Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
Cutting off a source of revenue seems counterintuitive. But I'll take it on faith that this move makes sense for FLP.
Hoopla and Freading were the two options that kept me with FLP long after I was annoyed with the paucity of Overdrive selections.
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Just for fun, I decided to take a quick and ad hoc look at a few numbers. Googling gave me a Hachette price of $84 on a library license for a book which retails for $14.99. Amortizing this over a year gives $1.60 week. A paid patron who reads two per week costs $300, or $250 net. The breakeven is at about 30 books a year, or two and a half per month. Even the maximum borrows of six books at a time kept for the maximum three weeks would result in about 100 books per year.
I did say this was ad hoc! There are a lot of factors involved both in the aggregate and per account, and I admit that using the Hachette license price on new books scales the dollar figure up significantly (it ignores books that are cheaper or whose costs have been entirely amortized), but I think it does show the potential for colossal losses on individual customers. This ties into both Steve's point about paid patrons who seek to maximize their use and Catlady's about FLP knowing the costs of servicing paid patrons.
I'll add that the timing, at the same time at the Macmillan embargo, strikes me as suggestive. I suspect it led FLP to take a long and hard look at the demand and the waitlists for new books. It's entirely possible that this is a sop to their local patrons, who'll see a shorter waiting list on the single Macmillan copy in the first eight weeks.
I suppose I was part of the problem in that case, as my m.o. is always to put holds at all my libraries on the new stuff I want and then I wait and see which lands first.