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Originally Posted by pidgeon92
I am happy to pay for the option. I just sent the Free Library of Philadelphia $35 to renew my card with them. In the past year I have read 21 ebooks that I borrowed from them. Even if I only read a half-dozen next year, I am happy to support them in their efforts to expand their ebook holdings.
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But you only have to pay money to the Free Library of Philadelphia because you don't live in Philadelphia and thus don't pay property taxes to support the library. The Free Library of Philadelphia is, as the name suggests, "free" for people who live in Philadelphia.
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Originally Posted by shibamistress
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?
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A pie chart came with my property tax bill. But it shouldn't be hard to find for any county - i.e.,
http://www.indy.gov/eGov/County/Trea.../Pages/go.aspx. This shows that, in 2009, there was a total property tax levy of $1.018 billion; and of this money, just over $40 million went to libraries. If you do the math, that means that 4% of property taxes went to libraries - so if you take 4% of your property tax bill, you can tell how much you spent on libraries.
If your library is also supported by local income taxes, you would need to include that as well - mine isn't, though.
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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.
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This kind of cuts both ways, though - while it allows for the purchase of new books, it also dramatically increases the number of people who want those books - meaning that residents of Philadelphia will have to wait much longer to check out e-books due to demand from out of area users. I think that I would *not* like it if my library did this...especially since the FLP doesn't have a particularly large e-book collection to begin with, and I think they just add the out of area fees to general revenues and don't devote them specifically to e-books.