HOW MUCH????

[erastes]

I just got back from the library, and I picked up a text book BEFORE WILDE which is a text book about “Sex Between Men in Britain's Age of Reform”

They had to get it from the British Library, which cost me £2.50 for an inter-branch transfer. This is bad enough, but hey, the petrol has to be paid for I suppose.  Then, they present me with a disclaimer to sign.  They apologised and said that the British Library always does this with all their books.  Fair enough, I suppose – BUT – I had to sign away that if I lose or “damage” the book – I will pay ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY NINE pounds to replace it.

HOW MUCH?

The books can be purchased from Amazon for £29.40.  So PLEASE, British Library, explain to me what the extra £100 is for??  I’m damned sure you don’t pay full price for books, I’ll lay odds that you pay less than the Amazon price, and even sending Beryl up to the bookshop to buy a new copy BY FOOT is not going to cost that much. 

BLOODY OUTRAGEOUS.

I feel a letter to the Times coming on.

*disgusted of Norfolk* - - - -

Comments

[crawling-angel.livejournal.com]

I think Beryl would have to crawl up the road for that price!

[mylodon.livejournal.com]

Ah yes. That's the 'hand written in gold ink on Jonny wilkinson's underpants copy' then.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

you'd think it was hand illuminated on the skin of twenty slave boys.

[mylodon.livejournal.com]

Blimey, if it was, it'd be worth the money. I'll go halfers...

[spindriftdancer.livejournal.com]

Er, but only if the skin is still attached...

[spindriftdancer.livejournal.com]

I suspect that it might be a processing and deterrent fee. If someone likes the book they could just say that they lost it... and then it would take time and effort on the part of the library to replace and re-catalogue it.

It's a *MAJOR* pain in the butt when someone decides not to return a book.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

It doesn't take one hundred pounds to replace a book!

[spindriftdancer.livejournal.com]

Oh, believe me. It's pretty annoying. Plus, there's the salary of the person/people involved in trying to get it back. If they spend an hour in total thinking about that book/ trying to get it back, that's already about twenty to thirty pounds at least. It's never as simple as the physical replacement cost ;p

[iulia_linnea.livejournal.com]

That is outrageous. The only vaguely logical reason for such an expense that I can think of for the expense is the labor involved in replacing the book, but still. o.O

[iulia_linnea.livejournal.com]

And I'm going to go find cheap coffee now so that I'll be awake enough not to repeat myself. *snorts*

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Yes - filling in a form or adding to their online order page would be terribly time and money consuming. I'm just horrified. God knows why i signed the damn thing.

I'd like to know their definition of "damaged" too - it's entirely subjective and since it's not defined, they could say any marks on it were done by me and invoke the disclaimer.

artgh.

I have it in a plastic envelope now.

[iulia_linnea.livejournal.com]

Shog just called me to say that when he turned in his books this morning on the way to work, the librarian wanted him to pay a fine for damage to one of them—that was damaged when he checked it out! It even has the library's "this book has wear & tear" stamp on it. He pointed this out to the woman, but she'd already entered into his account that he'd damaged the book and didn't know how to remove the notation. A likely story. Now I have to go down there to correct this, which I can do because I know the big boss librarian (who is reasonable and knows the computer system).

I don't know with whom to be more annoyed, the assistant librarian, or my husband (who used needing to get to work as an excuse not to deal with the situation right then and there, which meant leaving a $25 fine on his account). *rolls eyes*

[spindriftdancer.livejournal.com]

Ew. That's not good.

[iulia_linnea.livejournal.com]

It wasn't, but I've got it sorted out now.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I know how he feels - my library once complained that there was cat hair on one of my books which was embarrassing in front of a queue of people, and when i took a book out a few weeks ago, I got it home (it looked fine) and opened it to find that the first 30 pages were all loose and had fallen out and were tucked cleverly in.

I sent an email off to the library immediately, and took a copy with me when i went to drop it off. grrrrr.

[spindriftdancer.livejournal.com]

Cat hair? Sounds like British librarian-types get a little more bent out of shape than us colonial-types ;p

[iulia_linnea.livejournal.com]

Could she not have just brushed off the book? o.O

Tucking up the loose pages and re-shelving books isn't fair. The closest I've come to that sort of thing is getting home and finding all the picture pages missing. They'd been neatly cut out, so I expect someone made prints of them, and the librarian was completely reasonable about it when I brought the book back at once. People do this all the time, apparently. *smites them*

[beckyblack]

Ooh, now I'm paranoid. My library has self service kiosks. What if I returned something that they then put a notation on my account saying I'd damaged it?

[iulia_linnea.livejournal.com]

Make friends with your librarian; it helps with that sort of thing. :)

[spindriftdancer.livejournal.com]

What pisses me off the most is when a beautiful, brand-new book comes back smelling so bad that it makes me want to puke when I flip through the pages looking for damage. It's not 'damaged', but it's almost impossible to make it not puke-worthy again. Even putting it in a freezer for a couple months won't get rid of the smell.

Or then there's the "No, it was like that when I took it out!" and the pages are all cockled, and still damp from when it got dropped in the bath. Yeah, right.

When you encounter this *at least* once a week... it's not uncommon to lose patience(:

[beckyblack]

I had one like that once. Strewth it wasn't even anything terribly rare. I've never lost a library book in my life, but I treated that one like it was briefcase full of unmarked cash. I returned it as soon as I was done, so that I didn't have to have it in my possession any longer than I needed to!

[lb-x.livejournal.com]

The library I work for currently charges a flat rate of $150CDN per a lost book. Because it's a flat rate, I assume it is to cover more expensive books which would cost a lot more than $150 to replace but to also be a deterrent against actually losing or damaging the book.* Sometimes the librarians negotiate with patrons who can't afford the fee, and if they bring in a self-purchased new copy of the book, the actual fees involved with labour/supplies to recatologue come out to only $40CDN.

*The library doesn't have a drop box because kids kept putting fire through it. Now people seem to think that if the library is closed, hanging a bag with the books on the door handle overnight is perfectly acceptable. They never seem to think that someone might steal the books!

Also, I suspect by damage they mean something along the lines of "your cat used it as a litter box/dog ate it/child destroyed it". All of which happen way too often imo. I accidentally dumped an entire bottle of water on a brand new book from another library, and never got charged a cent.

In short, not fair if you honestly lose the book. But a lot of people lose books for stupid reasons they had the power to avoid. I think the fee is probably because if there weren't severe repercussions for losing or damaging the library's books, people wouldn't care what happened to them. But tell them it will cost hundreds to replace, and suddenly they care a lot more.