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Some of the comments here are surprising. Imo people who come to library to read books want to be a good member of the library. By assuming they will stop retur
by cryptozeus 7y ago
Some of the comments here are surprising. Imo people who come to library to read books want to be a good member of the library. By assuming they will stop returning books due to no fees is just assuming worst of them. I was surprised when my county in California decided to get rid of all the fees. I had 5 books due and all my fees were forgiven. I donated way more to the library just because of this change. I was worried that how will they now afford to run the library effectively without fees. I guess people who can afford to give donations should do that and take the financial load out of the people who cannot afford. There is something freeing about this. Education and knowledge should really be free for all.
- tfha 7y agoFees are not a significant part of a libraries revenue
- cryptozeus 7y agoYeh I guess that is why it was easy for them to experiment with it.
- konschubert 7y agoI agree that most want to be a good member of the library, but what do you do about a few bad actors? (I haven't read the policy but I guess there must still be some restrictions to prevent abuse.)
- naniwaduni 7y agoYou buy replacements. It's not fundamentally different from books getting generally worn out. Lending limits on categories of items effectively upper bound the cost of each individual bad actor to not prohibitively expensive.
- jakeogh 7y agoAlso I bet they deny check out until late's are retured, maybe with some buffer for lost or cant return it yet but will. I dont see it mentioned in the article. Smart move imho. Bravo CPL. I bet the same result happens elsewhere independent of assumptions about desire to pay.
- cryptozeus 7y agoGenerally you are blocked from renting more books if you do not pay full amount of lost or not returned book after some point. My library allows 10 books at a time so if I don’t return due books then they put my account on hold.
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoHow many books do you imagine they are going to keep/loose, a hundred? Paper is cheap, have a backup. Books in copyright are a bit more difficult, but still.
- lr4444lr 7y agoYeah, it's really quite interesting in general the internally inconsistent view of human nature people will hold in to satisfy some higher order bias they have about how the world does or should work.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoI'd assume that most people would do their best to return books, but my concern would be that a tiny handful of bad actors could hoard books and ruin the system for everyone else This doesn't seem to have happened, which is super encouraging! But I'm also very surprised!
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoIt's the medieval mentality, like there is a shortage of paper or something. The amount of it wasted in my office alone could supply every library in town. I'd be happy if a kid stole 10 books from my shelf and read one. The most expensive thing in the world is people that are unemployable, ignorant, need support and vote for the politicians we deserve! There should be like a national policy where kids get paid for reading, every penny spent will payoff 100X.
- paulddraper 7y agoBooks are valuable and scarce goods. Something tells me if you opened an online bookstore, you could make a nice little business...
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoThere are successful businesses selling water, air and sand. The correct conclusion is not "everything is scarse"
- cryptozeus 7y agoOn top of all these they have free ebook programs where you can rent a book from your local library for free. They are really doing everything they can to support free materials. Its up to the people now.