Free to read all you want in-house, but if you want to take some home, you gotta pony up for that card.

Fortunately the card was usually cheap.

  • XTL@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    44
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I’ve never heard of a library card costing anything. But I guess I’m not really surprised if that happens somewhere.

      • WxFisch@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’ve also never paid for a library card and I live in the US, so it’s clearly not always America. In fact most commenters here are noting they are paying small fees in euros so it seems this trend is common in Europe more so.

      • MrLuemasG@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        I have yet to see any kind of public library in America that charges for a library card, and I live in a red state.

    • frenchyy94@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      Where I live, it’s free for school children and people on welfare etc. For university students it’s 5€ a year, for adults it’s 10€.

      So really not a lot, but you also get access to a lot of other online services for free (encyclopedia, streaming service for older and arthouse films, magazines etc.)

      Late fees are just there to keep you from keeping a book or whatever for long periods of time, because then other wouldn’t be able to read them.

      • elvith@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        My library charges 1€ initially to cover for the cost of the card, then it’s free to use no matter what income, age,…

    • Lux@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      the library where i live gives you 1 card for free, but you have to pay a dollar if you need to replace it

    • ares35@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      when i was a kid, we lived on the ‘wrong’ side of a county line, and thus, in a different township than was part of the nearest (7 miles away) public library’s “service area”… tax sources, jurisdictions, and all that jazz. it was outrageously expensive to get an ‘out of area’ library card… at least that’s what i was told. we never had one.

      so our library was a tiny rural library that was housed in an old one-room school house. it was open only a few hours a day, a couple days a week; instead of the 7 days a week at the public library in town (an original carnegie library).