Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic: The title hits home. When I was young, books were a luxury item. Less rich people just used the library. But the library had a strict 7 books rental policy. Not enough for the avid reader that also needed a small programming reference library. So I had 3 steady, occasionally 4th, library card pool from family members to keep my bookshelf operational.

View on HN

I also remember libraries having a very small limit back in the day, so I was surprised to find out that in the Bay Area libraries typically allow up to 100 books per card!

Mind blown. How can that work? I assume book rentals follow the usual Poisson distribution?

In addition to printed books, my library has audiobooks, dedicated audio players for single books, DVD movies, video games, audio books on CD that count in your rentals. For new digital releases when they see the queue get overly long, they license more copies.

Maybe it's a way for the libraries to have more overall books/deal with crowding, if a fixed % are out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com