Re your second para
I could never understand why we had date due back on any but the heavily in
demand books. When people finish they return, a few wont, but they don't
now. And fines are appalling, and not worth the bad will it shows and the
effort.I worked in a large county once that only charged fines to the non
landed gentry or important people with posh names or homes. I did it the
other way round and was almost sacked.
You are so so right., change the model, update, be of this era and century,
make the technology lead to improvements, not mimicking the old stuff.
f
Frances Hendrix
Martin House Farm, Hilltop Lane, Whittle le Woods, Chorley, Lancs PR6 7QR,
UK
tel: 01257 274 833. fax: 01257 266 488
email: [log in to unmask]
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary Porter" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2010 4:03 PM
Subject: Re: Lovefilm for books
The LoveFilm business model is wonderfully simple - helped by fact that DVDs
are light, cheap to post and fit through letter boxes, unlike books. If you
check out the LoveFilm website you can see their direction of travel
though - a move away from posting physical items towards digital downloads -
the best route for libraries too?
Aside from the home delivery aspects the other interesting feature of Love
Film is that they don't have fixed return dates, unlike ourselves in
libraries, optimising customer convenience. We need to look at this in
libraries in my view. Reducing the number of items a customer can have at
any given time would prevent hording and allow customers to return items
when they no longer needed them. The incentive to return stuff being the
ability to borrow new stuff. I feel that when we intro IT management systems
back in the 80s we really just automated the brown issue system - fixed loan
periods etc - rather than changing the model which ICT allows for. Customer
convenience is the key to attracting and retaining people.
Regards
Gary
-----Original Message-----
From: lis-pub-libs: UK Public Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Linda Berube
Sent: 26 August 2010 15:50
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Lovefilm for books
Surely whether this works in an individual authority or not rather misses
the point, and especially when the targets appear already to be library
users. I'm not saying that I have worked out all the economics, or dare I
say business model, for such a service, but the aim here is that as a
national service some economy of scale can be achieved while we may be able
to reach out to people in our local communities who feel that public
libraries have nothing to offer them. Also, partnership with experts in
delivery such as Amazon may increase exposure.
I am curious about LoveFilm's ability to generate a revenue stream with this
kind of business model--how many people have used the service? Which type
of subscription is most popular? What about stock that isn't returned?
etcetc
Co-East looked into home delivery years ago, ot just postal but through a
delivery service. As with the Wiltshire example, there were concerns about
delivery cost and stock retention.
|