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Comment by cryptozeus | Hacker News Reader

Some of the comments here are surprising. Imo people who come to library to read books want to be a good member of the library. By assuming they will stop returning books due to no fees is just assuming worst of them. I was surprised when my county in California decided to get rid of all the fees. I had 5 books due and all my fees were forgiven. I donated way more to the library just because of this change. I was worried that how will they now afford to run the library effectively without fees. I guess people who can afford to give donations should do that and take the financial load out of the people who cannot afford. There is something freeing about this. Education and knowledge should really be free for all.

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It's the medieval mentality, like there is a shortage of paper or something. The amount of it wasted in my office alone could supply every library in town. I'd be happy if a kid stole 10 books from my shelf and read one.

The most expensive thing in the world is people that are unemployable, ignorant, need support and vote for the politicians we deserve!

There should be like a national policy where kids get paid for reading, every penny spent will payoff 100X.

Books are valuable and scarce goods.

Something tells me if you opened an online bookstore, you could make a nice little business...

There are successful businesses selling water, air and sand. The correct conclusion is not "everything is scarse"

I'd assume that most people would do their best to return books, but my concern would be that a tiny handful of bad actors could hoard books and ruin the system for everyone else

This doesn't seem to have happened, which is super encouraging! But I'm also very surprised!

I agree that most want to be a good member of the library, but what do you do about a few bad actors?

(I haven't read the policy but I guess there must still be some restrictions to prevent abuse.)

You buy replacements. It's not fundamentally different from books getting generally worn out. Lending limits on categories of items effectively upper bound the cost of each individual bad actor to not prohibitively expensive.

Also I bet they deny check out until late's are retured, maybe with some buffer for lost or cant return it yet but will. I dont see it mentioned in the article.

Smart move imho. Bravo CPL.

I bet the same result happens elsewhere independent of assumptions about desire to pay.

Generally you are blocked from renting more books if you do not pay full amount of lost or not returned book after some point. My library allows 10 books at a time so if I don’t return due books then they put my account on hold.

How many books do you imagine they are going to keep/loose, a hundred? Paper is cheap, have a backup. Books in copyright are a bit more difficult, but still.

Fees are not a significant part of a libraries revenue

Yeh I guess that is why it was easy for them to experiment with it.

Yeah, it's really quite interesting in general the internally inconsistent view of human nature people will hold in to satisfy some higher order bias they have about how the world does or should work.

On top of all these they have free ebook programs where you can rent a book from your local library for free. They are really doing everything they can to support free materials. Its up to the people now.

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