More fun at the local library!

After my recent survey of our local library for suitable books for boys, I decided to try another sample. What is the recent acquisition pattern for children's books, if any?

For this case study, I focused on the 565 titles in the Children's Fiction Department of the Orillia Public Library under the "New" category, as of November 24, 2010. These were organized in order of "relevance", and a statistical sample of 83 was taken. On a purely random basis, this affords results within 10% accuracy, 95% of the time. Contact me if you would like a copy of the Excel spreadsheet I created for this sample.

Onward, then. What of the 83 titles? I remind myself that I am looking for books for boys, written by male authors, in the "young readers" category (let's call it ages 9 to 12, as Amazon does). And we'd prefer subject matter dealing with earthly things, not monsters, ghouls, dragons, fairies and the like.

Hmm, bad start again. Of those 83 titles, 59 (or 71%) are for ages 4 to 8 (including a single for preschoolers). That only leaves 24 of the sample.

Carrying on, ten of those 24 titles are girl-centred by female authors. What does that leave, 14 of the original 83? And of those, another 5 are by female authors. This reduces the pool of male-authored books for young readers to 9 out of 83, or less than 11%, and we haven't even begun to consider the focus of the writing!

Lets look at that shrunken pile of 9 new books from our sample. Well, only 5 of them are boy-centred (the remainder in the "neutral" category).

Down to 5 out of 83, alas, four of those deal with the non-earthly stuff outlined above.

And what of the single book out of an accurate-within-10%, 95%-of-the-time survey of 565 new fiction books at the Orillia Public Library, by a male author arguably suitable for boy young readers?

Ugh. It's something called Captain Underpants and the big, bad battle of the bionic booger boy.

Is this pattern typical of North American public libraries, or just Canadian ones, or just my local one? I truly don't know. If anyone has any thoughts, please comment below or contact me directly.

Time to go browsing for used books on the 'Net again...

By the way, folks, we are taking delivery of The Secret of the Old Swing Bridge on December 1, as planned.