February 21, 2008
CoCo County Bart Stations to Receive ATM-Like Library Book Machines
Starting sometime in April, library books will be available at Contra Costa County BART stations via "ATM style lending machines." A new program called Library-a-Go-Go, along with the Contra Costa County Library, will allow BART riders to simply swipe a card, select a book, wait for said book choice to drop, and then return the book after the rider is finished reading their literary gem. The machines will "hold around 400 popular and best-selling titles, both fiction and nonfiction, and will be accessible during Bart hours."
Sweden, Norway, and Finland already use these nifty little gadgets. The Pittsburg/Bay Point station is first up to receive the literary lenders, which "cost a little under $100,000 each."
Read more about it here.
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I like press releases that don't give you information like dates. I like those a lot.
And how much would it cost to hire a semi-retarded shlub to man a counter where he/she handed you one of four hundred books you wanted to check out, instead of automating the process for $100K?
I think that's a great idea. Well played, Librarians!
But, yeah, it would have been nice for them to come up with some sort of date to expect this to happen. So bureaucratic of them.
I hope SF will follow suit...
Wait, we're supposed to RETURN the books? Oops...
For $50K I'll hide in that machine and make beep-beep-beep noises before dropping the wanted book into the bin.
Please. As someone who rides BART twice a day, I wish they would take that money and use it to clean the interiors of cars. I don't think that the lack of reading material for passengers is such a big problem that it needed to be solved with expensive robotics. And if the CCCL doesn't have more pressing problems to solve either, then they need their funding cut and redirected toward something more useful.
Can they just stock those with half pint refills of schmirnoff? A book isn't going to help me forget that I just paid $4 to be stuck inside a stinky metal tube for the next hour... just saying.