I think you were thinking of something like a county library in the United States, which deal primarily with mass-market paperbacks. That's not a great analogy.

I think you were thinking of something like a county library in the United States, which deal primarily with mass-market paperbacks. That's not a great analogy. When you're talking about breaking expensive equipment (as in a maker space), the median user doesn't matter. The worst user matters. Books (at least mass-market books) are several orders of magnitude cheaper than expensive hardware. Also the last interaction I had with a college library was being charged $200 to replace a textbook that had a cup of coffee dumped on it, so in my experience libraries aren't really model replacement-cost internalizers.