Quote:
Originally Posted by OrangeBlossomBaby
Five books per day is costing the library $280 per day? That's $56 per book. Maybe you should all get together and petition the County to discontinue the Hoopla service entirely. That's a lot of taxpayer dollars wasted. You can BUY an e-book from Amazon or Google Books for less than $20 and in most cases, less than $10, and when you're done reading it, it's still yours. No limits, daily or monthly. No need to reserve it - you buy it, it's downloaded to your device, and you can read it whenever you feel like it.
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When I originally called the library, I was told over the phone that Hoopla was limited to five books a day for the entire county. This did not seem right so I sent several emails to the library and finally got the answer that the budget is $280 a day.
(I expect that the person who answered the phone did not know the hoopla budget. I was at the pinellas library last week and asked the librarian about the hoopla budget and she had no information on it.)
$280 a day is a little over $100,000 a year. The cost seems to vary depending on whether it is a movie, an ebook, or an audio book. And some publishers appear to charge different rates per item so it is impossible to calculate how many items can be checked out per day. If everyone checked out books, we could probably get more books per day than movies.
I doubt that the library is paying $56 a book. At least I hope they aren’t!
As for buying a book, how often do you read books more than once?