BigEd,
We are looking into a few different options relating to business rates. We really don't want to be using donations to pass money back to the council for the privilege of running a not for profit library when the council won't.

We need to look further at the idea of selling donated books. It can be a useful source of income, but we don't want to to compromise the main work of the library, which is lending books for free. We have a few different ideas about how to progress this, but at the moment we are more focused on getting the lending library working after 24th October.

And donation have DOUBLED since I posted this morning, thanks particularly to a few very generous donations. Total at £4,600 so far. I'm not going to give a running total every day, but today has been a good day :-)