Well, there are a few things to unpack from your comments. Australian academic libraries have had an E-preferred collection development focus for a long time now, and several of the companies working on the technology to make that happen were Aussie start-ups in the early 2000s. So it's been a big part of the ecosystem for a long time now. Our Universities are pretty much all publicly funded, and we do a lot in the distance-education space - my University does the whole "open university" online education thing, we deliver remote Vocational courses throughout Australia, and we have partner campuses in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. It's not at all like the American "college experience" of living on campus and living that whole lifestyle. In fact in many other countries we would be called an advanced research polytechnic instead.

Our collection policy follows from that - there's no point keeping outdated concrete engineering standards documentation on the shelf, or having user guides to Windows 95 taking up space.

"So, if we check out more books, the libraries have the data to show that there is a need and desire for such books, then you can take those numbers and request even more money?"

There isn't a "more money" tap that you can switch on sadly, or rather those discussions happen at the Dean and Vice-Chancellor level, far far above my pay grade. We get an allocated chunk of money for the year, then we have to try and guess what the foreign exchange rate will be at the end of the year, and then have to negotiate with the vendors about their price rises.

Wait till you see how much academic Ebooks cost

It's actually my job to sit and crunch the circulation numbers all day. I work at an academic library that has almost no physical holdings left other than art/design books. What I'm generally doing is providing data that goes to the budget planners to inform the decision to either renew or cancel a journal subscription, and to take that data into the negotiations with vendors. Key metrics are cost-per-use, use-by-faculty, use by subject area, year on year trends, failed access attempts and so on. Before this, my last gig was working for a vendor doing much the same thing but with a sales support focus.

The advantages of Ebooks for us are that they don't take up any physical space, they don't get lost or damaged and we can control the loan settings to prevent circulation "logjams" on popular titles. By this I mean that I can set individual titles to only by available for short term loans, or to only be "checked out" as long as you have it open in a browser. I can set the system to automatically buy a second copy if someone tries to access a book that's already checked out, and to send me daily/weekly/monthly reports on access failures.

Not for the fragile. On one hand it's grotesquely violent and at first pass irredeemably grim and truly quite horrible to read. On the other, second-read hand it's still all that but the religious/metaphysical subtext comes out.

The "what" is just as important as the "why" in this. Consider that he's isn't talking about the kind of music that hipsters of his day would discuss (Punk, New Wave etc), he's going on about the most middle-of-the-road, superficial, mass-market pop music. More or less the equivalent of using hard-core foodie terminology to discuss instant noodles in that he understands the form but none of the content. There's even a scene where somehow he gets tickets to see what I understand was meant to be U2 (before they went fully mass-market pop) and he doesn't get it at all, all he can talk about is the singers poor muscle tone and having to be around working-class people.

This might not be so immediately obvious to us now because there has been a trend in music criticism to take "disposable" pop more seriously and discuss it in the way that "serious" rock music writers did. But I think at the time of writing this would have read as much more jarring and as more evidence of Bateman's emptiness.

Absolutely. We moved from Aus to NZ in 1988 as my mum took up a position at the national library. She was always complaining about how expensive books were comparatively. I've been back in Australia for 20-odd years, but I did occasionally travel back, ironically to sell books to the universities. One of the last times I was there I was struck by the fact that there was only one bookshop I could find in the Auckland CBD, and while Unity books is by any objective standard well stocked and curated, it was outrageously expensive.

Pretty hard to be a Librarian without it, so yes. Worked in a bookshop for years too.