Do libraries have a blind spot for a certain set of important, interesting books? Tim Spalding thinks so, and in Getting real: Libraries are missing books he brings up the case of Getting Real, a book on building web applications by the web software company 37signals. It was a big seller as a PDF download for 37signals, and again on Lulu.com. But it made not a dent on libraries, judging by holdings in Worldcat.

Spalding asks “how could libraries miss this?” That’s a reasonable question, but it’s pretty easy to answer, and people answer it in the comments: bias against self-published books, difficulty of ordering without a purchase order, lack of reviews, lack of faculty/public demand, the fact that there is now a free HTML version, etc.

But the real question isn’t “how did libraries miss this one book?” The questions (implied if not explicit in Spalding’s post) are “is it OK to miss that kind of book?” and “how big of a problem is this?” and “how are libraries going to deal with this in the future?”

I have another example book: Wil Wheaton’s Happiest Days of our Lives. Wheaton, best known as a kid actor on Stand By Me and Star Trek: The Next Generation (cf. alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die), has reinvented himself as a geek writer in recent years. His earlier memoir, Just a Geek shows 160 owning libraries in Worldcat.org. His new, self-published memoir? Zero libraries.

I don’t want to make too much of that goose egg. The book has only been out since October. I don’t konw what the usual lag on Worldcat reporting is. At least one big library has it on order. Plus Wheaton has had surgery recently, and has been late in filling orders.

But that’s kind of my point. Soon, it may not sound all that unusual to say “the guy who wrote and designed the book and had it printed has been under the weather and hasn’t shipped the book to us from his home yet.”

Kevin Kelly’s essay/post 1,000 True Fans received a lot of attention recently. The idea is pretty simple: a creative person needs to have only 1,000 people spending $100 a year on their stuff to make a nice living. It may not be easy, but it seems doable. But that plan only works as stated if the artist is selling his or her own work, with very little in the way of middlemen to pay. Kelly makes that point, and also emphasizes that “The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly.”

It’s important to note that Kelly isn’t saying that these artists will only appeal to a thousand people total (though I’m sure large academic libraries have books that appeal to even small audiences), just that pleasing this core audience will be the artist’s most important task.

Put it this way: a writer trying to go the True Fan route will be so busy cultivating a relationship with the audience, he or she will have little time for sending out review copies, creating a workflow that deals with P.O.s, etc. They really don’t care if they sell to libraries, as long as they are keeping that fan base happy. If they pick up other fans, or sell a few books to some libraries, that’s great, but it isn’t what their main focus will have to be.

Probably predictably, I don’t really have answers to the questions I posed earlier. I don’t think it’s worth getting worked up over particular books and how popular they might or might not be or how important they might or might not be. I don’t know how much of an impact self-published books will have in the long run. But I don’t think libraries can afford to neglect this kind of book for long.