Nicole Engard writes a blog post in response to Tim Spalding's comment about self-publishing:
Getting Real is an important book. It came along at exactly the right time, said something important. To the extent the greap web-app “explosion” of 2004-2007 had a book, this was it.
And it was successful. According to 37Signals the (paid) version has sold has 30,000 copies. It’s the number six seller on Lulu.com. Passionate, unpaid fans have produced translations into thirteen languages. Google records 166,000 mentions. Even on LibraryThing, where the book had to be manually entered and there is a bias toward the printed version, 37 members have listed it.
Did libraries notice? Not at all.
OCLC’s WorldCat records exactly three copies—MIT, California Polytechnic and the University of Nebraska. That’s three copies of one of the top tech books of the 00’s in most of the US libraries that matter. The Library of Congress? New York Public? Harvard? None of them. For comparison, WorldCat contains 619 copies of Solitary sex : a cultural history of masturbation.
Nicole is absolutely right -- libraries have a long way to go when it comes to buying self-published items. Most libraries don't even have self-publishing on their radar, but it sounds like an interesting phenomenon that more librarians should be aware of. Why shouldn't sites like Lulu.com be on our vendor lists? She also brings up a good point about digital resources - why aren't we capturing more? Some of it is lack of time and money and an unwillingness to change. Collections need to encompass more than just print and electronic databases, but you also need to the time and resources to attack this problem systematically.
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