Developments in Foreign Approval Buying

Extract

“You claim to be entirely able to do your book selection with only a few suggestions from us here and there—how can that be'?” Thus Professor X to Librarian Y, all over North America. Well, granted, we librarians are proud of the subject know-how that we've acquired, some by earning higher degrees in the subject, others by just having learned our way around the literature of the subject after years in the trenches. We have to admit, though, that approval-plan buying has made a big difference: the vendor allows you to see the book before you decide whether or not to add it to the collection. (People do this when they buy a car or a cabbage; why not a book?) Approval-plan buying is a great deal more reliable than the reading of blurbs, which are all too often deliberately uninformative, or than waiting for reviews before ordering, which takes too long. However, since debate springs up from time to time about whether libraries with straitened budgets can afford approval plans (a red herring, in my view), I thought I'd speak up in defense of them, especially in my area, foreign language book selection.