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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Showerthoughts
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I've never paid for a library card in my life.
There's no way card fees or late fees could ever fund a library. I'm pretty sure those are just policies enacted by people who either don't understand or don't care.
The late fees are usually miniscule and they act as a deterrent to keep people from holding onto the same book for an extended period with zero repercussions.
The library card itself is mostly meant to make sure the people borrowing books are known for purposes of late fees etc. It's nothing else than an account registration, the only reason it sometimes costs money is because the library is meant to attract only a small specific area of a city (the others have their own libraries) but due to a lot of communter traffic they're worried about X-times the amount of estimated people getting books from this particular place.
So they make the cards cost a tiny amount (I think I paid €5 before) so that you won't just want to get a card from every single library in your city.
Some US libraries have a reprint fee if you lose it. But I have never seen a library that charges for the initial card.
I am not sure what you are saying here.
And I don't know how stuff works in America, but where I live with most public offers like libraries, public pools, graveyards and stuff like that the amount that the user has to pay is almost never enough to completely fund that thing.
It is still good to demand a certain price, since that increases the appreciation of this public good, decreases wasteful or careless usage and obviously helps to lessen the necessary subsidies from taxpayer money.
I am pretty sure the people enacting those policies understand that perfectly well.
If you would demand so much money from library users to fund the whole library, then noone would use it and a valuable public good would be lost.