[issybird]

Originally Posted by meeera

My objection is just that windowing only applies to the book type that for many people is only one they can readily access, for accessibility/disability reasons.

"Who cares if people have to wait?" is one thing. "Who cares if only disabled people have to wait while anyone else can grab a paper copy?" is kinda another.

I don’t think this is a disability issue as much as it’s an accessibility issue, granted that accessibility can bear more heavily on the disabled. However, I think it’s mostly transportation and time that are factors in “can’t” borrow a paper copy.

That said, I think in terms of medium there’s a bifurcation in terms of strong preference. People mostly want to read paper or they mostly want to read digital. The papercrats might travel with digital books or read on their phone in the doctor’s office, the digitalists might read paper when there’s no alternative, but the two media aren’t really fungible for the vast majority. There’s a let them eat cake aspect to saying “let them grab a paper copy” that I can’t support. I recall you thought that so long as a library served its romance patrons it was doing its job; so much for the outliers. This is similar. People who like history “could” read romance instead; they just don’t wanna.

In any case, the big picture is that there will be waits for most popular books whether people are duking it out for paper or digital; library patrons accept that they won’t be able to participate in the water cooler discussions. I still don’t think eight weeks is all that much in the grand scheme; there are other books to read in the meantime. I’ll repeat that the giveback on this is huge, IMO; a license in perpetuity serves a library’s brief as repository in a way that paper can’t.

Not every book is Harry's memoir. For most there is nothing like that sort of queue.

Actually, I think the queues for Harry’s memoir will be shorter than for medium to low appeal books where the library buys one or two copies. There’s still no denying that some people will wait months.

Full disclosure: My own borrow (not at Stark) of Spare hit my account today; I was 22nd on the wait list. And I was going to read less trash this year….