Exploring physical vs digital titles in our Singapore Libraries (Part II)
In my previous post, I studied the number of physical and digital copies in our Singapore libraries of selected non-fiction authors, and the analysis indicated that switching to borrowing digital copies from our Singapore libraries can potentially give me a greater variety of non-fiction titles. This is based on the high number and variety of digital copies that our Singapore libraries stock up as compared to their physical copies.
However, total copies indicate the supply-side of things. As a book borrower, I should be more concerned about the number of available books from our Singapore libraries, and this is data that I can get from the NLB API too. This is what I intend to do in this post.
Analysis — Available Copies
In total, at the point of my extraction on 13th Dec 2023, we have 619 audio, 303 physical and 292 electronic books available for borrowing.
At face value, despite the large number of electronic copies in stock, there are less available electronic copies to borrow than physical copies. It seems our Singapore library users really love to borrow electronic books over physical copies! However, as a fellow library user, does it mean that there are likely more physical copies available for me to borrow?
Looking at the ten least available books, we see Annie Duke, Adam Grant, Malcolm Gladwell, Ryan Holiday and Nate Silver (No love for Nassim Taleb I guess).
Fig 2 shows that “The Gift Inside the Box” and “Hidden Potential” by Adam Grant and “The Daily Dad” by Ryan Holiday were all borrowed out and were not available for borrowing for all formats at the time of my data extraction. I am ignoring Annie Duke’s two unavailable poker books, as this number could be skewed by the lack of these copies in our libraries.
Then, there are the popular books by Malcom Gladwell (“What the dog saw”, “David and Goliath”, “The Tipping Point”), Ryan Holiday (“The Boy Who Would Be King”) and Nate Silver (“The Signal and The Noise”) that are available for borrowing in small quantities. Interestingly, most of their available copies are physical ones (green). A win for us physical book lovers?
Analysis — Physical vs Electronic
I also looked at the available titles between physical and electronic copies. I am ignoring audio books for this because I feel physical and electronic formats are more comparable in terms of how they are consumed (reading) versus audio books (listening).
There are 17 titles with more available physical than electronic copies, and 11 titles with more available electronic than physical copies.
In addition, I also looked at titles that only had physical copies, of which there were 9 titles (as shown in Fig 5).
And lastly, titles that only had electronic copies, which had 3 such titles.
These ways of comparing physical versus electronic copies is naive, and the sample of books isn’t very representative of the wide selection of books that our library has. The supposedly available physical library books could be located in libraries that don’t actually make their availability accessible. Reserving a physical book and / or getting the physical book to be delivered to your designated library also requires a fee, while reserving an electronic book requires no costs at all. These are many nuances towards whether the availability of physical and electronic books for borrowing, and these may really be down to how one loves to get his books.
Some Personal Thoughts
One thing that I have glossed is just how amazing our Singapore library book selections are, regardless of the formats that they are in. Beyond that, our physical library also has a variety of physical talks, events and facilities that are available (mostly free) for all our library users to join.
Personally, I love visiting our libraries to browse the shelves of the sections I frequent (philosophy, tech, economics, etc…) to find new books. I also like the trigger of having to return my books physically, and the accompanied fine if I do it late. I feel this social contract and financial disincentive has kept me on track to read more books in general. It is also why I buy yoga packages to keep my yoga lifestyle going, even though I can easily just do yoga at home through YouTube.
On the other hand, I have not been able to consistently read and complete the electronic books that I have borrowed from our libraries. Maybe I need a proper e-Reader, or just a different system for reading eBooks. I also have tried listening to audio fiction books, but I easily get distracted and lose track of the book’s plot. I was told I need to find the correct activity to pair with listening to audio books, activities that are not mentally intense, so that I can listen to my books, not get distracted, but still complete these set of mundane tasks.
From this data exploration exercise, I will try again to borrow and read eBooks from our libraries, even though physical books are still my preferred choice of reads in the near future.
Next (final?) post
I do have one last bit of analysis that I hope to do before I conclude, and that is the ratio of total copies and available copies. However, this angle of the analysis would be more like understanding the redundancy involved stocking up titles by our libraries, and may be seen more as an efficiency measure from a library perspective, rather than from a library user like myself.
A better way to find (physical) SG library books
If you finished my post about library books, I assume you are a hardcore library user. And if you borrow a lot of physical books from our Singapore libraries (like me, for now at least), the web app I built may make it easier for you to know the availability of the physical library books, by their library locations.
I built this tool for myself as I found the experience finding books in our libraries frustrating, and I decided to release it to the public for anyone who wants a better experience finding physical books in our libraries too. I am also adding improvements to my web app, so if you visited my app in the past and not done so recently, do give us a try again! Feel free to provide any feedback to me as well!
To those who have not, feel free to connect with me on Linkedin, where I share more about my tech and data related stuff!
