This is completely outrageous. I am a book buyer today because my mother took me to the library when I was younger. Not only do I find new authors whose books I then might decide to buy but I also read lots of other things which I might not want to actually own. I suppose some kind of lending limit makes sense to publishers but it makes no sense to me. You can't really compare to p-books which eventually are damaged beyond use; e-books don't get damaged by use. If you must however have lending limits 26 seems crazy. In Cleveland, where I live my library has a fairly large selection of e-books but it also a large number of borrowers so having to replace licenses after only 26 books would price them out of the market. Is this what H/C wants? Someone said that they don't think e-books should be part of library inventory because ebook readers are the province of people with the discretionary income to afford them. Maybe that is H/C's true goal. Maybe they really do want to make ebooks only accessible to "certain" people.
And geographic restrictions -
I thought the thing that made the internet so wonderful was less restrictions on people not more. What difference does it possibly make where I live if I want to borrow a book electronically as long as I have internet access. It's not like a p-book where if I take it out of the jurisdiction they can't get it back. With Overdrive the book is only "active" for the borrowing period and then I can't access it anymore.
During bad economic times more people use libraries then ever. Why in the world does H/C think that restricting access is going to make economic sense. If people are using the library because they can't afford p-books and e-books cost the same as p-books (or almost), which people can't afford, and you restrict access by libraries .... (can you say circular logic?) ... seems like shooting yourself in the foot to me.
I can feel Andrew Carnegie turning over in his grave
