Discussion
Public library ebooks are becoming a thing of the past.
Libby is bleeding the libraries to death, sucking tax money straight to private equity. (KKR owns it).
For that cost, you get very little, beyond hockey-playing-vampire romance novels and other dumb bestsellers.
If your experience with Libby is still good:
1) You live in one of the few remaining cities in the US with a well-funded library
2) It won’t last. Libby is a parasite that’s indifferent to its host’s long-term survival 🧵
My kinda-sorta, back-of-the envelope number is that one borrowing of an ebook costs the library system on the order of five or ten times as much as one borrowing of the physical book.
A common contract for an ebook via Libby is a two-year rental that allows 26 circs, for—depending—something approaching a hundred bucks. That’s a few dollars per circ.
Hardback books cost about a third that much and circulate many more times. Probably tens of cents per circ or better.
Librarians, being good public servants, will tell you to borrow books without guilt. You’re a taxpayer, or the child of one, and library material is for you; in any case, the library can advocate for realistic budgets based on what the patrons actually use.
I think this is a kindly lie. Library budgets are shrinking, never increasing, and the opportunity cost of these huge ever-growing Libby contracts is severe. They’re strangling everything else the library might do.
Should you not use Libby? Go ahead. You already paid for it.
I just don’t use it frivolously. I try not to use Libby to borrow what I might not actually read/listen to/use. I try to make sure I have the time to read what I take out.
I use the preview feature.
The point is, the marginal cost to the library of an additional circulation of an ebook is significant, not trivial, up to (if the library decides not to renew the expensive license) loss of the ebook to other borrowers. So be mindful.
Incidentally this is why the library’s collection beyond current bestsellers and other high-circulation books will always be unavailable for circulation electronically, unless we come up with a less exploitative model to pay for it.
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