An oft-cited example of the more user-centric library service is one in which items are delivered by post to my door rather than (at best) taken off the shelf for me and held at a library branch for collection.

Sweeping aside the moans of the “but we don’t do that sort of thing” brigade, real issues remain around the cost and staff effort involved in managing such a process inside individual library branches. Even were the requester to be charged for this value added service (a not unreasonable presumption), the process remains infrequently required, labour intensive, and fundamentally quite inefficient. And inefficient means expensive.

We could - and should - consider possibilities to do this collaboratively. Maybe every single library shouldn’t need to concern itself with printing postage labels and the like. Maybe bigger libraries could carve the work up between themselves, delivering a real benefit to the sector and its users, whilst achieving economies of scale that increase cost effectiveness.

Maybe, too, that model of clicks and bricks fulfilment, Amazon, could lend a hand.

Writing on his blog yesterday, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels announced the arrival of ‘Fulfilment by Amazon‘;

“In completely self-service way you can send items to our warehouses and we will take care that the items get shipped to customers once they get sold. But the service is not limited to products sold on Amazon.com. And we handle the returns if necessary…

There are also major advantages from this program for our retail customers; if a 3rd party seller is using Fulfillment by Amazon its products will now be eligible for free shipping promotions and for Amazon Prime.”

There’s clearly potential here, but much to explore and understand better. Amazon’s offer to handle returns is presumably predicated on the presumption that this expensive process will only infrequently be required. Libraries would doubtless expect that it be required every single time. Also, the economies of scale only truly kick in when a supplier ships items in bulk to Amazon, for Amazon to store and ship as required. I can’t help feeling that most libraries might raise concerns about clearing their shelves and packing the contents off to an Amazon warehouse on the offchance that someone requests a copy.

It’s worth thinking through, though. Can Amazon (or UPS or FedEx or NetFlix, or…) help libraries to do something that they appear incapable of doing themselves beyond limited pilots? If we agree that we need to offer library equivalents to these commercial services, do we really need to reinvent all of the infrastructure they’ve built?

Personally, I’d love my library books to arrive with the painless convenience that my DVDs already do. And I wouldn’t mind paying for the privilege. For those who don’t want to pay, there’s nothing stopping them from popping down to their local library in exactly the way they do today.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, Libraries, Library 2.0, Talis

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