The librarians have been thinking for a while now about how to reduce the amount of time anyone has to wait to read the new books by the most popular authors. Our policy is to purchase one copy for every seven people who have designated an author as one of their “favorites.” (Do you know how to do this? If not, stay tuned.) At this point there are at least six authors whom more than 70 people have chosen as one of their favorites. That means we purchase ten copies of each of their new books. For perhaps a year those ten copies get heavily used, but after that time that take up a lot of valuable real estate upstairs on the regular shelves. Normally, when these books are removed from “new book” status, we discard all but two or three copies. Those copies remain on the shelves for a couple more years before being reduced to one or two copies.

We believe that our budget can handle purchasing ten copies of a title, but any more seems wasteful of our resources — that is, buying books that we do not have room to store for more than a year. However, the number of people who want to read the latest books by such folks as David Baldacci, Michael Connelly, Janet Evanovich, Sue Grafton, John Grisham, and James Patterson continues to grow.

Our new method for reducing your wait time for books by those six authors is to reduce the amount of time for which they are checked out from two weeks to one week. This change will begin in early February, when James Patterson’s new book is released. When that book hits our shelves (well, it doesn’t actually hit the shelves because there are already 70 people on the wait list to read it), it will check out for only seven days. Staff believes that books by these authors usually are quick reads, but, of course, you still have the option of keeping the book longer than seven days and paying our 10¢ per day fine. When these books finally make their way to the new book shelves, you’ll recognize 7-day checkouts by the blue NEW BOOK label on their spines, and when they are ultimately removed from new book status they’ll check out for three weeks, like all other fiction.

We hope this change will please most of you and we’re anxious to get your feedback, both positive and negative. Other libraries charge a fee for reserving books, which eliminates some people completely and also subsidizes additional copies of books, but we prefer to keep the cost of using our books completely voluntary (paying a fine for overdues). Please let us know whether you think this change shortens the time you have to wait for books by these six authors.

For those of you who haven’t found the Favorite Authors feature in our electronic catalog, here’s what you do. On the library webpage (library.georgetown.org), choose Catalog/Online Services. The catalog page will open and there is a box in the upper right corner where you may log in to your account. You’ll need your library barcode and your seven-digit phone number (no dash or spaces) to log in. Then click on “Open My Account.”

Another box opens that shows the personal information on your library record as well as books you have checked out. Scroll down past the books you have checked out to where you see “Have Some Favorite Authors?” Click on the highlighted link that says “receive new books.” An alphabetical list of authors comes up and all you have to do is click on an author’s name to add them to your favorites list. That automatically puts you in the queue for all new books by that author. In case you’re wondering how the queues are created, the computer generates a new randomly ordered queue as each title arrives.

This list of authors also serves another purpose that you may find useful. These are the authors on our standing order list. You may be assured that we will always receive any new book of fiction that these authors publish. You don’t need to request that we purchase their books.