty awesome!  I like this song a lot.  I also love it when we have new music; it makes me very excited.

In case you don’t listen to the outro, which I totally understand, Dena is also willing to answer your questions about libraries acquiring eBooks, that sort of thing, so if you’ve questions for her, email us.

And now, on with the podcast.

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Dena Heilik:  Okay, well, a few weeks ago, you just briefly touched on getting books, eBooks from the library, and since I am a librarian, and I’m actually somewhat involved in purchasing eBooks for the library, I figured I would tell you how that kind of works and why you’re seeing some things and not seeing other things there.

Sarah:  Tell us all about –

Dena:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – ordering eBooks for a library.  I understand that this is a really simple process and there are never any problems.

Dena:  Never.  Never.  At least, none that you see.  Do you remember – oh, goodness, I, I am old, and I’m trying to remember how long ago it was, but Napster and LimeWire and all those things that started coming out with music, and everyone’s like, woo, music online, it’s free, it’s not free, what are we supposed to do?  That’s kind of where we are with eBooks for libraries.  It’s this huge, big thing that’s happening that nobody’s really gotten an idea of the best way to do it yet.  So the publishers are like, we love libraries having books, but we don’t want them to get, like, one book, and then it never gets worn out and they never have to replace it, and then they lose money that way.  So, and at the library, we’re like, we want everyone to be able to read everything, and it’s a really great way to publicize your books is to have them in the library, ‘cause people will run across them, read them, hopefully love them, then want to buy everything you’ve ever written.  So, those are kind of the two things that are working there.  The publishers want to make money, and we want to have everything.  And we’re never going to have everything.  So what the publishers do is they work with kind of a middle man.  The major one right now, the one that was first out of the gate, is called OverDrive, so if you have a library card and you download a lot of eBooks or audiobooks, eighty percent of the time you’re going to be doing it through OverDrive, and that’s a distributor.  The publisher sells to OverDrive, OverDrive sells to us, and then we use their platform to distribute the books out to everyone.  And not all publishers treat libraries the same way.  So, if we were buying a paper book, we usually get approximately a forty percent discount on the book.  We buy a lot, we buy in bulk, and there are a lot of libraries doing it, so we get a discount, kind of the way a bookstore gets a discount.

Sarah:  And the, and the paper books that you’re buying, are they more often hardcover, or are they a special format so that they don’t degrade too quickly?

Dena:  There used to be library format.  You’ll see them a lot of the times, the older books that have a, a binding that you’ve never seen in a retail store.  It’s, it’s a tighter binding, it’s a little bit more reliable, it’ll last longer.  You don’t –

Sarah:  Yes –

Dena:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – I’ve seen those many times.

Dena:  Yeah, they stopped – I haven’t seen the library buy one of those in over fifteen years.

Sarah:  Wow!

Dena:  Yeah.  Maybe some of the kids’ books?  I don’t do kids books, so don’t quote me on that, but I’ve never seen an adult book come through that way.  We buy the paperbacks, the trade paperbacks, and the regular hardcovers the same way anybody else does.  And eBooks don’t work that way!

Sarah:  You don’t say.

Dena:  [Laughs] For one thing, not all publishers sell to libraries.  It was only in the past year, I think, that Penguin started selling to libraries, ‘cause they were holding back.  They’re like, I don’t know about this eBook thing!  I don’t like this idea that nobody’s – they, they think, I don’t know what they think.  I think they think that once there is a perfect copy out there, people just aren’t going to buy any.  They’re going to either download them and pirate them or just wait for the library, which is what you do with regular books anyway.  I mean, if I had to pay for all the books that I read, I would be so broke!  That’s what the library is for – I’m in a good position, though, ‘cause if I want to read a book, I, I buy it for the library, ‘cause I figure if I want to read it, other people will want to read it, and, and so, that’s how my library romance collection comes to be!

Sarah:  That’s just a terrible side benefit of being a librarian, getting to –

Dena:  Oh, I hate my job so much.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I know!  It’s just a terrible, terrible thing.

Dena:  Yes.  So, some publishers do not sell to the library, which is why you’ll see, or you won’t see certain authors, because if their publisher doesn’t want to sell to the library, that eBook is never going to get into the library, ‘cause we just –

Sarah:  You can’t buy it.

Dena:  – cannot do it.  We can’t buy it.  We want to; we can’t.  The other thing, and this is across the board, is we don’t get discounts on eBooks.  There’s –

Sarah:  So, you get forty percent –

Dena:  We pay full price.

Sarah:  – you get forty percent off of a paperback or a hardcover, but for an eBook you pay full price.

Dena:  Yes.  Oh!  But if only it was just that.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Wait, you’re telling me there’s more?

Dena:  [Laughs] There’s more!  Not only do we pay full price, and there are some really fantastic publishers out there who – and I’ll get back to them – who, who don’t try to do some weird things, but what a lot of the publishers do is they inflate their prices.  So, say – I, I just read Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, which just won all the science fiction awards, and that is a $15 trade paperback.  To buy it for the library costs, as an eBook costs $48.  And I see prices for books that would go in the stores for anywhere between $10 and $25 going for between $60 and $80 for some publishers.  So, what they’re doing is they’re saying, listen, we’re going to sell you this book, but it’s never going to wear out, and we know you’re never going to replace it, so we’re going to get some more money up front to kind of balance out the money we’re going to lose on the other end by you never buying other copies of it.  So, there are some publishers – Hachette, Random House do that, and it irks me, but I, I can deal with it, because yes, this book is never going to get lost.  It’s never going to get checked out and never returned.  It’s never going to have the binding fall apart and the pages fall out.  So, yes, I understand not paying a discount, and I even understand paying a premium for that.  Other publishers meter that.  Me-, meter the checkouts that you’re allowed.  So, it’s not like you’re buying the book, you’re renting the book, and there was a huge stink a few years ago about HarperCollins trying to decide what the optimum number of checkouts would be.

Sarah:  And they decided it was, like, twenty-six, right?

Dena:  Twenty-six.  They said an average book lasts twenty-six checkouts before you have to replace it.

Sarah:  Which –

Dena:  Mm-mm.

Sarah:  – I remember s-, I remember this, because there were, there were, like, librarian MacGyvers making video of how they repair a book and all of the different tools that they have –

Dena:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – to restore a paper book back to functional circulation level quality.

Dena:  Yes, yes, and a lot of what happens, like – and I’ve looked at the circulation of my books as just, like, a very tiny sample – I would say a well-loved paperback circs anywhere between thirty-five and fifty before it’s unusable, and then, yes, we either buy a replacement or we’re just, we’re like, okay, we’re not getting that book anymore; let’s go on and buy new stuff.  So, yes, HarperCollins does twenty-six circulations.  Some of them say it’s metered for a year, so as many circulations as you want, like, as many checkouts as you want, but after a year, this book expires, and you have to repurchase it, so it’s basically putting a hard limit on how many times this book can be checked out, or a time limit on how many times this book can get checked out, with no real bearing on what the equivalent as a paper book would be, and so, I – one of the reasons you won’t see some books in libraries is because a librarian looked at this and said, you know what?  I’m going to spend my money on the paper copy instead of the metered copy, and – ‘cause I know it will last longer than twenty-six circulations, or it’ll last longer than a year.

Sarah:  Especially because – correct me if I’m wrong – libraries don’t have unlimited budgets.

Dena:  The budgets get smaller and smaller every year.  It’s – and there’s so much more stuff to buy, and without the discount, we can’t buy as much of it, so you have to be a lot more critical about what you buy.  And then – I just found this out when I was digging around – some places both inflate the price andmeter it!

Sarah:  Ouch.

Dena:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Ouuuch!

Dena:  Yeah!  So, and, and what was really sad is last week – ‘cause Harlequin Carina, Carina especially, ‘cause I can’t go, get those as paper books.  I would, I would buy, like, pretty much all the Carina books that came out because they were great, they’re popular, they circ like crazy, and they weren’t metered, and they weren’t inflated.  It was, they were fantastic.  Now that HarperCollins has bought Harlequin, last week –

Sarah:  Oh, no.

Dena:  – all the, everything from Harlequin and Carina has been metered.

Sarah:  No.

Dena:  Yeah.  So –

Sarah:  Noooo!

Dena:  Yes.

Sarah:  I knew it was going to happen, and I’m still bummed out.

Dena:  I know, I know.  So everything –

Sarah:  Mother pusbucket piece of doggie crap!  Can you tell I’m trying not to curse?

Dena:  Yeah –

Sarah:  There’re people in the room with whom I cannot curse.

Dena:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  So every book from Carina and Harlequin has a metered checkout of twenty-six checkouts now.

Dena:  From last week forward.  So the stuff we bought prior to that –

Sarah:  Does not.

Dena:  – is still okay.  But –

Sarah:  It’s, it’s grandfathered in, so to speak.

Dena:  Yes, yes.  From what I’ve been told.  I, I checked with my IT guy before I, I said, okay, I’m doing this!  What can I say?  And he goes, oh, it’s all public knowledge.  I’m like, yes!  I can talk about it!

Sarah:  Oh, crap monkeys.  Now, the d-, the, the Carina titles don’t have DRM.

Dena:  Correct.

Sarah:  Do they, do they have them now?

Dena:  No.  I believe I –

Sarah:  So, the DRM remains off, to the best of your knowledge.

Dena:  To the best of my knowledge, Carina is still open epub.

Sarah:  But you get twenty-six checkouts.

Dena:  But you get twenty-six checkouts.  So my guess is you’ll start seeing –

Sarah:  That just blows.

Dena:  Yeah.

Sarah:  [Frustrated noises] I, I can’t even come up with – I’m just gesturing.  You can’t see me.  I’m just gesturing now.

Dena:  [Laughs]

Jane:  So, one of things –

Dena:  My guess is you’re going to see less of those.

Jane:  One of the things that publishers say is that they don’t see a rise in sales between the checkouts and retail sales, so I know that some libraries have set up affiliate links and that you can buy the book direct from their site.  Is, is there anything that’s being done to go to publishers to say, hey, we do sell books, and here’s, you know, why you shouldn’t be pricing these books so high, or, or are, is your argument as a library to publishers kind of, this is a public good and you shouldn’t be gouging us?

Dena:  I think it’s a little of both.  Yes, we’re a public good.  Yes, we sell books.  And I think that the American Library Association especially is on this.  I am but a very small, small fish in the pond, so I, I can bitch about it to my publisher friends when I see them at conferences, but I don’t have a, a voice in the argument to the extent that the library organizations do.  Yes, it is being argued that – But it has been.  I mean, this is just a format change.  It’s argued that having a book in a library is good publicity, and that’s been going on for hundreds of years.  So the argument hasn’t changed.  This argument is still being made, but the format and the, I don’t know, the – because it’s an old argument, we haven’t had to say it for very long, so now that we have to start fighting again for it, I think it’s starting to heat up a little bit, and if you look at librarians talking amongst themselves – well, the National Book Awards were the other day, and my friend was following the live tweets of them, and a book reviewer, I believe, a journalist, kind of put his foot in it and said, what’s this about eBooks?  Wh-, what?  They’re expensive?  Huh?  And then all the librarians just kind of piled on him and went –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dena:  – oh, really, let me tell you about this!  How do you not know this?  It’s, it’s definitely a conversation that’s going on in the community, and I know that the ALA is being proactive about – I’m sure they’re talking to the publishers.  A lot of the stuff is behind the scenes, but they definitely put out releases and press releases and statements about this.  It’s just hard because we don’t see the, any change, and the changes we are seeing are not for the better, so every change that has happened has not been particularly library friendly, so far, that I have seen, except Penguin now sells books to the library, so that’s good, ‘cause they kind of jumped on board.  Macmillan started selling, ‘cause they were holding out for a long time.  So you’re going to start seeing them.  I think Penguin was selling a lot of – They – And Penguin won’t be on Kindle.  It’s very interesting, because OverDrive works with your Kindle, so you, what happens is you, you download it, and it goes to your Amazon page, and then you can download it to your Kindle, just like any book you bought on Amazon –

Sarah:  It’s so cool.  My –

Dena:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – my OverDrive connection, ‘cause we have, in New Jersey, we have a library consortium –

Dena:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and I think just ‘cause, you know, basically, New Jersey is a bunch of small towns all glued together very closely, and then there’s, like, the glue is made of big box stores, so it’s like Kohl’s and Best Buy and Staples, that’s what glues us together as a state, basically.  But all the libraries are part of an enormous consortium, and in my county and all of the counties around me, we’re all connected to the Bergen County Cooperative.  I’m not in Bergen County, but I’m all up in their consortium, and the books that I have downloaded, the, the eBooks that I have borrowed from my local library, most of them I had an option to go through Amazon and then manage the lending and the returning through Amazon –

Dena:  Right.

Sarah:  – which I thought was not only amazing, and I had no idea that happened, but I also have to say, the layout and the function of the actual send and return was a lot better than the other layouts that I get when it’s time to send and return a book.

Dena:  It’s not particularly intuitive, the way it works.

Sarah:  No, it’s, it’s weird, but then you get to Amazon and it’s like, here’s the button, press the button.  Just, just the one –

Dena:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – you can’t mi-, right here, it’s, like, five feet wide.  Click that –

Dena:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – thank you, good job!  Here’s your book.  Thank you, drive through!  So –

Dena:  Yeah, Penguin isn’t on that.

Sarah:  No, that – and it’s, watching the, the, the protracted negotiations of publishers with different people over the past two years, from libraries and Amazon and of, and, and Barnes and Noble and all of these different negotiations being covered, I mean, I don’t know diddly-poodle about the terms, but I have always thought that it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to say to libraries, we need more money from you for you to function, to get our books, we need more money from you.  You don’t have more money.  You have less money.

Dena:  Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  It’s – and, and digital books, it’s like, if I could spend $48 on an eBook and I can spend the same amount of money on four paper books?  Or three and a half paper books?  I mean, that’s some math that I’m going to have to seriously think about.  Especially since –

Jane:  Which doesn’t make –

Dena:  Hmm?

Jane:  Which doesn’t make publishers unhappy, because they want to promote the adoption and, and preservation of print books.

Dena:  Yep!  And it’s not really –

Jane:  So, so their plan, their evil plan is working.

[Laughter]

Dena:  Yeah!  And it’s hard to think ‘cause, I mean, the three of us here, we read eBooks, and I read them, I read eBooks and paper books interchangeably.  I’m in Philadelphia, and our digital divide here is vast.  And so, I mean, you can’t focus, okay, I’m going to get –

Sarah:  What do you mean by digital divide?  What does that mean?

Dena:  That, people who have computers at home, who have Internet at home, versus people who don’t.

Sarah:  I see what you’re saying.  Yes.

Dena:  Yeah.  So, we have a very large population who does not have access to the Internet or who does not have a computer at home.  Yeah, so, you know, when we talk about all these eBooks, and it’s fantastic, and eBooks are at about ten to fifteen percent of our circulation now?  That doesn’t have a commensurate funding for buying the books, because you have to start thinking, is it worth it to buy the eBook that maybe thirty percent of your population will read versus a book that a hundred percent can read.  So that, that’s another argument that kind of gets in there as well.  The, the consortiums are fabulous, and if you li-, I want to, even if you live in a tiny town, if you live in a state that has a library consortium, check your big city library.  If you, I had somebody call me from Texas, from a little town in Texas the other week, and they were asking me if they could get a library card with us, and I said, yes, you can.  We charge $50 a year, which is fairly rea-, if you read, like, a book a month, that’s worth it.  I think New York Public is a bit more expensive, but check your, your, your large library in your state, ‘cause we will give a free library card to anyone in Pennsylvania.  So –

Sarah:  And every state has a state library, right?

Dena:  Yes.  The state library isn’t always what’s in charge of this.

Sarah:  Right.

Dena:  My, my recommendation is, like, if you’re in Texas, talk to Houston, talk to Dallas.  See if they have it.  I don’t know, I’m guessing, just Texas is the one that was on my mind.  But if you live in that state, you’re probably going to be able to find a library card, and then you have access to ev-, not just books.  Audiobooks, streaming movies, databases.

Sarah:  What are some of the things that you notice among the digital lending, if you can talk about it, at your library?  What, what’s, what types of eBooks get a lot of eBook lending.  Is it, is it the same as the paper, or is it a different demographic?  And if that’s not something you can talk about, it’s totally cool.

Dena:  I know that there are – I got my dad a library card, and I know what he does is he just trolls the new releases, and he just picks up anything that looks interesting that’s available.  We get a lot of romance.  I try to buy a lot of LGBT stuff as an eBook, ‘cause I think, and it’s, it’s borne out, that circulation of eBooks, because you don’t have to show a cover when you’re reading on a bus or anything, and it’s a little less potentially dangerous/embarrassing to read, like, a gay book if nobody knows you’re gay.  So stuff that is potentially embarrassing gets checked out a lot, which I think is fantastic, and I’m annoyed about this Carina thing because they have a lot of really good male/male romances that I can’t get in paper, but I can get for the eBooks.

Sarah:  And so you, you’re, you’re seeing people who maybe exploring sexuality –

Dena:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – borrowing through digital reads to learn more about things that they can’t find out overtly.

Dena:  Right, or, you know, that they’re too afraid to fi-, to go into the – to go into a library and go into the gay and lesbian section is a statement.  I mean, yeah –

Sarah:  Yes.  And some people are not comfortable making that statement.  Right.

Dena:  No, and yeah, probably no one’s paying attention to you, but that’s not what it feels like.

Sarah:  And you make a good point with Carina, because they do have a lot of male/male –

Dena:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – publications in their fiction, in both, like, futuristic and historical and, and contemporary, so having that limited checkout is a, is more of a problem for those readers.

Dena:  Yes.  And –

Sarah:  Damn, that limited checkout ticks me off.  [Laughs]

Dena:  Yeah.  And, and for stuff like that, it’s like, I know it’s not going to circulate very well if I buy it as a paper book, but it will circulate like crazy if I buy it as an eBook.  I don’t know how well children’s books circulate, because there is something visceral about sitting with a kid and a picture book that can’t really be duplicated with a kid and an eReader.  So, I know we have a lot of children’s picture books and chapter books as eBooks.  I don’t know how well they circulate.  Just –

Sarah:  I have never had great success looking at picture books with my kids on a digital device.  Every now and again, there’ll be one on sale, or I’ll find something on the library, and I’ll download it to a tablet, but basically, it’s like reading a color .pdf –

Dena:  Right.

Sarah:  – and it’s, you can tap on the text to make the textbox itself just a little bit larger, and you can, sometimes you can zoom in on the illustrations and sometimes you can’t, but the experience of a picture book is not something that I have enjoyed digitally as much as I have on paper, and I still buy paper picture books.

Dena:  Yeah.

Sarah:  For my older son, who is nine, who has the emphasis on reading this year – I mean, there’s a lot of problems that I have with Common Core curriculum in New Jersey, but the degree to which emphas-, reading is emphasized, in terms of logging what you read and interacting with what you read, is fantastic, and both kids have started reading a lot.  My nine-year-old is now approaching, like, Sarah speeds of reading.  He is churning through books so quickly now, and the library digital options for him are a huge bonus, especially because there’s so much YA chapter books digitally available now.

Dena:  Yes.  Definitely, the, the, once you move into text books –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Dena:  – like, like, books with, as opposed to pictures, that’s where it starts picking up.  But a lot of kids don’t have dedicated eReaders, as opposed to adults –

Sarah:  Correct.

Dena:  – so it’s, it’s still – the audience, I don’t know if it’s there to the extent the, the adult audience is.  Definitely romance goes like crazy, but romance readers have been early adopters of this technology since the very beginning.  I take out cookbooks a lot.  That, that’s my thing.  I don’t know – and, and they’re, I’m always on a waiting list for things, so, basically, if you, if you have it, they’ll check it out.  It’s very rare that I look up a book that I want to check out that’s available.  We do treat books the same way as paper books.  You don’t, it’s not like once we have it everyone can check it out for, at the same time.  We buy licenses, so if there’s a really popular book, we’ll buy three or four or ten copies, but then ten people can have it checked out, and when their time expires, the next person gets it, so it’s, it’s not like being able to, like, one-click buy it from Amazon all the time.

Sarah:  What do you think, what do you think would be the ideal solution?  Do you have an idea as to how to fix the distance between the publishers and the libraries when it comes to digital books?  Have you seen any solutions or ideas that might help bridge that divide?  ‘Cause it’s a big divide.

Dena:  It is, it is.  I think the fact – and I am not a fan of DRM at all; I don’t like digital rights management on my stuff.  I like being able to take things from device to device, but I think that having DRM on library books helps the publishers, because it’s, it’s not, you can’t just download it and it’s yours.  There is, there are actual restrictions on that, like you would have on a regular – if you just check out a library book, you don’t get to keep it; you have to bring it back.  So that kind of makes the book a little harder to pirate.  So I think that, that putting DRM on that was a good thing for a library-publisher relationship.  Even though I, I really hate DRM, I see why it’s there.  It also helps manage when it expires.  It’s just automatic.  It expires; it goes to the next person.  I don’t know.  I don’t know if it’s an ideological thing.  I don’t know if it’s just a money thing.  My ideal solution is all the publishers sell us all the stuff at non-inflated prices and not being metered.  That would be wonderful.

Sarah:  One thing I know about libraries is that you keep a lot of data.  You are aware of what is borrowed, you’re aware of patron behavior, and you’re aware of how patron behavior differs from branch to branch, and that you are extremely protective of that data, so, I say thank you for being that way.

Dena:  [Laughs] I was about to say, we don’t keep any of it.

Sarah:  No, you, you are aware of it, and I know –

Dena:  Yes.

Sarah:  – libraries have to use it internally to talk about –

Dena:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – budgets and spending and buying and all of the things that go into being an effective library.  You have to study the data that comes in through your patron usage, and I know that especially since Katrina, since Hurricane Katrina, on a government level, people have realized how important a library is as a function of basic disaster location –

Dena:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and that I, I think it was, I don’t rem-, it was the ALA in New Orleans I was an, I was a speaker, and I heard a general meeting of the ALA where they were talking about how FEMA had upgraded local libraries to tier one restoration, so that if there’s a disaster the fire department, the police department, and the library are in the first round of people who are established with power and safety, because people go to the library –

Dena:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and that’s definitely true where I lived.  After Hurricane Sandy, most of my town didn’t have power, and the library was open 24 hours a day, ‘cause they had heat and Internet.  And they, and they were like, and we have all these books.  Just come on in and read the books.  And it was cold, so everyone slept, people slept in the library for a couple days.  It was, it was awful, but that’s what the library does.  So I know that you pay attention to what happens in your building and how your patrons interact with your, with your books and the things that you lend.  And you know, you have video games and movies and everything.  With, with all of that data that you have, is it – and you touched on this briefly – is it hard to prove, is it still hard to prove that your function as an opportunity for book discovery and book exploration is still, is still profitable, or potentially profitable?

Dena:  It’s very hard to prove.

Sarah:  How, how do you prove that?  Like, I’m trying to think, like, okay, what’s, what’s, what’s the connector that’s going to make it clear, okay, libraries function in all of these ways, and they also help sell books?  It’s not a, it’s not a bookstore or library decision all the time.  Sometimes it is.  Sometimes it’s the, I must own this, get out of my way, I have to go to the bookstore now.

Dena:  It’s, the problems is, is really the basic metric that we have is circulation.

Sarah:  Right.

Dena:  We can, we, we know how many books are being checked out.  We know how many times a certain book has been checked out.  We don’t know who’s checked it out.  That is information, just so you know, that if you check a book out from the library, we know you have it checked out while you have it checked out.  We will not tell anyone; there are privacy laws.  Even if you call up and ask me over the phone what you have checked out on your account and you can’t give me your library card number, I’m not telling you what you have checked out.  Once you return it, it is off your record.  We cannot –

Sarah:  No kidding!  I didn’t know that!

Dena:  We cannot find out what you have checked out, even if we got a subpoena.  My, my understanding is, even if the police came and said, what did this person check out last month?  I can’t tell you.  I do not have that information anymore.

Sarah:  That’s amazing.

Dena:  Yeah.  And that’s a really import-, we’re – I mean, everyone should be really aware of privacy.  It’s not anybody else’s business what you’ve checked out to read.

Sarah:  Yes, but librarians are pretty much privacy badasses.  They’re, I’m, I’ve read many a story of a librarian, like, ha-ha, I laugh at your subpoena.  Bye!

[Laughter]

Sarah:  Your subpoena amuses me greatly.  Would you like to borrow a book?

[Laughter]

Dena:  I won’t tell anyone what it is!

Sarah:  Yeah, exactly.  [Laughs] Yes, you can totally borrow that book.  Go ahead!  I won’t tell.  No, really, it’s fine.

Dena:  Yep.  Mm-hmm.  So, we can see what’s been checked out, and we can see, but we, we cannot track usage in the library.  If you just come into the library, sit down, and read a book and leave and never check that book out, we don’t have any information about it.  So, that’s –

Sarah:  So, it has to pass through your system in order to, to register as circ-, having circulated.

Dena:  Correct.  It has to have been checked out.

Sarah:  And then the person who borrowed it, that information is disconnected from the record of the book, so you’ll know that book A has been checked out X number of times, but you have no record as to who those people were.

Dena:  Correct.  It could be the same person renewing it sixty times.  Who knows?

Sarah:  Wow.

Dena:  Don’t know.  Yeah.  So, it’s hard because we’re nonprofit.  We are not in it for money.  We have never been in it for money.  And when you’re not in it for money, the corporate side of America doesn’t quite know what to do with you.

Sarah:  You don’t say.

Dena:  [Laughs] So, we have anecdotal evidence.  We know that if an author comes to us –

Sarah:  [Laughs] That’s called, that’s called anecdata.

Dena:  [Laughs] Yeah.

Sarah:  [Laughs] And we have lots of anecdata.  We’re the library.  [Laughs]

Dena:  Yeah.  So, we know that if a major author comes to the library – we have a lot of author events where I work – we can pull, like, three to five hundred people to come and listen to that author and, you know, a fair number of them will purchase the book.  We have, we have a partnership with a bookstore that comes in and sells the books for us.  So we know that the library is a draw.  We know that author events are a draw.  We know that, we have, a lot of cities have this, we have a One Book, One Philadelphia program, and so every year they pick one book that the whole city’s going to read.  This year it’s Orphan Train.  I forget who the author is; I apologize.  But, you know, the minute we have, like, 100, 200 people on the waitlist for that book, you know there’s going to people who are like, I’m just going to go buy it.  So that pushes it as well.  Or – I, I don’t know.  I don’t know how to measure that past what we do.  It’s not like I’m go-, and I don’t – I talk with people, and they’re like, yeah, I really like this author, so now I figured I needed to collect her, so I have all her stuff at home!

Sarah:  Yep.  Backlist glomming.  Those are my people.

Dena:  I mean, that’s what I do.  I mean, I will not purchase a book unless I know the author and I like the author.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dena:  That’s what libraries are for; it’s my test ground.

Sarah:  My understanding of how most or many romance readers interact with the library is that our appetites always outstrip our budgets –

Dena:  Oh, yes!

Sarah:  – and we have much, much more appetite for, for reading than we do have dollars to support that reading, and so we buy and we borrow –

Dena:  Yes.

Sarah:  And we also buy what we have borrowed.

Dena:  Oh, yes!  I have bought –

Sarah:  One of the most common themes of the Help a Bitch Out feature on my site is, I borrowed this book from the library, I can’t remember which one it was, I can’t figure it out, here’s the plot, I have to go buy it.

Dena:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  It’s never, I need to go back to the library and find it, it’s, I, I read this years and years ago, it was a library book, but I need to own it.

Dena:  Mm-hmm.  I have purchased and given away about fifteen copies of The Princess Bride –

Sarah:  Uh-huh?

Dena:  – and every time a new version comes out, I buy it, because I need to own that book in every single permutation.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Isn’t that funny?  I do that too.

Dena:  And, yeah, I took it out from the library the first time, and I fell in love with it, and then that was kind of my springboard into obsessively purchasing it over and over again.

Sarah:  It’s a good thing you’re a librarian.

Dena:  I started out working in a bookstore, and the thirty percent discount was amazing.

Sarah:  [Laughs] I bet it was.

Dena:  [Laughs] And then I figured that libraries are even better!

Sarah:  Yeah, you’ve already paid for those books through the virtue of your lovely track, taxes.

Dena:  Yes.  Now, one thing I do want to mention, especially with the self publication that’s happening now –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dena:  – which I think is fantastic.  We can’t buy those most of the time.

Sarah:  You can’t!  Really!  Why not?

Dena:  If, especially if it is, if it’s not through a major publisher, it’s hard to get on OverDrive.  Courtney Milan did it.  Courtney Milan’s stuff is all on OverDrive, which is awesome, because we now own all of them multiple times.

Sarah:  I believe what she did was she went through her, her agent.  Her agent has the connection to OverDrive.

Dena:  Yeah.  Yeah.  But if you publish your book through the Kindle-only imprint, we can’t get it.  The, we, OverDrive just inked a deal a few months ago with Smashwords, so if you’re on Smashwords we can get the books, but any other format, if it’s Kindle-only or if it’s only through, you know, if you do it yourself, only through some of the smaller platforms, it’s very hard for us to get, which is really frustrating.  Like, remember when you guys were talking about The Last Hour of Gann?

Sarah:  Yes.  That was, that was –

Dena:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Jane – I think we had, like, eight podcasts in a row.

Dena:  Yeah, so I bought it.  Can’t buy it for the library.  It’s not in print, so I can’t get it in print, and I couldn’t get it as an eBook for the library, so I bought a copy, and, and the problem is, is if we can’t get it for the library, I can’t recommend it on the library site –

Sarah:  Of course.

Dena:  – ‘cause we have to link to what we have in our catalog.  So things like that, which is a fantastic book, and people should read it, and you can’t get it from your library – I’m so sorry!  So that’s also an issue that’s getting more and more prevalent, just ‘cause more and more people are self publishing.  So –

Sarah:  So you mentioned, when we connected, some of the things that make you happy.  What are some of the things that make you happy?  Like, what makes you totally excited to go to work, oh, my God, get out of my way, this day is going to be awesome?

Dena:  Ah, I look book ordering day.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  I don’t know anybody in any permutation of book ordering who isn’t like, yes!

Dena:  Ba-, basically, I get to go to work, they pay me to go to work, and I shop for books for the library, which, in my head, is books for me.  So that’s always fun.  I love going to the library and being on the reference desk and recommending a book to someone, and they love it.  It’s, it’s the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when somebody comes back, and you’re like, oh, my God, Sunshine by Robin McKinley?  I can’t believe I’d never read it before!  What else has she written?  Aaah!  So, that is always fantastic.  And then you, what I really love is when you get those, over time, the long-term connections with patrons who you know who they are, you know what they like, and as you see books come in, you’re like, oh, my God, Patricia would like that, or, oh, wow, Kristin would love that, and you start kind of, like, matching books to people, and you get that relationship.  And then they recommend books to you.  So I have read so many new things because other people have recommended them to me, patrons who came in that I said, you would love this, and they say, you would love this, and I’m like, awesome!  So, yeah, my reading list gets really big, really fast.  Like –

Sarah:  That’s a terrible, terrible problem to have.

Dena:  [Laughs] But people make these connections based on the – I, I had a, oh, I had the cutest couple in yesterday, and the husband, they’re losing their eyesight, and the husband reads all the books out loud to his wife, and he –

Sarah:  That’s adorable.  I know so, I know a few people like that.

Dena:  Mm-hmm.  It was, it was wonderful, and I took them into the large print section, and I was, I was, like, pulling out some books that I thought they would like, and we were chatting, and, and the lady was like, oh, but you probably remember everything you read.  I’m like, oh, no.  I – [pbbbt] – next week, I won’t remember a thing about what I read this week.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Welcome to my brain.  [Laughs more]

Dena:  Yeah, that’s, that’s why I have Goodreads.  That’s why I make lists.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dena:  And she was, oh, my goodness, she was, it’s like, I think, her eyes just, her face just lit up, because it’s like, really?  I forget also!  And it was just that little moment that you’re like, this is that connection, that human connection that just gets you.

Sarah:  Yep.

Dena:  And that’s – I love being on the desk.  I love talking with people.  That’s my favorite thing.  I don’t want to be stuck in the back on a computer doing my stuff there.  I want to be out in the public and having conversations, and that’s my job, which is fantastic.  So I like – I, I am so lucky.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dena:  I get up in the morning and I like going to work.

Sarah:  That’s just terrible.  I’m so sorry to hear that.  Oh, my gosh, dude.  That’s just –

Dena:  Yeah, so if you’re in Philadelphia –

Sarah:  That’s just horrible.  Which library are you at?

Dena:  I’m at the central library.  I am actually in charge of the fiction library, so –

Sarah:  Oh, dude.

Dena:  Yeah!  And I am also, I, it’s taken me a few years, or from the beginning, it took me a few years, I am in charge of science fiction, fantasy, and romance.

Sarah:  Oh, really!

Dena:  Oh, yes.

Sarah:  So, would you be willing to share a few recommendations in science fiction, fantasy, and romance?

Dena:  Sure!

Sarah:  Like, what is popular, what you recommend, what books you thought, you think are just worth finding in your library?

Dena:  Do you know what was really hard, is I started thinking about books I wanted to recommend.  Because I read your website and I listen to the podcast, everything I’ve read over the past month or so has been stuff you’ve talked about already –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dena:  – and I’m like, I don’t want to say that again!  Everybody knows about A Bollywood Affair.

Sarah:  [Laughs more] That’s a rare thing.  Jane and I never agree on books.  Like, when, when we both agreed on that one, I was sort of, like, alarmed, a little wary, concerned.

Dena:  [Laughs]

Jane:  But I still laugh that even though we liked it, we, we had differing opinions about what type of book it was.  Like, we can’t agree on, really, anything.

Sarah:  Nope!

Jane:  Like, our Venn diagram overlap is this tiny, infinitesimal, two-molecule sliver.

Sarah:  [Laughs] It so is.  Like, we both like that book, but we disagree about why.

Jane:  [Laughs]

Dena:  Yep.  So, let’s see, for romance, I just read Rogue Spy, the last book, or the latest book by Joanna Bourne, who wrote, her first one was My Lord and Spymaster, I think, was the first one?

Sarah:  I do like that book.

Dena:  Which – every book by her is amazing.

Jane:  It says The Spymaster’s Lady.

Dena:  The Spymaster’s Lady, sorry, yes, My Lord and Spymaster is later on.  Yeah.  I, I will read anything by Joanna Bourne, and I’m very excited that her very early, Her Ladyship’s Companion, I believe, has just been re-released as an eBook that has been out of print for, like, twenty years, so I will be getting that.  Grace Burrowes is a new favorite, and Grace Burrowes has so many books out.

Sarah:  I am fascinated by her because I know her writing is not for me –

Dena:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – but when I listen to people who love her, her books, they all really gravitate towards something different.  For some, some readers, it’s the amount of emotion in the, in the characters, especially the heroes.  People really did the angst.

Dena:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  And what, what shocks me is RedHeadedGirl, who reviews for me, is very knowledgeable about historical detail.  Like, she constructs historically accurate costumes for different periods of time in the Regency and the Edwardian era and knows the difference between what, how different pieces of costume work.  At one point I sent her a book cover, and I said – [laughs] – I don’t think the corset is supposed to be like that, and she emailed me back instantly, and she went, it’s upside-down!

Dena:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  That woman is wearing the corset upside-down!  You can tell because of this and this and this other thing!  She’s wearing it upside-down and backwards!  Like, she can identify this stuff, and the historical inaccuracy in Burrowes’ books doesn’t bug her at all.  She’s like, whatevs!  Don’t care.

Dena:  I don’t like everything by her, but she’s written, her latest series was capt-, The Captive, The Traitor, and The Laird, and it, it really has my catnip, which is the broken hero.

Sarah:  Oh, yeah, lot of broken heroes in this series.

Dena:  Yeah, yeah.  And I really liked all of them.  I have a colleague at work who we, we sit together at lunch and, and go on and on about romance novels together, and, and her thing is the broken hero and the virgin hero.  Those are her two big ones, and I have to say I enjoy those ones as well.  So, I, I would recommend The Captive, The Traitor, and The Laird.  I, I don’t recommend every single one of her books.  I do have to be a bit picky about her.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dena:  But, oh, do you know who I really love, and she’s not a household name at all.  Judith James.

Sarah:  Really!

Dena:  Yes.  She, she wrote a few books, and then she started writing a series of romances set during the Restoration.

Sarah:  Hmm.

Dena:  The King’s Courtesan, which is loosely based, the heroine is loosely based on Nell Gwyn, so she grows up in a brothel and, you know, all the – so, so she’s not an aristocrat – and Libertine’s Kiss, which is based on the court poet at the king of, James II, and I love these books, because they were romances, but they had a lot of politics, and they had a lot of history, and she did her research, and it was really interesting, and then she fell off the face of the earth.

Sarah:  So, it’s, like, a 50/50 blend between historical fiction and romance.

Dena:  Yes.  And they’re really hot.

Sarah:  Nice!

Dena:  Really, really good.  The King’s Courtesan has been re-released with a new title, Soldier of Fortune, which, l like the first title better, but she, and then we knew there was a third one coming out, and then it, nothing happened, and from what I understand, it just didn’t get published with that publisher, there was, like, a couple years, nothing, and then back in September I get an email – ‘cause evidently I had signed up for her email list and forgot about it – saying, my book’s coming out tomorrow!

Sarah:  Woohoo!

Dena:  And I went, ah!  And so, the third book in the series, which is called The Highwayman, came out, and I, I bought it, like, I pre-ordered it, I have it, and the thing is, is I haven’t read it yet.  It’s sitting on my Kindle, and I don’t want to read it, ‘cause the series is over.  This is it.  And so, I don’t want it to be over.

Sarah:  You don’t want it to come to an end, so you’re not going to read it?

Dena:  I don’t want it – I know I should read it!  I’m super excited about reading it, ‘cause I love the first two –

[Laughter]

Dena:  – but I’m afraid that when it’s done, there’ll be nothing left.  So, that’s, like, a weird kind of mental thing that I’m going through right now.

Sarah:  I know, I, I know; I have been there.

Dena:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I understand.

Dena:  I really, I really like non-Western-European books, historicals especially, and there’s so few of them.  I really like Jeannie Lin.

Sarah:  You mean, like, historicals that are not in England, France –

Dena:  And, and don’t feature European characters.  Like, I want characters that – you know, if you’re setting it in China, I don’t want, like, the White Samurai.  If you’re setting it in ancient China, give me Chinese characters, and I really enjoy Jeannie Lin for that.  Sherry Thomas, with My Beautiful Enemy, at least has one Chinese character, which is awesome.  And those are really hard to find, and if anyone knows any really good ones, let me know?  It’s, because it’s so predominantly white.

Sarah:  You don’t say.

Dena:  So white.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dena:  And it’s really nice to read about other people.  One of the joys of reading a book is going into a world that’s not your own.  I, I would like to read other worlds that are not my own, as well.  Courtney Milan.  I, I said that.  Anything by her.  She’s my catnip.

Sarah:  Have you read Theresa Romain?

Dena:  I’ve read some of hers.

Sarah:  She is – we are talking about white people in England, but what I do love, I have a whole category of Regency, but not in a ballroom.

Dena:  Ah, I like those.

Sarah:  Because, like you said, not only does, not only is there an, an enormous amount of sameness, but – Jane, I think you were talking about this a while ago, that when you write a historical, and you set it in London, you don’t have to work too hard on the worldbuilding, because the, the audience that’s reading the book is already familiar with what a ballroom is, and what Hyde Park is, and what a phaeton is, and the police and the rain and – there’s a certain amount of common understanding among historical readers, so that if you set them in the very familiar world, it’s very easy to turn that book into wallpaper historical, because the reader supplies all of the worldbuilding.

Jane:  Right.

Sarah:  Am I, am I paraphrasing you right, or did I get that all wrong?

Jane:  That, that’s right.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dena:  I did just read a book called, I forget who the author is, but it’s called A Dream Defiant, which I, I bought under the wire, ‘cause I think it was Carina, so we got it for the library, and the main character is, the guy is a son of runaway slaves who is an officer in the British army during the Napoleonic wars, and the female lead is an ex-chambermaid who’s following the drum with her husband, who gets killed at the beginning of the book, and it’s their, then, the relationship between these two people, and it was, it was a decent book.  It wasn’t, like, stunning, but it was about characters you do not read about very often in romances, which I thought was really interesting.

Sarah:  There are, there are a few Carla Kelly his-, Regency historicals that take place in the war, like, in the Napoleonic war, and th-, it’s weird how, how, how I could describe a book that’s about war as a comfort read, but they, but the Carla Kelly Regencies like that are definite comfort reads for me.

Dena:  I’m writing these down.

[Laughter]

Dena:  So let’s see, science fiction/fantasy you asked about also.

Sarah:  Yes, please.

Dena:  Okay, well, Ancillary Justice, which, by Ann Leckie, it won the Nebula, it won the Hugo, it won the Arthur C. Clarke, it won the Locus, and it won the British Science Fiction award this year?  And it’s a first novel?  It’s really interesting, because in the culture that is being written about, there are no masculine pronouns.  Everybody is she or her or daughter or sister, irrespective of gender.  Which is fascinating when you’re reading it, because you are then trying to decide, is this person male or female?  Is it changing how I’m reading this character if I swap the gender in my head because they’re not telling me what the gender is?  Very interesting.  And it’s, it’s a fantastic book about, the main character is an artificial intelligence of a ship, but the ship has disappeared, and now the only part of the intelligence left is in the body of one of the ancillaries, which is basically bodies that, that, that the ship uses as, like, extensions of its own consciousness, so there’s only one left, and, and Breq is the name of this, and Breq is on a quest to do something at the beginning of the book, and you learn as you go along what’s going on, but the worldbuilding was so interesting!  So interesting!  So, I just finished that one and promptly downloaded the second one, so I’ll be doing that next.  So, highly recommend that.

If you like romantic fantasy, Amy Raby is really good.  She wrote Assassin’s Gambit, and the main character is an assassin sent to kill the emperor, and he’s also broken.  He’s missing a leg, so that was my catnip.  They fall in love and have adventures, but it’s in a very, again, a very interesting world that, that I really enjoyed, and there’s more than one in that series, which is nice.

I always recommend The Princess Bride, because it’s perfect.

Sarah:  Well, that’s your catnip.

Dena:  [Laughs] It is!  And it’s the only situation where the book and the movie are equally fabulous, in my mind.  That doesn’t always happen.  Almost never happens.  The book is almost always better, but The Princess Bride book and movie are both perfect.

Robin McKinley’s Sunshine.  Those aren’t particularly new.

Very obscure:  I just read a book a couple of years ago called Constellation Games about a group of, consortium of aliens who come to Earth, and the main character, all he really wants to do is play their videogames, and he’s the one they pick to do first contact with, so that was –

Sarah:  Well, why, why, why would you not want to play all the videogames?  This makes perfect sense to me.

Dena:  So, if you, if you like gaming, there’s a lot of stuff about videogames in that book.  Ready Player One by Ernest Cline –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dena:  – is a fantastic pop culture science fiction virtual reality videogame type book.

Anything by Tanya Huff.

Sarah:  Yeah?

Dena:  Tanya Huff is – you know what I love about Tanya Huff is that she writes across, like, sci-, science fiction, high fantasy, urban fantasy, she writes it all.  She writes series, but she ends the series when the story is done, which a lot of people don’t do, especially when you’re looking at fantasy.  So she’ll write three or four books, and then the story’s done, and she’s like, okay, now I’m going to write something else.  So she goes off, and she writes something else.  She also is really great with dialogue.  I love witty banter.

Sarah:  Yeah, I do too.

Dena:  And she’s phenomenal at witty banter.  She just has a brand-new one out, the third book in her Ench-, the Gale sisters, the Enchantment Emporium series, and it is called The Future Falls, which is on my Kindle that I’m waiting to read.

There was a book that came out last year called The Rook by Daniel O’Malley, Australian author, and it’s basically about a woman who wakes up in a body she doesn’t recognize with absolutely no memories, and there are some notes in the pocket telling her who she is, and it turns out she works for an organization that protects Britain from supernatural threats.  It was the most hilarious book.  I love that book so much.  And I just found a sequel’s coming out in March called Stiletto, and I kind of squeed and emailed all my friends and emailed the publisher going, do you have an ARC?  And she kind of went, no, but a lot of people have been asking, so I’m really hoping she’ll send me an ARC sometime soon.  But if you like urban fantasy, witty banter, just sheer hilarity, The Rook by Daniel O’Malley is fantastic.

Sarah:  Cool.

Dena:  Yes.

Sarah:  So, before we wrap up –

Dena:  And her name is Myfanwy!

Sarah:  Myfanwy.

Dena:  Myfanwy!

Sarah:  Oh, I see.  Okay.

Dena:  Yeah.

Sarah:  So, before we wrap up, I have an, I have one question for you.

Dena:  Mm-hmm?

Sarah:  Is there something that you wish more readers knew about the library?  Something that we could do to support the library, something we could do to make your life easier, something that you wish more people took advantage of?  Is there anything you wish you could communicate to people who don’t necessarily have time to hang out and talk with a librarian?

Dena:  I think that one thing that you, if you talk to a lib-, if we don’t have a book that you want, ask us to get it.  If we can, we will.  So that’s, so I think a lot of people think, oh, it’s not in the library, oh, well.  And if we don’t have it, we can probably get it from another library through interlibrary loan, so just because it’s not in your local library’s catalog does not mean you’re never going to read this book.  We have ways of finding it for you.  I think a lot of the thing – libraries offer a lot of programs aside from just having books for you or movies for you.  There’s author event, there’s, we have an African-American interest book group in my department that’s going strong right now.  But if you go to your local library – We have a kitchen in our library now, and we do cooking classes, which is kind of awesome.

Sarah:  You have a kitchen in your library?

Dena:  They just built a culinary institute –

Sarah:  That’s rad!

Dena:  – so I, I, I, this summer I took a knife skills class at the library, which was fantastic!  So, you never know what you’re going to get, so check, check your library and see what kind of programs there are, because it’s not just taking out books.  It’s not just, you know, going in and getting a book off the shelf and leaving.  There’s so much interesting stuff going on.  We just, this week, Monday night, Alan Cumming was at our library.

Sarah:  Oh, that’s just terrible.

Dena:  I love him so much.  And last, in the summer, we actually had a group of romance authors in for the first time to do a panel discussion, which was fantastic.  We’d never done it before, but, you know, if someone shows an interest in something, the library is there to kind of help out.  If you want to do a program, like – we have a branch that does knitting programs, because, I think, they had a patron who was interested in knitting and mentioned it to the librarian, and the librarian said, hey, that’s cool!  Let’s do this!  So you have a lot of input.  You can kind of help create what you want the library to be, so that is something that a lot of people, I don’t think they know.  They think that the library is a building and it’s there, but it’s there to be part of the community, and we want to know what the community wants, and we will tailor our stuff to the community, but we need to hear.  We need to know.

Sarah:  Huh.

Dena:  Yeah.  You want to do a knitting program?  Volunteer to do a knitting program.  You’ll meet new people, and you’ll knit a scarf.

[music]

Sarah:  I hope you enjoyed that interview with Dena, and I want to thank her for taking so much time to speak with us.  I do have a few addendums that she emailed me afterward.  Once we hung up, she realized that she hadn’t mentioned the publishers that are awesome that she really enjoys working with digitally.  The main romance publishers who don’t inflate prices or meter checkouts, she says, through OverDrive are Sourcebooks and Kensington and Samhain, who she just remembered today when she went to buy The Princess and the Porn Star for the library on OverDrive, and she said she was giggling as she added it to her cart.  Oh, the power.  There are a lot of small presses, she says, who work with OverDrive, who aren’t playing the pricing and metering games, as she put it.  If any of your listeners, she says also, have questions about libraries, library services, or librarians, I’d be happy to try to answer them.  So, if you have a question for Dena, and you would like to know something mysterious and interesting or freaky-scary about your library or how libraries work, email us at sbjpodcast@gmail.com, and I will pass your message along to Dena, and we’ll get your question answered.

I don’t know if you ever had a lot of questions about libraries.  I have many.  I have asked them.  I’m, I’m a very annoying patron, and I try not to store up all my questions for one long, pain-in-the-butt question-and-answer session, but if you’ve ever been curious about how your library works or what you can do to better support your library or why the library doesn’t have the books that you want most of all, ask!  Ask your librarian or ask us, and we’ll ask Dena, and she’ll come back, and she’ll answer questions.  Works really well that way, right?  If you really feel like being, you know, brave and you have, like, time, or if you’re not feeling like emailing, you can call our Google voice number at 1-201-371-DBSA.  You can give us your name and where you’re calling from, and we’ll include your message or question in an upcoming podcast.

This podcast is brought to you by Berkley, publisher of Romancing the Billionaire, the sizzling new Billionaire Boys Club novel from New York Times bestselling author Jessica Clare.  You can find Romancing the Billionaire wherever books are sold.

The music that you are listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater.  If you took ballet like I did, or you attended The Nutcracker like I did as a kid, then you probably recognize this song.  This is the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” originally composed by Tchaikovsky as part of The Nutcracker suite performed by the Deviations Project.  This is from their album Adeste Fiddles, which is probably my favorite album title for holiday music of all time.  Like, I don’t think could be topped.  I will have information in the podcast entry about this song, the album, and where you can buy it for your very own, because this would make a pretty rocking ring tone, if you ask me.

And on behalf of Dena and Jane and myself, wherever you are, we hope you are enjoying the very best of reading.  Have a great weekend.

[excellently odd holiday music]