How cheap can cheap books get?

Monday's drive out to Penrith in the stinking heat in a non-air conditioned vehicle was the pits; but well worth the trip to participate in the Western Sydney Region Teacher Librarians' 2012 National Year of Reading Think Tank, hosted by Penrith Public Library. Great ideas getting tossed around there.

As an extra special bonus, I got to visit the cheap book place everyone is talking about, in the adjacent Penrith Plaza. Sure does have a heap of quality books for the minuscule amount of five bucks. Good luck to my colleagues who are authorised to take advantage of these retail outlets. I'm still trying to figure out why that select group school principals, who control the working conditions as well as the budgets of school library folk would object to getting a little more bang for their buck.

Anyways, having traversed the shopping mall to get to the library, just outside the library were paperback spinners stacked with library culls selling for 20 cents each. Oh boy!

But in today's email came what has to be the cheapest of the cheap books. A company called Free eBooks wrote to tell me that they currently have a 50% off sale ....

Shame File: School Library Expenditure

How can a school spend $0.00 on their library, and then bank over a million dollars? These figures are from a school's annual report. Just to let you know that this is a government high school in NSW, but not one where I am employed (nor ever have been).

This is a public document available through the Internet, without any password etc requirements. You can locate it through a Google (or other search tool) search for "NSW school annual report" [insert year]. You will get a clearer image by clicking on this one, which will enlarge it.

At the bottom of the document it says "the school" invites you to contact them for more information. I wonder if anyone did.

Sort of makes me want to go check out some others ...






Hey! Just for comparison, this is the library expenditure for the geographically closest school to the one above. Interestingly, the schools are about the same size.

You can see this one spent more than $25K on their library, and banked "only" $708, 000.

Their income was $3,285,896 for 1165 students ($2820 per student). Library expenditure was $25231 ($21 per student).

Notably this school excels academically.

The first example's income for the same year was $2, 999,720 for 1200 students ($2499 per student). Library expenditure was $0.00 total, or equal to 0.00 per student.

Both schools are in an area of socio-economic advantage. Both are for the 2010 school year. Go figure ...

Book Budget Defence Resource

Something to show the bean-counters and the techno-twits who consider that your book budget money is better spent on gizmos and do-dads ... and then wonder why literacy rates and attention spans are plummeting. Or perhaps in those places where the technology budget doesn't quite extend as far as The Library ...