Yes very true. We’re all happy to have Hoopla in my system it’s just so hard to plan around because it’s not a flat cost and we know there are though choices to make because we’d love to be able to offer more and better items through them but that only drives higher costs. I just wish they stopped the silliness of needing to purchase “new copies” so often. It might not be all on them, i know distributers are still very weird with all of the e-resources but it’s still silly.
I don’t have the same level of knowledge on the costs of Kanopy mostly because it doesn’t garner the same level of attention in our system so it isn’t a topic that’s come up. But I’ll check in on that. Hoopla came up cause we have cut the borrows down from 10 a month to 6 and it’s now only for county residents not reciprocal borrowers as well. And we often don’t have some of the best items available because of the additional costs.
Hoopla doesn’t have a wait for their items but your library might not have the best items. Ours just made things like the Lord of the Rings books available for the next 3 months since we have some budget available and chose to use it that way. But those popular items cost a lot with Hoopla so most libraries probably don’t carry them.
As a Librarian, Hoopla is great except for the fact that the company running it charges crazy prices and it’s starting to become a real problem for library systems. Every thing you check out has a rental fee and then they make us repurchase the item after every 20-30 borrows. Compare that to regular books which can have 100+ borrows before needing to even be mended.
It’s wonderful and I’m glad it exists but it’s getting very costly.
Dropping all this money on coffee and still has enough to pay the 1. Sounds like this coffee is a real Game Changer. Thanks for the awesome write up.