Polyglot New York

       In The New York Times Sarah Maslin Nir finds Among Readers in Polyglot New York, 50 Shades of Best Sellers, as:

In the Babel that is New York City, where nearly 200 languages are spoken and read within the public school system and nearly 40 percent of the population was born abroad, literary tastes among immigrant cultures turn out to be as different as their cuisines.

But what is popular in foreign languages is not always what is selling well back home in Bahrain or Bucharest.

       She also looks at the New York city public library systems -- and among the interesting observations is that:

Foreign language books also tend to last twice as long in the library system; they rarely return dog-eared or food-splotched.

       She also mentions:

A Lower East Side branch, once in the heart of Little Germany, has a longstanding endowment to buy books in German, now little used.

       (That's presumably the Ottendorfer branch.)
       As someone who has long lamented the decline in the NYPL's German-language collection (which really started going south fast after the disastrous shut-down of the Donnell Library Center in 2008, and the move of the World Languages Collection to the Mid-Manhattan branch) I'm shocked that there's money out there that they might be able to replenish their embarrassingly bared shelves with that's going unused .....