Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
If we presume 70 readers per month (35 copies x 2 week checkout period), that's 13 months before you'd have to re-purchase.
Let's say the HC library cost is $8 (a 20% discount on a $10 price, which is actually high for this title), and a non-HC blockbuster is $25 (150% markup).
HC costs you $280; non-HC costs you $875. You'd need to purchase this title 3 times over before it costs the same as the marked-up price.
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You're assuming what seems an artificially low price for the HC copy, paid for at what look like mass-market paperback prices when most new release bestsellers are hardcover which the Agency publishers usually insist on selling at $12.99+ e-retail (and the HC guy even says in his "open letter" that the lower pricing is posited to be available after a year's worth of the 26 expiries takes place).
And the library would still get only 1 year + 1 month's worth of usage out of the new-model HC book, whereas an old-model HC/non-HC book could stay in the catalogue for years.
Even if it's not a title that gets a mad initial rush (although the new e-books tend to be heavily put on hold with long-ish waiting lists, regardless of subjct matter; who knew that many people wanted all four copies of
Vampire Knits: Projects to Keep You Knitting from Twilight to Dawn?), it would slowly earn back its keep over time and stay there for the enjoyment of the patrons without them having to worry it'll disappear if they don't get it *now*, or wonder if it's going to be one of the ones that the library won't bother to renew.
Sorting the available PDFs by "date added to site" from my library says that the oldest still available goes back to a late 2007 "release date", which seems roughly in tune with an
old press release from one of the participating municipal systems which says that the "Library to Go" site is now open for audiobooks etc.
A lot of the books are personal reference-type stuff (Your First 100 Words in Persian, Various Crafts for Dummies) which it would benefit the library patrons to keep in relative perpetuity, even if they cost a rather higher initial outlay, and not to have expire after a mere 26 loans. And even the less popular and more obscure fiction would benefit from the gradual exposure over time.
Frankly, I kind of envision future e-listings looking rather like the multiply-stocked "Fast Reads/7-day Loan No Renewals $1 per day Overdue/Bestseller Express" shelf of the New Releases section if what gets acquired depends heavily on how many loans you'll get out of it before it expires.
It's a pretty bleak desert of briefly "hit" popular titles which all end up looking the same with little variety between them compared to the single-purchase non-bestseller new releases, which look by far more interesting to take home and read once you've indulged your Tom Clancy/James Patterson/Danielle Steel cravings.