Suggest a Title FAQs

While patrons from other municipalities are welcome to borrow physical materials from the VPL collection, materials are selected primarily for the use and enjoyment of Vancouver residents. If there is a title you want access to, you are welcome to request it from your local library.

We tend to select titles that:

• Have been published in the past two years
• Are of widespread interest to the community or help diversify our collection
• Are of local interest, written by local authors and/or relating to Vancouver or BC
• Are already published - we do not accept suggestions for titles in pre-publication

• We generally do not purchase academic books, specialized titles or textbooks, or out-of-print titles. 
• Also, we typically order titles published within the last two years.
• If you'd like to borrow a title that is older, out of print, or an item that doesn’t meet our selection criteria, you could try requesting it through our Interlibrary Loan Service.

You may suggest up to two items per week. This limit is set to allow Vancouver residents to consider and prioritize what they want to suggest for the collection.

Please only suggest one item per form. Do not submit a suggestion for all the titles in a series, or all the titles by the same author.

Yes, you can make a suggestion for a title in languages we collect. We actively collect physical materials for the following languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian/Farsi, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Spanish, Russian, Tagalog, and Vietnamese and electronic books for French and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional).

There could be many reasons why an item is not selected for the collection. Examples include: availability, cost, ongoing popularity, format, space, etc.

There may be several reasons. Some titles available for Kindle and Audible are simply not licensed to libraries. Also, some titles readily available for Kindle and/or Kobo cost substantially more for libraries than they do for individual readers. As a result, we're unable to add all patron suggestions.

The Selections team at VPL monitors holds regularly and may add more copies depending on availability, demand, cost, and licensing terms. Some titles are added to the collection at a certain price and licensing model; however, the availability, price and/or licensing model may be different for additional copies.

Series information is taken into consideration when purchasing new books. A number of factors impact the ability to maintain all titles within a series; however, the most common reason is that missing titles are no longer available through our library vendor(s) or are too costly to source.

Certainly! Please visit our information page on Selling Your Book or Other Publication to VPL. 

There could be several reasons for this. Sometimes this is due to delays in reprint cycles that result in unanticipated delays acquiring the material. Other times a title's publication date gets pushed into the future and the library has to wait to purchase the title.

Please note that It can take many weeks (and occasionally months) for physical materials to be purchased and processed for borrowing.