Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Inspired by the Guardian's piece on the row over library fines, I'm going to try to argue in favour of the proposition that charges for overdue books are a good thing.

When a person checks an item out of a library, they establish a contract between themselves and the institution. The contract offers the borrower exclusive access to the item for a limited period and in exchange imposes a duty of care on the borrower. As part of this duty, the borrower is required to look after the item and to return it on or before a given date. Should the borrower fail in their obligations, they should reasonably expect to attract some form of censure.

If we assume that the goal of punishment, in this case at least, is to communicate the wrongness of the borrower's behaviour, its not clear that fines are necessary. Instead, it may be that all the borrower needs is a stern word from the library or, as was apparently the case in the Soviet Union, being named and shamed in newspapers.

But the communicative process may not provide a sufficient prudential incentive to return one's books. For example, a person might fully intend to return their books on time, only to fail on the day because the certainty of a telling off failed to motivate them more than their desire not to go out in the pouring rain. But when a relatively small fine is added into the mix, it may provide just the motivation needed to persuade them endure the rain and return their books on time. The fine also provides a clear channel for the library, as an institution to express its disapproval of the late borrower's actions, freeing individual librarians from the need to explicitly carpet someone for their tardiness.

Perhaps the current system isn't perfect — certainly, any revenue generated from fines should not be used as an excuse to subsidise taxpayer funding — but it works for me: on the one occasion in the last decade I've had to return overdue books, I felt so fantastically guilty at having to pay my twenty pence, that I vowed never to let it happen again. And so far, it hasn't.

So I think that library fines aren't necessarily a bad thing. Set at a relatively low level, they provide a decent prudential reason for persuading people to return books on time and the charging process itself provides the institution with a simple way of conveying disapproval. Applying the fines equally may result in some books being returned even when there are no readers waiting, but this is simply an unfortunate cost of fairness. And maybe there will come a time when the threat of censure works well for everyone, even without the threat of being fines, but until that happens, I suspect we're stuck with things as they are.

A surprisingly serene day today after the Menagerie's internet connection broke in some as-yet-unexplained way, causing all other work to be abandoned. Rather than languish in front of my computer, I spent most of my time reading and enjoying the tranquility of the library.

Sometimes I wonder if my parents are living in a house that has been turned into a library or a library with a few beds stashed in the few unbooked corners.