Quote:
Originally Posted by Fbone
I would prefer my local library to use my tax dollars wisely.
Subscribing to hundreds or thousands of ebook titles that are not borrowed would be wasteful. Having limited budgets my library had to sacrifice other purchases and services to be able to obtain ebooks which may be considered nonessential items.
So, when I saw a 67% usage on that particular day I was satisfied (and surprised) that it's money well spent.
|
Guess it is a matter of what one thinks/wants libraries for. For some reason the big holding times and large number of copies of a book like 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' bugs me. The ebook can be bought for $5-6. I find it hard to imagine that someone who wants to read that on their ereader can't spring for it themselves. On the other hand if I find myself with the need to research, so on a legal theory or a medical issue, those books are often very expensive. To get enough to do good research can be hard , especially at a time when possible sick and money is not coming in. Hopefully people do not need them all the time, so the check out rate would be low. However when you do need them it could be literally lifesaving to be able to get easy free access to them.
So guess I have a strong bias towards libraries having good reference/research collections that may not be commonly needed, but are hard to duplicate quickly privately. To me the supplying of books like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that are popular, but cheaply available are the waste of the tax dollars, even though they do lead to high utilization rates it seems.