- It happens almost every month that it hits the ceiling the last two weeks of the month and then you have to wait until it becomes a new month, says Älmhult's library manager Anette Ekström.
According to the Swedish Library Act, municipal libraries must provide free lending of e-books. But e-books are much more expensive than regular books for municipalities.
Unlike "regular" printed books, the lending e-book costs the municipality money per download. A cheap e-book can cost SEK 20 for each download. While a new and popular e-book can cost up to 89 SEK - or more.
Different rules for lending
And in order to keep the budget, the municipalities have solved this in different ways. We have previously reported that you can borrow a maximum of two e-books a week at the library in Växjö. Even in Älmhult, you have a limit on the number of books you can borrow, but if the budget is exceeded, no one can borrow any more books that month.
Älmhult's library allocates as much money for e-books as for fiction and audio books, which is SEK 140,000 a year. But because loans from e-books cost the municipality more money, they cannot offer unlimited loans from e-books.
- When a new format becomes popular, we need a larger media grant and in this municipality we have not received anything extra. We got a small sum in the beginning, I think it was 20,000 SEK. But we have scrapped the other SEK 140,000 from other parts of the budget, ”she says.