Quote:
Originally Posted by Barty
2. The more people do this, the more likely the publishers will want to stop selling ebooks to libraries altogether, or to come up with ever more cumbersome DRM schemes, and everyone ends up worse off.
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Since when do publishers sell ebooks to libraries?
I do know that they lease a small number of titles of current books. But the model of the hardcover book, where a library can purchase it outright and then lend it out one patron at a time to an unlimited number of patrons does not exist with eBooks.
I still read more library books than eBooks, partly because of a tendency to get interested in a subject and then look for the best-reviewed relevant non-fiction books. Hard copy books are great for this because libraries engage in collection building where they get the best books on a given subject and keep them in their collection for decades. eBooks as presently constituted are a distraction from the traditional value of libraries, and you certainly are not doing your library a favor when you take one out.
See this article with the over-provocative title "Why are you for killing libraries:
http://www.librarything.com/blogs/th...ing-libraries/
Libraries are traditionally democratizing institutions, and I like this. The government should not be subsidizing a form of reading which lower income people are unlikely to be able to take advantage of.
By the way, this post is not mean as some kind of sly defense of breaking encryption. Only as a defense of traditional librarianship.