Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
Who suggested that this proposal would prevent low income individuals from getting ebooks?
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Probably the point at which someone pointed out that the proposal would require patrons to cough up money in order to access ebooks?
As I've said, I don't mind a situation where a "premium patron club" could be instituted where patrons voluntarily choose to pay money to the library in order to help out. In return, all sorts of carrots could be offered: more books checked out simultaneously, maybe, or fast tracking to the front of the hold list on brand new releases.
But there's a reason why a lot of people in this thread are against a "pay for ebooks" suggestion and it's because we're uncomfortable with basic access to the library being denied to people who can't or who FEEL they can't pay for the luxury of reading. That is, in fact, the whole point of a library -- to offer a public service for readers who can't just up and go to the bookstore.
We've all seen "exceptions clauses" handled poorly. Making someone PROVE that they're too poor to pay for ebooks is a bad system -- it's a nightmare of employees and paperwork, it's insulting and degrading, and furthermore it's just plain not going to work. There is no one way to identify ALL the poor people in this country -- they don't ALL have food stamps to flash at the librarian or a WIC card or whatever.
And then you have the middle grounders -- people who won't pay for library access because they don't want to spend money for their reading, like my Mom who currently exclusively gets books from the library because it's free. Her property taxes go to support the library, and she's happy to use it, but if they started charging a fee, she'd stop. Losing that demographic would be TERRIBLE for libraries, because how do you keep going to the bench defending your need for funding when the numbers show that
half your customers don't use your service anymore?
I've yet to hear a good reason why an "opt-in" fee would be worse than an "opt-out" fee, while hearing many many good reasons why an "opt-out" fee will hurt people. (Like, say, Matilda. I'm sure her parents would have loved to pay the lending fees. How can you hate Matilda???
) If the ONLY reason to prefer an "opt-out" fee is because otherwise it's just not fair because someone, somewhere, will use the library without paying even though they COULD, well, then the issue has stopped being about "helping libraries" and more about "making sure the rich don't rent ebooks for free".
Tl;dr. Carrots, not sticks.