Hollywood is driving library borrowing habits like never before – and Australian authors without film-book tie-ins are struggling to find a mass readership.
With the film version starring Emily Blunt soon to be released, British writer Paula Hawkins' novel of a vanished wife, The Girl on the Train, has topped the list of most borrowed library books in Australia and New Zealand for the past 12 months.
Overseas crime thrillers from James Patterson, Patricia Cornwall, John Grisham and four from Lee Child's Jack Reacher series also dominated the top 20 list of best borrowed books.
The Rosie Effect and The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion and Di Morrissey's The Road Back were the lone Australian entrants. On the young adult fiction list,not a single local writer featured in the top 10.
The poor visibility of Australian youth fiction was disappointing, said Sue McKerracher, chief executive officer of Australian Library Information Association.
"We've got some truly fantastic writers," she said. "This year's list was absolutely dominated by the big US series Divergent, The Hunger Games and Maze Runner, and that's because of the film-book tie in the whole fantasy book sector."
The committee for #LoveOzYA movement, formed last year to raise the profile of Australian youth literature, said the rising influence of Hollywood adaptions on reading habits was unsurprising, and it would take effort and patience to "get the message out that America did not have the market cornered on teen tales".
"Such movements take time to seep into the community consciousness, and for the word to be spread to a vast network of readers," the committee said.
The local film industry was doing its part with the ABC's adaption of John Marsden's Tomorrow When the War Began, and talk of a movie from Melina Marchetta's award-winning On The Jellicoe Road.
"But it's safe to say that the Australian creative industries are united in our belief that recent funding cuts have seriously hindered our ability to grow, prosper, and most likely to collaborate with each other in ways that we'd like," the committee said.
The Civica index measured the borrowing habits of Australia's 10 million library members across 1500 public libraries, as well as those in New Zealand.
Library members had the biggest appetite for crime, mystery and thriller novels, with almost one third of all books loaned out between April 2015 and May this year coming from this genre.
Romance was the second most popular category, especially among borrowers aged 65 and over.
Marc Nolan, managing director of Civica – the library information, management and collection agency that collates the index – said borrowers seemed to be coming to books viatelevision, film and video games.
As with fiction titles, biographies adapted for the screen were among the most borrowed biographies. These included Jennifer Worth's Call the Midwife, Laura Hillenbrand's war story of survival, Unbroken, and Cheryl Strayed's Wild.
Sarah Wilson's I Quit Sugar for Life led the non-fiction list, with travel guides also popular.
Among young readers, Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid book series ruled while there were three books by Andy Griffiths in the top 10. In kids' non-fiction, handbooks on the video game Minecraft comprised one third of all borrowings.
Ms McKerracher said bestsellers and film tie-ins were helping shape library fiction collections.
"Often what's different between bookshops and libraries, apart from the fact that one is borrow and one is buy, is that we have a bigger collection of mid-list and back-list books because we find if books and [films of the books] remain popular we need to keep buying new copies of those older titles."
Top 20 most borrowed titles:
The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins
Make Me, Lee Child
Personal, Lee Child
The Burning Room, Michael Connelly
The Rosie Effect, Graeme Simsion
Never Go Back, Lee Child
The Rosie Project, Graeme Simsion
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
The Road Back, Di Morrissey
The Gods of Guilt, Michael Connelly
A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
A Wanted Man, Lee Child
The Cinderella Murder, Mary Higgins Clark
Flesh and Blood, Patricia Cornwell
Hope to Die, James Patterson
The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Short Stories, Ian Rankin
Zero Day, David Baldacci
Gray Mountain, John Grisham
The Gentlemen's Alliance Cross, Tetsuichiro Miyaki; Arina Tanemura
Die Again, Tess Gerritsen
Most borrowed biography:
The Happiest Refugee, Anh Do
I Am Malala, Malala Yousafzai
Wild: A Journey From Lost To Found, Cheryl Strayed
More Fool Me, Stephen Fry
Call the Midwife, Jennifer Worth
My Story, Julia Gillard
The Never, Um, Ever Ending Story, Ian Meldrum
Not That Kind of Girl, Lena Dunham
Unbroken: A WWII story of survival, Laura Hillenbrand
Outback Midwife, Beth McRae
Most borrowed young adults:
Divergent, Victoria Roth
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
The Maze Runner, James Dashner
Allegiant, Veronica Roth
Insurgent, Veronica Roth
Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
The Fault in Our Stars, John Green
The Scorch Trials, James Dashner
The Death Cure, James Dashner
Linda Morris is on Facebook and Twitter @LindaMorrissmh
