[keithpeter]

Librarians are pretty brutal about shelf space and 'discards' are ruthless and based on readership as you noticed.

In UK most public libraries will offer to get a book in on the 'inter-library loan' system - there is usually a charge. University libraries (https://copac.jisc.ac.uk/) are (mostly) accessible through this system.

The other strategy would be to try to increase readership of philosophy books perhaps starting with texts accessible to the teenager age range (Sophie's World?, the various comic book options?)

[barking]

It's years since I was in a library, the one where I lived was getting worse for a while. The stock of books was decreasing and the staff were resorting to displaying them in a manner that made this less obvious such as some books being displayed face out to take up more space. Where I live now, I'm twenty miles from the nearest, not very good library, and never go there.

[Izkata]

Yeah, the one I grew up with (and worked at in 2005), I revisited around 2010 and it kinda hurt to see just how much they'd gotten rid of. Not only had a large number of shelves been removed for a new bank of computers, the remaining ones were relatively bare like you describe. Probably only had around half the number of books it used to, and this was after they'd built an annex and tripled in size in the late 90s.

Wasn't long after that I moved away and haven't had an urge to go back to any library.

[buckminster]

In the last ten years the inter-library loan charge here has increased from £2 to £10. Second hand is often cheaper.

[Tomte]

That's really expensive.

Around here the standard seems to be €2.50, and I recently found a library in my neighborhood that only takes €1.50.

I haven't used ILL too much in the past, but I recently decided that lending before buying only those books that are worth it will save me a lot of money.