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Originally Posted by abookreader
To answer the question - my biggest problem isn't that I wouldn't be willing to pay. I'd pay a small fee to get access if I needed to.
My problem would be that fee charging for access to those books in effect locks out the lower income members of the community from accessing those materials. This would be in direct disregard to one of the primary parts of the libraries mission, which is to provide access to reading material to all local patrons regardless of their income levels.
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yeah, I find this worrisome too. I'd personally be willing to pay a small yearly fee for more ebooks (say, like what the Free library of Philadelphia charges for those not in the area), but I would worry that it would lock out people, and I don't like that at all.
That was pretty cool about the Minneapolis library having a drive for used readers, too. Great idea!
Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
I don't recall if there is a fee for the card itself where I live, but there is a charge if you keep things too long certainly. Plus they sell some of the older books and such to make room for new. They do have ereaders for loan here (a month) and no fee for the actual loan. I think they might have ebooks but they're through Overdrive which isn't yet compatible with Kindle.
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I've put Overdrive books on my Kindle. Oh, scratch that. Our library books come either in Adobe Digital Editions OR Overdrive, and its the ADE ones I put on my Kindle (with a little help from Calibre, of course).
I'm a bit puzzled by the people who know exactly how much of their property taxes go to libraries. How do you know it's that much?
Anyway, overall, I would love our library to have more e-books, but when I did a recent survey with the library, I qualified for my desire for more by saying that I know, in our state, the libraries are fighting just to stay open and buy new (paper) books, and so as much as I would like e-books, I'm not willing to divert scarce resources to something that I believe gets less use than regular books.
I love the way the Philadelphia Free Library works, allowing people out of their service area to pay to check out e-books. I wonder if other libraries do that? It's a good idea to help get more resources to support a service like this.
eta: we have no fees for library cards or for late books, unless the book is actually lost and has to be replaced.