Comment by woadwarrior01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by woadwarrior01 | Hacker News Reader

The public libraries in Ireland decided to eliminate fines early this year and it seems to have had the opposite effect. In some cases, people don’t seem to return books at all. I’d placed a hold on a book, a couple of months ago and it looks like the people who’d borrowed the only two copies of the book in the system haven’t returned it in over 8 months now.

I‘d initially thought that eliminating fines was a great idea, but since then I’ve changed my opinions on it.

Perhaps a better way to go about it would be to have a month (or 3 months) long jubilee when people could return the books they haven’t returned in years without any penalties and then switch over to a more reasonable and less punitive fine structure. Having zero fines implies that there will always be people who exploit the system. Lower but non-zero fines will be closer to the optima, IMO.

I don't think you're correct here. In my own (anecdotal) exerience it seems to me that returns are up. In fairness books got lost or borrowers failed to return them before the change to abolish fines as well.

Did you speak to a member of staff and ask for a replacement book to be purchased?

I did speak to one of the librarians at my local library and I'll be writing them a letter detailing my suggestions, soon. Based on the comments here, I suspect a decent middle ground of a solution would be to not lend books to people who have books overdue. That'd probably fly better than re-introducing fines.

The public library system here Ireland is by far the best I've seen, and it's a bit discouraging to see people exploit a public good.

You base your opinions on your own individual experience, which proves nothing for the whole system.

In fairness, I don't think the article proves much for the system either. A single month of data, when there is pent up demand for people to return books and a publicity campaign, virtually guarantees this month will be very different from all the others.

In fairness, my library system has a fairly steep fine system and I've gone 8 months without returning a book before.

Anecdote vs. anecdote.

In Seattle, the late fees have been eliminated. But they'll still charge you replacement cost for a lost/ruined book.

How does that work? If you just never return it, is it assumed lost after some time?

In reality, that might be the case here as well. All the OP article is saying is that there was a ~2.5 increase in returns just after the penalties were eliminated. That might be 2.5x a very small number, and it might also come with a longer term increase in book theft.

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