Inter-library loans

[fivemack]

An ILL through Cambridge library used to cost three pounds, and this was a magical level: instead of paying £2.76 to Amazon for a book from a 1p-seller who charged the standard postage, I could pay £3 and the library would take the book away afterwards.

I suppose that this should have struck me as strange, since an ILL implies moving the book from one library to another and back and second-class postage for a book is £2.36 each way; but maybe you could cut a factor two off that by posting books in batches, it doesn't matter to me if an ILL takes two weeks.

I went in to collect an ILL today and was told that the fee had gone up to five pounds. I pointed out that this stopped them being competitive with Amazon, and the librarian said 'but it costs us thirteen pounds to process an ILL'. Librarian salaries are about £20k per year, so with overheads this is saying that it takes most of an hour of librarian time plus postage for a second-class small packet to do a single ILL.

This isn't a problem for me; I can switch to buying the books from Amazon, and I can donate them to the library afterwards if I want the library to take them away. But I'd have used the service less if I'd known it was so expensive to provide.

Comments

[simont]

I've just this month got around to signing up for a new-Cambridge-library card, and I expect to feel much the same way about it as this. One of the first lot of books I borrowed at random turned out to be an obvious mistake (volume 2 of a series I hadn't read volume 1 of – I looked at the spine and the back cover, but that wasn't obvious from either and was only mentioned on the front cover), so I immediately got some value out of not having spent money to make that error :-)

But the obvious utility of a library for me is that you can grab random stuff off its shelves that you didn't already specifically know you wanted. I'm not sure I'd order things on purpose with as much abandon as that.

[rmc28]

I was up until 1am this morning reading a library book that I picked up on a whim "because it looks pretty" and I thought I'd read something else by the author that was bearable. I'd never have bought it (especially in my new Must Reduce To-Read Pile mode), which would have meant I missed out on a great few hours reading.