Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
I was missing a lot of variables.
There are building maintenance and repair costs. Utility bills. Fire insurance. And forgone property taxes, since our town's library is at a prime location. All these would be much higher if the library was expanded to house paper replacements for eBooks.
While both eBooks and paper books require an acquisitions librarian, staff salary and pension costs associated with physical books are much higher.
Then there are legal costs such as if a patron slipped and fell on a loose carpet in the stacks. In Connecticut, this might be balanced against the legal costs of suing publishers to try to get your eBooks for less. No such balancing needed in Pennsylvania.
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Not to mention that the more paper books your average library has the more the structure of the building has to be supported in order for the building to remain standing. Some yrs back the old clinic building in my town was purchased by a couple and donated to the city to be a new library building (the old one had become too small) and construction crews were many months in preparing it for the task. It wasn't just that interior walls had to be taken out to open up the space. The floors hadn't been constructed with the object of supporting as much weight as hundreds of paper books, shelves, etc. would add to them. So modifications (I don't know the details) had to be made just in order to be certain that it would be safe for people to enter the building. At present they are doing some additional refurbishment (making quiet areas etc.) but even before that we had Cd's, Records, Microfilm viewers, Computers, books etc. all of which add weight onto the structure.