New York Public Library ends all late fees

Late fees: pay small fee, borrow books.

No late fees: pay for replacement, borrow books.

I think the best system would be something like a $200 fully refundable deposit, plus late fees (deducted from your deposit account). Account must not drop below $180 due to accrued late fees, or use of library is suspended.

If you don't return books for an excessively long period, like six months, their value is automatically deducted from your deposit on top of accrued late fees; then you may keep the books.

You just come back and get a new library card under another name...just keep taking out more books and selling them on ebay; that will become a cottage industry. suckers, i mean taxpayers, will just have to make up the difference.

As mentioned elsewhere, this seems like the same discovery Netflix made back when they were mailing DVDs: it is more effective to incentivize returning by making it a tit-for-tat trade than by fining non-returners. Sure, this approach might end up with people never returning items if they never want to get more (move away, etc), but that's a relatively uncommon situation for a library, and doesn't seem to have become a major problem for Netflix.

More subjectively, I also think that charging a replacement fee to patrons that truly cannot return the book feels more fair than charging a per-day late fine until you hit replacement. It's more of a direct indemnity sort of situation.

So I stopped being a customer and went to a competitor.

My first reaction was to disagree with this new library policy. But if poor people want to read books and forget to return them, it doesn’t help to punish them. Sometimes we just have to accept that a certain percentage of society can’t or won’t do socially responsible things all the time.

Late fees do have one benefit – what if someone has a strong interest in one particular book (or a handful of books, which fits within their borrowing limit). Maybe it is a textbook or reference book for a course they are doing. Maybe they are just an obsessive person. They want to borrow a book for far longer than the standard borrowing term, or even indefinitely. They don't care if doing so blocks them from borrowing any further books, because they are more interested in the book(s) they have currently borrowed than in any of those.

Before, if they didn't return it, they would start getting late fees. Some people may be so intent on possessing that book, they may consider the late fees worth it – viewing it as a rental fee rather than a fine. But others, the late fee may be enough to convince them to return it, whereas merely suspending their borrowing privileges would not.

And this can make a difference to other library users. Ever wanted to read a book, or even borrow it, but you can't because it is out on loan? Abolishing late fees runs the risk of making that negative experience much more common than it was before.

My recollection from the last time I returned a library book late (decades ago) is that the fee was a certain amount per day late. In that case even if you cannot pay the fee there is still incentive to return the book as soon as possible because that stops the fee owed from growing, meaning it will be easier to eventually pay it off and get your library privileges restored.

I don't really agree with the angle taken by the Burbank and NY public libraries that somewhat depicts fees and fines as unfair and only penalising the poorest, which sounds like a ideological stance. Those fees penalise those do not follow the rules, and that has nothing to do with being rich or poor. People who use public libraries responsibly never have to pay any of those fees.

I also think it's fair to charge a replacement fee for lost material (which are also abolished according to the article).

Now, if they have actual data showing that these fees don't work and an alternative approach improves the return of books, especially return on time, then by all means go for it.

I also see from an article that they eliminated fees for not returned ("lost") books which looks like just an open invitation to steal books from the library. Maybe I'm too cynical but I don't think it'd work very well.

Well, it's not all that obvious in a world where "just add a monetary incentive" is the go-to policy change for just about anything...

Great that some people think beyond that though.

1. AFAIK colleges can't send transcripts to people without your permission, so it's unclear what she's trying to prevent.

2. If she's trying to get a job and the place she's applying to cares about GPA, then chances are they're not going to accept the "I can't get a transcript because I didn't pay a 5 cent fine" excuse. If anything people would consider it a red flag. What type of a responsible adult can't pay a 5 cent fine?

3. similar applies to applying for graduate school, except that they're probably even more strict about transcripts.

They say it increases return rates overall. If that's true, it's good, but let's try to understand why, and what secondary consequences there might be.

Nothing was stopping those people from returning the books and walking out without paying their outstanding fines. They could use the exterior book drop (don't libraries still have those?)

The idea seems to be that the experience of going to a library with fines outstanding is a kind of intrinsic aversive punishment; you feel guilty slinking into (or around) the library with overdue books, so you try to avoid that by not returning the books. You might even try to hide the books in your house so you don't see them and aren't reminded of your guilt. But it's not the doing away with the fines that matters, it's changing the social dynamic so that nobody ever feels guilty; it's no longer a faux pas not to return books when you should, because there's no longer any punishment. The interaction becomes entirely positive: without fines to think about anymore, you queue all the books you want to read, when one or two become available the cost of checking them out is returning the books you've read and have delayed returning.

A typical reason someone might get stuck in library fine purgatory: they queue up a bunch of books, none are available before their old books are due back, and they simply didn't have motivation to go to the library solely to return their existing books. Once they have a fine they don't want to pay and they can't check out the new books, there's no motivation for them to ever return. Historically, there would be: people tended to have a sense of duty and shame so that they'd do the right thing and return the book even if it made them feel bad and they couldn't afford the fees and couldn't use the library anymore, but now I guess nobody has that kind of super-ego anymore.

Removing fines encourages those people to re-engage with the library system, but I expect it messes with book queues and makes them worse.

Libraries were already struggling to budget book acquisitions. Increasing demand by changing policies so more people use the libraries will only make it more difficult to fund book acquisitions to meet demand.

Items are declared lost after they have been overdue for 30 days and a replacement fee will be charged to the patron account.

You need to accumulate $100 in fees before they suspend borrowing. It all seems very fair to me.

You can't check out new books until you return the ones you have. So people have a strong incentive to return books if they want to continue using the library.

By removing fines, you get good press and an easier message to convey. Really, the library just wants the books back, the fines aren't meant to generate revenue.

If someone's going to just take 10 books from the library, they'll take them regardless. Just like grocery stores, a librarian isn't going to pursue you if you set the alarm off; the alarm's there to remind honest people that they forgot to check a book out.

* Late fees disproportionally affected the poor

* Dropping fees brought with it an uptick in library attendance

* Libraries spent more money collecting the fees than they received from the fees

[0]: https://www.npr.org/2019/11/30/781374759/we-wanted-our-patro...

People can already do this if they want. Nothing stops you from checking out the max number of books and never coming back.

Most libraries have discovered that late fees discourage people from returning books when they forget, lose them, etc. The longer the book is out the higher the fee. The higher the fee the more likely that person will decide library membership is a lost cause and decide to never return (or use someone else's membership).

Eliminating late fees increases the overall rate of books returned vs stolen.

This would probably end up costing them even more than just losing the books and buying new ones and in the process creating a new bureaucracy of injustices.

Their policy works like this (just looked):

14 days overdue: library card blocked

28 days overdue: library card blocked, billed replacement cost of overdue items

42 days overdue: your account sent to collection agency + $10 collections fee, the latter of which must be paid to unblock your card.

You can also extend how long you're checking out the items online by a decent amount, like 2 or 3 extensions I think. You can hang end up hanging on to what you've checked out for several months before it has to go back, as long as you're staying on top of it.

Similar but slightly different: what stops you from borrowing a few books and then keeping them, not for forever, but for an unreasonably long time?

Physical books are a limited resource, and others might like access to them. (It's the same reasoning as for parking meters and 2-hour parking: make sure someone else gets a turn.)

Without any time limit on books, the only thing motivating you to return a book is that you need some other book, which might happen weeks later or maybe 6 months later.

Replacement fees, which still exist.

> Seems like instead they could've created a program which verifies inability to pay fine and waves them for people who legitimately can't pay it

That would cost more than eliminating late fees entirely, which other public library systems have proven works to improve returns. More expensive, less proven, what's not to like?

The library would then probably have to process and store sensitive financial information on those who apply for fee waivers in order to determine who legitimately qualifies. I'd guess that the costs of doing that in an adequately secure manner would be more than the fines they would get from from the people who applied for waivers and were rejected.

From an article on Chicago's new system:

| Chicago's cardholders have seven days past the due date to return items before their card is blocked from use. In the case of lost materials, patrons must pay to replace the book or provide a new copy of the same edition.

|

| "We're really putting the focus on the physical object that needs to come back to the library rather than the revenue stream — that really wasn't a revenue stream," Telli said.

It seems like fines are not very effective at getting people to return stuff on time, but they are effective at getting people to never return things and stop going to the library once they have a few late books, because they can't afford the fines.

To directly answer your question, they can just ask people to please be respectful and try to return things on time, and they can stop people from checking out new items if they have too many overdue ones. The problem isn't big enough to warrant stronger measures than that.

I would be curious how this pans out over time and whether libraries would change course of this causes a problem. Given that the change was pushed through in the name of equality, there's probably not much that would ever cause it to be undone.

Hopefully it works well.

If our library switched to this policy I would definitely use it and probably get the books back in 4 weeks. The "encouragement" would be that I want to read another book, and I don't need to pay a fine.

As it is I just buy books on kindle so I can read them at my pace.

That’s a big download, BTW

I'm assuming your account is closed and the books should be returned. As a kid, I was told you can drop local library books into the mail and they'd be sent back to the library.

Presumably, the replacement fee gets charged if they aren't returned, but collecting is difficult. Same as what happens now, mostly.