‘I order for the community’: Library buyers demystify book selection process

Rob Roose, Spokane Public Library support services director, is currently reading “Empire of Ivory,” the fourth book in an alternate history series by Naomi Novik involving dragons and fighting Napoleon. But his true love is Dorothy Dunnett, a historical fiction author who he said had exacting, beautiful sentences and great dialogue.

His wife used to joke that she was a widow to Dunnett – best known for her six-book series about Francis Crawford of Lymond – because Roose was off in his book again. But when Roose is ordering books for the Spokane Public Library, these aren’t the books he’s typically ordering.

“I don’t tend to read the bestsellers personally, but they’re really popular,” Roose said. “I don’t order for me. I order for the community.”

Sheri Boggs, Spokane County Library youth collection development librarian, is not Roose’s exact equivalent for the Spokane County Library system – she selects the children and young adult materials. For Boggs, working at Auntie’s Bookstore planted the seeds for her current job.

“I really loved seeing what was new and being able to champion the ones that I loved,” she said. “There’s all the bestsellers that people know, but it’s really fun to take kind of a sleeper, or something that might not have the big budget advertising-wise that another book has, and be able to kind of hand-sell that.”

Boggs is still sure to stock popular titles like the “Dogman” series, but she’s also excited about series like “Little Senses,” which are picture books about children who are neurodiverse, meant for both those children and their peers.

Though he can’t fill all of them, Roose strongly takes into account requests from the patrons themselves, which are made through the online portal. The main vendor the Spokane Public Library uses is Baker and Taylor, which has a portal called titlesource360 that sends Roose “carts” of books on a weekly basis – an online list of curated titles such as “reviewed books” and “popular titles.”

Though he cannot possibly read the review of every book, he tries to tackle as many as possible. He also cross-checks the author’s name in the library system to see how other books from that person have performed in the past. Typically, he won’t order the audiobook version if the print version wasn’t well circulated.

Roose uses Ingram as a secondary vendor, but for the county system, that is the primary vendor. Ingram’s setup is a bit different from Baker and Taylor. Baker and Taylor scaled back operations to only supply to libraries, but Ingram still provides books for bookstores, as well. Like Baker and Taylor, Ingram provides lists that Boggs can peruse, but she said she also forms a lot of ideas browsing Twitter.

“That’s been really good to know about, like a couple of Native American releases that I’m going to be ordering this spring because people are already talking about that and getting really excited,” Boggs said. “So just kind of keeping your ear up to what the writing community is talking about.”

Boggs said she was excited about “Race to the Sun,” a Navajo fantasy adventure book by Rebecca Roanhorse. Boggs said she also gains intelligence from staff who are talking to people directly on the floor.

Roose and Boggs said there isn’t much of an emphasis on academic titles for the libraries. These titles are often expensive, serve a niche audience and have low demand.

The libraries pay close attention to ratios. At Spokane Public Library, for every three holds a book receives, a new book is ordered. The county ratio is 4 to 1, and Boggs said she’s worked at districts where the ratio is 10 to 1. However, when a book becomes particularly hot and then its popularity wanes, the library can end up with an inordinate surplus. Boggs said a perfect example of this was the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer.

“People will still check it out but definitely not in those numbers,” Boggs said. “Books definitely have their moment, some books do. What happens with that is a lot of the copies end up getting beat up, so we just weed them.”

Roose also said ordering some books can be a roll of the dice. Sometimes Baker and Taylor will suggest that a book is going to hit it big, but the book ends up being a miss.

“Libraries are a guaranteed sale,” Roose said. “We don’t buy them and then say ‘Oh, we didn’t like it, it wasn’t well-written, you can have it back.’ ”