[SteveEisenberg]

As I've posted before, I live just outside Philadelphia. The handsome suburban public library near me, which houses 30,000 books, and doesn't even have a dedicated community room, had a US$3 million expansion/renovation a few year ago. That price came to $100 / book. Philadelphia is, by some measures, America's most impoverished large city, and necessity forces them to do things a bit more efficiently. Still, when you add together costs of real estate, utilities, salaries and benefits of staff involved in book circulation, and other costs I must be forgetting, the $16-$17 price they quote for a paper book is a small fraction of the real cost to the library. With eBooks, the library does have to pay staff to select the titles, and to investigate whether to go with Overdrive and/or Cloud Library, and even to talk to newspaper reporters about eBooks. So eBook staff cost isn't zero. But it is far lower than with paper books. So I find the 16 cents per loan price they quote, for a paper book loan, misleading.

Most books I borrow from the Free Library of Philadelphia are reserved on the web and then physically transported, from the central library, or sometimes one of the large regional branches, to the small branch I can walk to. So there's another paper-only cost not included in the 16 cents -- physical book transportation.

If it is cheaper for the library to stock a thousand more physical titles than a thousand more Overdrive titles, they probably should do the former -- especially if the economics allow a fair portion of the physical titles to be large print. However, I'd be surprised if the $84 for a perpetual eBook license isn't cheaper, all costs taken into account, than the $16.80 quoted in the article as the paper price.