Quote:
Originally Posted by Ankh
I do apologize for the way how this topic turned political. It was my assumption that the political potential of the topic is self-evident.
Be it as it may, it seems to me that almost every person who expressed his opinion was talking about a change, even if it was only a minor "fix" to the way how public libraries operate today. It seems to me that we are in violent agreement: a change is upon us.
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So, I agree and I think all of us do that a change is inevitable. However, you can't really have this discussion without getting political.
Making it easier to loan/check out library books will have the consequence of damaging the commercial (Amazon, BNB, ...) marketplace. I leave it up to your political beliefs to decide whether that is good or bad.
Paying authors for each checkout leads to a discussion of how much creators should be paid for their work, and whether that payment should be done through the government or through the market.
All of this begs the question of how taxes should be used.
Now, some of us will argue one side of each of these issues, and other will take the opposite view. However, I don't really think we can have this discussion without bringing politics and political beliefs into it.
The nature of this issue is that the view that each of us holds on the 'right' way for this change to occur will reflect our own political orientation. It is not an issue that is based in some universal principle of e-reading [grin].