Louisville readers’ voracity for digital books is creating a waiting game for popular titles that would test anyone’s patience.
There are nearly 700 digital titles available through the Louisville Free Public Library that have waitlists up to five months long.
“Great Big Beautiful Life” by Emily Henry, “The Wedding People” by Alison Espach and “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt — all published since last year — are the most desired books, according to library data. And it’s the e-book and audiobook versions that take the longest.
At the same time, the library has 50 titles whose physical copies come with a wait of up to three-and-a-half months.
LFPL leaders and supporters are hoping to improve wait times by expanding its collection.
Louisville Metro Council approved a matching grant of up to $1 million in the city’s current budget for the library system to buy more books and other materials. For LFPL to get that money, the Library Foundation will need to raise another million for the effort.
LFPL expects to buy an additional 50,000 print books, 10,000 e-books and 5,000 audiobooks — on top of its regular purchases — during the fiscal year, according to LFPL communications director Paul Burns. Overall, LFPL has about 1.6 million physical books, 145,000 e-books and 78,000 audiobooks in its catalog.
The library uses an app called Libby to loan out its books and magazines online.
On average, waits for e-books and audiobooks can be more than a month, Burns said.
But Kiera Hall, the Library Foundation’s communications director, said she’ll have to wait five-and-a-half months before she can check out the latest “Hunger Games” book, “Sunrise on the Reaping” by Suzanne Collins, from Libby.
“When I see a book I like, I go ahead and add it to the list, because with the way Libby app comes up, you can always kind of just click it and have [the book] delivered later,” Hall said. “But I try to add several, so that way, while I'm waiting, hopefully books will become available.”
Erlene Grise Owens lives about a mile from the Northeast Regional Library in Lyndon. She said she was the 28th person in the virtual line for “Code Name Hélène,” a historical fiction novel by Ariel Lawhon. That was in April. This week, there are six readers still ahead of her.
“I will oftentimes do my limit of the books that I can put on reserve, and then I just know I'll be waiting a long time for some of them,” she said.
If the queue is too long, buying a copy from a local bookstore or online is the only other option, Grise Owens said. Sometimes, she said she sets aside money to buy those books.
“I recognize the privilege of that, very much so,” she said. “That's also a choice that I make. I don't buy a lot of clothes. [So instead] I’ll spend 30 bucks on a book and I don’t buy something else. But people should not have to do that.”
Libby users with LFPL cards can put eight titles on hold at a time.
The goal is to get wait times down to two months for the most popular books, said LFPL interim executive director Barbara Sexton Smith.
“Already we have lowered the maximum wait time from seven months for some books,” she said.
Sexton Smith said purchasing the additional books will take time.
“We want to be able to spread this money out over the course of the 12 months, because the book that is a hot item today and everybody's wanting to read, there's going to be another one of those in a few months,” she said.
The type of book also affects when the library can purchase copies, said Burns, LFPL’s communications director. For example, most e-books and audiobooks must be purchased in a “metered format.” Each book can only be repurchased after two years or 24 checkouts.
Hall, with the Library Foundation, said the $1 million match is already taking shape.
“We know patrons and library supporters in the community have been talking for a long time about concerns with long wait times and really looking for a solution to bring that down or to bring those wait times down,” she said.
Hall and her team are working “behind the scenes” with library patrons and community partners, she said. The foundation is also taking donations online and plans to launch a larger public campaign early next year.
In December, the Library Foundation completed a $1.5 million matching grant to fund new libraries and reopen older ones, including the Parkland Library, which reopened in February.
For now, Sexton Smith encouraged library patrons to be patient.
“I'm going to invite everybody who has a book that's on hold that they're waiting for, go ahead and select another book, because we have more than 1.6 million items in our collection,” she said.
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