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Comment by stbenjam | Hacker News Reader

I find the limits at ny libraries to be exceptionally high. Why does anyone need 25 digital books checked out at a time? That’d probably help with waitlists too.

I love Libby, I want to see it survive.

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People read for reasons beyond pleasure. I might be doing a study or comparing authors, I might be reporting on history or researching someone. I might be doing a comparative analysis.

Ten checkouts seems low enough that it's likely to get regularly cause problems. 100 checkouts seems too high. So start bisecting. 50? Almost certainly too high. 25 maybe reasonable.

They also might have p90 checkout rates and found that 25 is a data driven choice. Librarians are smart people.

Also, if you have kids then you check out tons of books at a time.

Get 'em a card! There's no minimum age!

I got mine in elementary school... My "signature" is in all caps with backwards letters!

To put a concrete number on "tons" - when I was a kid we'd frequently check out 300 books at a time, and the reason the number was 300 was that library cards had a limit of 100 each, and my mom, my dad, and I each had our own library card. Any time I was home sick from school they were all used to check out books for me; and yes, we would go through all 300 of them. Kids' books are pretty short.

How often did you go to the library?

probably a couple times a week or so?

I suppose this is true, but feels like the exceptional case. And why not have a reasonable policy that allows someone to appeal their hold limit and have it subjectively approved. I am a fairly prolific reader and I only have 7 holds spread out across 3 libraries. I seriously doubt 25 is the p90 here.

You’ve never been behind a parent and two kids at the automated book return? I have seen kids with 30+ books each. Usually the parent has a bunch too. I’ve also seen people with dozens of videos too. Usually older folks who may not be able to enjoy reading as much anymore or maybe enjoy the background noise in an empty home.

Hold limits are different to borrowing limits, and I would guess that most people borrow a lot more than they put on hold.

I mean it depends how much you read. If you read 1 book a month, sure. If you read 4 books a week and it's mostly relatively popular genre fiction, you can't just wait to get through the waitlists, you have to pre-plan your reading and sign up for all the books you plan to read for the next 3 weeks ahead of time.

I like having huge wait-list so that I can put entire series on hold (like wheel of time), maybe I'm manipulating the system a little too much.

Libby/Overdrive are a big part of the problem as they're VC owned https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshit...

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