Quote:
Originally Posted by cjottawa
I am about "56 of 75" patrons waiting for the .epub version of "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" at my public library.
I have enough reading to do that I'll wait a month or three for my number to come up at the library.
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You'll have to wait more than a few months before getting an email that the book is available. Possibly a year. One of the only exceptions that will shorten the wait period is a patron who has the book on hold but does not respond during the 3-day notification period to check out the ebook. And after you have waited a year, guess what? You'll either have lost interest in the book or be on vacation when you get the notification. Sorry, to the end of the line. Certain libraries limit the size of a patron's hold list. That could be to your advantage if he/she has to delete a hold.
Now that we gotten several pages deep into this thread, is there someone who can reliably answer a few questions that have been alluded to earlier?
1. What does a library pay to Overdrive for the initial cost and recurring lending cost of an ebook?
2. At what point does the net cost exceed the cost of a pbook of the same title? Would a library stop lending
after this cost has been exceeded?
3. Some have hinted that the annual recurring cost of an ebook is capped. But if an ebook is borrowed by 12 patrons a year vs. 50 patrons a year, then is this really true? What if there is a hidden gatekeeper that restricts the number of times a book is borrowed to, say, 26 lending periods a year?
I realize that there are bean counters out there who can tell me the cost of a librarian checking out a pbook, and re-shelving it. But that librarian is usually an overhead cost, and unless it can be demonstrated that he/she can be eliminated from the payroll, the cost savings are nil. Ah, but what if the city or state decided to eliminate an entire physical library and go all-electronic, doing away with employees, electricity, heating and maintenance bills? Hmm.