Public libraries and books

Richard Morrison, the Times music critic, has been airing his views on public library book stock. His column provoked letters from Mark Field, the shadow culture minister (not the former CILIP employee) and from John Dolan of the MLA. Dolan rightly points out that modern public libraries carry a wide range of resources as well as books.
I think the public library Morrison had in mind is Hendon, where I worked in the early 1980s; the book stock in Hendon and in the London Borough of Barnet generally was savaged by a series of cuts by the philistines of the then-Tory council, so it is perhaps a little rich of Morrison and Field to shout too loudly.
According to the LISU Annual Library Statistics 2005 public library bookstock fell by 16% from 131.7 million items to 110.1 million items over the ten years from 1993-94 to 2003-2004, a period that saw a huge increase in publishing output. Of course public libraries provide all sorts of resources, and always have. When I worked at Hendon it had a music library second to none, so, properly resourced, why should they not provide an excellent book stock as well? Dolan says, "you have, as ever, a national network that delivers books from far away". Pubic libraries should make this more widely known; it's a long tail phenomenon, the ability to find an item from a network of libraries anywhere in Britain or even abroad. Recently when I asked in a local public library how I might order an item that wasn't on the catalogue I was told, "you can't". "Yes, I can," I replied, but a non-librarian user might have taken this unhelpful answer at face value.
This could be how public libraries beat the Waterstones and others who pile it high and sell it cheap. Public libraries can offer something more interesting and challenging than ephemeral best-sellers, and the national library network, up to and including the British Library, ought to be able to satisfy everyone's interests, no matter how recondite. Instead, driven by the tyranny of the popular, they have distorted their stock buying and discouraged readers from exploiting the interlibrary lending services.