From reading cards and 0-dong borrowing cards in Ho Chi Minh City...
Ho Chi Minh City is developing a draft Project on public library fee rates, which proposes a level of 0 VND/card/year for reading cards and borrowed cards at 3 public libraries of the city including: Ho Chi Minh City General Science Library, Binh Duong Library and Ba Ria - Vung Tau Library.
According to management agencies, revenue from card fees currently accounts for a very small proportion compared to library operating costs. In the period 2022 - 2024, the Ho Chi Minh City General Science Library collected about 350 - 424 million VND/year from this item; Ba Ria - Vung Tau Museum - Library only collected about 6 million VND/year, while Binh Duong Library stopped collecting fees from 2022.
If card fees are removed at three provincial-level libraries, the estimated budget only needs to compensate about 405 - 406 million VND/year. Meanwhile, the Ho Chi Minh City General Science Library has from 14,000 to more than 21,000 card registrations each year in the period 2022 - 2024.
These figures give a different perspective on the value of a library card. A small fee may be insignificant for many people, but for children, students, or low-income workers, it can still be a barrier. When the fee is removed, what is received is not only a few hundred thousand dong of budget compensation, but an opportunity for more people to access books.
More importantly, not collecting fees also helps the library reduce procedures related to collection, payment, finalization and receipt management, thereby allocating resources for expertise, supplementing resources and improving service quality.
This is a notable change in management thinking: Public libraries must first perform the function of serving the community, instead of considering card fees as a source of income.
... To "zero-dollar libraries" from the community
If Ho Chi Minh City is considering a widespread free policy for public libraries, Hanoi has had private and community models operating in the spirit of "0 VND".
Prominent is the free library named D Free Book at 128 Dai La Street, Hoang Mai Ward, Hanoi. No deposit, no fee and no target audience, that is the special operating rule of D Free Book, a community library in Hanoi. More than just a free reading space, this place is spreading reading culture every day and sowing the seeds of kindness with trust among young people.
Established in 2017 by Hoang Quy Binh - a former student of Hanoi University of Science and Technology, D Free Book was initially just a small corner of a rented room with only 300 personal books. With the desire to share knowledge, the student of that year decided to open his room so that young people could access good books without any expense.
With the motto "Books lying still are dead books" and striving to revive reading culture in modern life, the project's founders have constantly called for community participation to enrich bookshelves.
After a long journey of diligently sowing seeds, the project has now reached out with 2 spacious facilities in the Capital, owning a fortune of more than 10,000 diverse books from literature, history to life skills. This diversity has turned D Free Book into a familiar "information charging station". This place not only retains book lovers, but is also a quiet place to study and nurture reading habits for many generations.
To maintain a completely free open space throughout the week, D Free Book is operated by a team of volunteers with enthusiastic hearts. They work unpaid, diligently every day to receive invaluable values for the community.
According to regulations, each reader is allowed to borrow a maximum of 3 books (or 6 comic books) with a term of up to 35 days. The most special point of this process is that there is absolutely no binding on papers or deposits.
Coming to D Free Book on a weekend when the school library was closed, Tran Thi Thanh Thuy (a student in Hanoi) said that she was extremely surprised by the scale and quietness of this special bookstore.
I learned about the library online and decided to visit to find a place to study. The quiet space and the diverse number of books here make me very excited. The library has many useful books that I had never known before. Now, on weekend afternoons, I often come to the library to focus on studying and reading books for entertainment" - Thanh Thuy shared.
Not only is it a learning space, for many people, D Free Book is the origin of positive changes in life. Attached to the library for the past 6 years, Luong Thi Thu Van (Hanoi) confided that the initial fate brought her here was thanks to free guitar classes organized by the library.
Not only D Free Book, the "Mother's Balcony" model - a private library on Vinh Phuc street (Hanoi) is a well-known address.
From a family bookshelf preserved through many generations, Ms. Nguyen Thu Huong has built a space with more than 10,000 books, including Vietnamese and English books, many genres from science, history to literature. The library is open from 7 am to 9 pm daily and is free for readers.
Ms. Huong said a very simple but suggestive sentence: "If books are only on shelves, it's no different from dead books.
The above models show that to develop reading culture, it is not necessary to start with really large projects.
A library can start from a few hundred books in a room. A family can open their bookshelf to the community. A locality can decide not to charge a card fee. A business can donate books and support reading space. A person who has finished reading a book can give it to someone else.
When small actions are connected, the book access network will be much broader. Young people today have too many entertainment options. If libraries only require them to "come to read books", the attraction will be difficult to compete. But if libraries become a space for meeting, learning, creativity and sharing, books will become the center of a community of knowledge.
From Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, stories about free libraries are together suggesting a message: To multiply reading culture, first of all, books must be made more accessible.
When a child can enter the library without worrying about card money; a student can borrow the book they need without depositing; a family can find a place to read books with their child on weekends; a worker can have a reading point near their residence, the distance from people to knowledge will be shortened.
If each residential area has an additional reading point, each family has an additional open bookshelf, and each library has a wider door to the community, reading culture will no longer be a story of the library industry alone. It will become a social habit nurtured from very small things.
