What's So Hard About Returning Library Books?

KimbaFoxNatsume

KimbaFoxNatsume

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Something I don't understand...

My county library system has an online catalogue you can search through. If a book is checked out, it will tell you when it is due. It's pretty common for me to see children's books that are very overdue.

Today I was at the library, waiting at the counter to get change for the copier, and the woman in front of me had a son who owed $18 in fines! I believe the fines at this library are 20 cents a day per book, $1 per DVD.

Why are people so irresponsible that they can't bring them back or renew them? I would say that people like that shouldn't be allowed to have library cards - I believe if you owe at least $5 you can't use it until you pay it down under $5 - but then again the library must make a small fortune in late fees.
 
Every person has different priorities something like returning a book for a lot of people is about as low is it gets on their list.

Plus the more stuff you have going on in your life the harder something like that is. I have depression and some day just don't want to do anything. You never know what they have going on in their life.
 
DanielW said:
I wish I was lucky enough to have a library near enough to me. My community has an annex. You can order books there and wait a week or so for them to be available, but with travel, and the wait time I usually just either buy used books and re-sell them or get things on my ebook reader.

It is irresponsible to have that many overdue fines, but I tend to blame the parent unless the child in question can drive or get to the Library independently.
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Yeah, I blame the parents too, obviously if the kid is like four or five they're not really in charge of getting books back...

Too bad you don't have a library nearby, I have like five within a five mile radius of my house. I don't live in the city, but an area where most of the towns are close together.
 
Well, I'm a nanny and there was one situation, I planned to go to the library on our only free time slot and then the mum booked us into a french lesson. but she then also didn't return the book on the weekend. I think it took me 3 or so weeks to finally find time while the library was open to get there.
with children it can actually be really hard to get shit done and if the late fee doesn't hurt it's even harder
 
I'll admit to being guilty of running up late fees at my local library. Back when my kids were little, wife and I were incessantly checking out children's books and DVDs from the library, and they ended up all over the house. We were bringing them back constantly as well, but it often happened that we'd forgotten one or it had fallen behind the toy box, etc. There were even a couple of times where we had to pay the replacement cost of the book or DVD.

But we did pay our fees as soon as we became aware of them and we did our best to get things returned. Life was just a little crazy back then!
 
In my area, we have library book drop offs and libraries here have book slots that allow people to drop off their books anytime. So that means you can return them in the middle of the night or when you get off work when they are closed. It's nice to see library book boxes where you can just drop them in there like you are mailing something. Here, all libraries are ran by the county so you can drop off the books at any library in the city because they are all owned by the same library and they have different locations. That makes it very easy for everyone and it would be very hard to not return a library book unless you don't have a car and it would take you over an hour to drop it off because of pubic transportation and walking distance. You might not have time for that. Plus at night when the bus lines might not be running at all or they run every hour and it's not work returning a library book for that. I drive so it would only take me a few minutes to drop it off and go home. It would be real inconvenient if I had to go downtown to return library books because it's hard to find parking and you gotta pay to park and it would take longer to get there by foot and commute so I dropped the books off at a local library close to my house that is about two miles.
 
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