Stacking up Opening the book on how Winnipeg libraries get new material By: Eva Wasney Posted: 4:15 PM CST Friday, Feb. 13, 2026 Last Modified: 9:38 AM CST Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026 Updates

Last week, local fans of the hit television show Heated Rivalry received a thrilling notification: “Your hold at Winnipeg Public Library is ready to borrow!”

The gay hockey romance has become a major CanCon export, turning Haligionian author Rachel Reid, who penned the books upon which the show is based, into a New York Times bestseller and wreaking havoc on library wait-lists everywhere.

Things started heating up at the Winnipeg Public Library last month.

“That’s when it really took off. There was some increase in December, but not enough to warrant additional copies,” says Aileen Clear, one of three collections librarians responsible for keeping the city’s 20 library branches stocked with new and popular material.

Clear’s job is both predictive and reactive. Most of her days are spent combing through publisher previews and internal holds data to determine demand and purchase accordingly.

She bought six copies of Heated Rivalry, the second book in Reid’s Game Changers series, in 2021 (likely at the request of a library user) and ordered the remaining five novels after the show debuted on Crave in November.

Since then, the book has experienced a meteoric rise in popularity matched to the superstar trajectories of actors Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams, who play rivals/lovers Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander, respectively, in the TV adaptation created and directed by Jacob Tierney.

By the end of January, Heated Rivalry had been checked out of the library more than 300 times and had surpassed the typical holds-per-copy ratio, with, as of this week, 140 people waiting for the physical book, 300 waiting for the ebook and 150 waiting for the audiobook.

Clear has reordered additional copies in every format and is ready to hit purchase when Unrivaled, the seventh book in Reid’s series, becomes available in the fall.

“I already have it in my cart,” she says with a laugh.

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Clear, 37, started at the Winnipeg Public Library in 2007 as a shelver and worked her way up through the stacks after completing a masters of library and information sciences at Western University — a prerequisite for librarian positions at the City of Winnipeg. (No local post-secondary institutions offer masters-level training in library services.)

As a collections librarian, her purchasing portfolio includes adult fiction, genre fiction, adult graphic novels, large-print material, magazines, newspapers and French titles.

Clear relies on seasonal hotlists from publishers to make purchasing decisions. Her spring-summer hotlist contains 480 forthcoming titles from well-known and debut authors forecast to make a splash.

Readers can also make suggestions, which are added if the material fits the library’s selection criteria, is currently in print and is available from existing vendors.

“Even if it’s just suggested once, it could be added, so we do ask that people don’t keep suggesting the same thing,” Clear says.

Everything from screen adaptations and social-media trends to literary awards and pop culture moments can influence what’s en vogue in Winnipeg.

(Reviews in the Saturday Free Press’s books section, G1-4, also have a notable effect, says Clear.)

Fiction is the most borrowed genre at the library, with mysteries and thrillers, such as Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache books, leading the pack, thematically.

Romance and “romantasy” novels, such as Heated Rivalry and Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean series, have become more popular in recent years.

“They’re very popular on BookTok,” Clear says of the TikTok community dedicated to reviewing and promoting books. “That definitely plays a huge role now.”

There’s a long line for Pick a Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa, winner of the 2025 Giller Prize, and interest in Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell has been piqued since the première of the Oscar-nominated film adaptation of the same name last fall.

Prince Harry’s sensational memoir, Spare, holds the title for longest library wait-list to date, says Clear, with more than 600 people jumping in the queue after it was released in 2023.

It can take several weeks for a book to make it into the library’s system after it’s been ordered — or longer if the library’s wholesale vendors are also struggling to meet demand.

Clear works out of an office on the third floor of the Millennium Library. Her purchases arrive in the quiet and colourful processing department down the hall, where it smells like new books, and library technicians are busy unpacking boxes, settling invoices and adhering call numbers to spines.

Books are then distributed to corresponding branches and users with holds are notified.

Digital ebooks and audiobooks are often more expensive than physical ones, which limits how many copies the library can afford to buy and leads to long wait-lists for popular titles.

“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, well it’s just a digital file, why can’t we have (unlimited) checkouts?’ But it’s the publishers that set the price, and it’s not always economical,” Clear says.

While a physical softcover book might cost $20 per copy, that copy will remain in circulation until it’s damaged or no longer usable, after which it might end up in a library book sale.

Ebooks are similarly priced, but come with licensing agreements that expire after a certain amount of time or number of checkouts. Licenses for the new batch of Heated Rivalry ebooks, for example, cost $20 apiece and each copy can be borrowed 26 times before it needs to be repurchased.

Audiobooks can cost upwards of $80 per license, but are usually available to multiple users at once. Some audiobooks aren’t available to libraries at all, owing to proprietary deals between publishers and platforms such as Audible.

The Winnipeg Public Library, which receives municipal and provincial funding, spent nine per cent ($3.4 million) of its annual budget on purchasing new material in 2024.

That year, five million items were borrowed from the library, including 1.8 million digital downloads.

The growing popularity of ebooks and audiobooks could pose a challenge for library resources in the future.

“Every year there’s higher demand for digital materials, so we’re always looking at that budget,” Clear says.

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