A little's enough
Nov. 18th, 2012 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupI'm a huge library user. If you wish to verify this fact, I'm on goodreads under the same username I am here. Otherwise, take my word for it that I probably start two or three books a week (although I don't finish all of them), and being able to do that for free is enormously beneficial to me.
My current locale doesn't do this, but my hometown and college town both charged you for holds and interlibrary transfers. I disliked this, but my dislike came from a general enjoyment of not paying for things. Books are expensive, getting them for free freed up money for hookers and blow, but I couldn't really argue that the county *owed* me free books, or even that my reading Dragon Riders of Pern was a public good.
I did of course realize that these fees, while nominal to me, were genuine obstacles to others. What didn't occur to me until a friend pointed it out is that when you introducing something that was a rounding error to the middle class but significant impediment to the poor, you shift usage of the library towards the middle class and away from the poor (defined in this context as "people for whom 25 cents is a significant impediment to reading, excluding people like my dad who could totally afford it but are extremely cheap"). Which is really the opposite of what you (should) want.
In my ideal, libraries are for the people who genuinely can't afford the books, but with some happy spillover benefit to the middle class in general and me in particular. Helping the poor is the justification for the capital costs, although once those are paid we can look at benefits and revenue from others to justify increasing spending on the margin. Arranging incentives such that the libraries are only used by people who have money means we are essentially subsidizing the middle class, which is all the worse for the fact that some of the money is coming from the poor who are now locked out. Taking money from the poor to subsidize the middle class is not okay.
Luckily my current city doesn't charge for holds or transfers, so I don't have to get super outraged over it. I donate enough money to (I think) cover the marginal cost of my usage, although definitely not the capital costs.
My current locale doesn't do this, but my hometown and college town both charged you for holds and interlibrary transfers. I disliked this, but my dislike came from a general enjoyment of not paying for things. Books are expensive, getting them for free freed up money for hookers and blow, but I couldn't really argue that the county *owed* me free books, or even that my reading Dragon Riders of Pern was a public good.
I did of course realize that these fees, while nominal to me, were genuine obstacles to others. What didn't occur to me until a friend pointed it out is that when you introducing something that was a rounding error to the middle class but significant impediment to the poor, you shift usage of the library towards the middle class and away from the poor (defined in this context as "people for whom 25 cents is a significant impediment to reading, excluding people like my dad who could totally afford it but are extremely cheap"). Which is really the opposite of what you (should) want.
In my ideal, libraries are for the people who genuinely can't afford the books, but with some happy spillover benefit to the middle class in general and me in particular. Helping the poor is the justification for the capital costs, although once those are paid we can look at benefits and revenue from others to justify increasing spending on the margin. Arranging incentives such that the libraries are only used by people who have money means we are essentially subsidizing the middle class, which is all the worse for the fact that some of the money is coming from the poor who are now locked out. Taking money from the poor to subsidize the middle class is not okay.
Luckily my current city doesn't charge for holds or transfers, so I don't have to get super outraged over it. I donate enough money to (I think) cover the marginal cost of my usage, although definitely not the capital costs.
