Free to read all you want in-house, but if you want to take some home, you gotta pony up for that card.
Fortunately the card was usually cheap.
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.
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.
I’ve never heard of a library card costing anything. But I guess I’m not really surprised that happens somewhere.
It’s always America… :)
I’ve also never paid for a library card and I live in the US, so it’s clearly not always America. In fact most commenters here are noting they are paying small fees in euros so it seems this trend is common in Europe more so.
Where I live, it’s free for school children and people on welfare etc. For university students it’s 5€ a year, for adults it’s 10€.
So really not a lot, but you also get access to a lot of other online services for free (encyclopedia, streaming service for older and arthouse films, magazines etc.)
Late fees are just there to keep you from keeping a book or whatever for long periods of time, because then other wouldn’t be able to read them.
My library charges 1€ initially to cover for the cost of the card, then it’s free to use no matter what income, age,…
the library where i live gives you 1 card for free, but you have to pay a dollar if you need to replace it
In my library the card was without charge, they just needed to know who had what book.
You pay taxes that pay for those libraries so…
Money well spent.
You paid for them without even knowing it. You were forced to do it. I don’t like that
A significantly larger chunk of my taxes are being used to subsidize military killing machines for wars outside my country. I got complaints, but a library ain’t one.
Do you like streets you don’t use to exist?
