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 heard of a library card costing anything. But I guess I’m not really surprised if that happens somewhere.
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.
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.
when i was a kid, we lived on the ‘wrong’ side of a county line, and thus, in a different township than was part of the nearest (7 miles away) public library’s “service area”… tax sources, jurisdictions, and all that jazz. it was outrageously expensive to get an ‘out of area’ library card… at least that’s what i was told. we never had one.
so our library was a tiny rural library that was housed in an old one-room school house. it was open only a few hours a day, a couple days a week; instead of the 7 days a week at the public library in town (an original carnegie library).
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.
Back in the day, the library was much much more essential. It was the only access to advanced knowledge. I remember driving (riding) long distances to get to a better library for school projects when I was a kid. It was like the required Odyssey one did just to find an address to an outdated article that half mentioned what you needed but had no citations. It is hard to believe how isolated information was back 30 years ago. Big libraries were like a religious holy site of opportunity back then, choir, clouds parting, golden rays, Morgan Freeman, and all.
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?
