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Hi Frances We did consider seriously how much we should charge for the reading groups reservations. The reason we went with £2 in the end was as follows: Our reading groups survey indicated to us the number of members of the groups. 7% had fewer than 5 members, and 59% had between 6 and 10. As our online reservation fees are only 50p per item we felt that if we priced the group fee too high at this stage people would see no reason for their group to be linked with the library and would just request books as individuals. Thus our contact with them would be lost and we would not get any of the benefits of that community contact with them. Also, we were reducing the loan period from 13 weeks to 6, which we felt was going to be a blow for a lot of groups, so we wanted to minimise the impact of introducing the new charge at the same time. This new charge will now become part of our standard charges and will be reviewed accordingly. We are to some extent testing the water and will monitor if the charge has cost us reading group borrowers. However, after building up the contact with these groups we wanted to tread carefully. We have also made savings in our whole process of reading group loans as we are no longer having to maintain a separate collection of stock, which was costly, with a member of staff whose role it was to look after it. The whole process has been brought into the day to day activities of all libraries and all library stock is now available to everyone. Craig