Quote:
Originally Posted by abookreader
My problem would be that fee charging for access to those books in effect locks out the lower income members of the community from accessing those materials. This would be in direct disregard to one of the primary parts of the libraries mission, which is to provide access to reading material to all local patrons regardless of their income levels.
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Well, that's the
public library mission, I suppose. But that's only one model for lending libraries, and perhaps it doesn't work well for ebooks. For one thing, in order to lend ebooks to "lower income" people, it would probably be necessary to lend EBRs as well. That gets a little problematical - although these days, LIP seem to have tvs & dvd players to play the dvds the public library lends out here in Chicago.
I can imagine an ebook lending library model which charged for lending ebooks, either on a per checkout basis, or via a monthly or annual subscription, ala Netflix.
Libraries remind me of newspapers in that they are print-era institutions which curate and mediate information, funded by someone other than the specific consumer of the information (i.e., by advertising in the case of newspapers and taxes in the case of libraries.) We all know what's happened to newspapers as advertising has migrated to television and the internet. so what happens to libraries as the taxes dry up? The answer may well be that the ultimate consumer has to pay the tab.
Whether and to what extent this leaves the LIP out in the cold remains to be seen. When the government stops paying, maybe private citizens will step up to the plate, as Andrew Carnegie did in the past.
I tend to think that the public library system worked only because it was inefficient (in economic terms) so that it did not materially impact bookstores, and in fact supported them by growing and sustaining readers. But epublishing removes a whole lot of inefficiency from the system, such that in the digital world, libraries become a competitor to bookstores, and in a world where the physical bookstores themselves are at risk, I'm not at all sure that free digital public libraries are such a good idea.
Personally, I don't use the local Chicago library for ebooks, because the Overdrive system is so annoying, and the ebooks actually in the library are pretty worthless based on my tastes. But I'd probably use a well stocked Netflix style library, based on a small fee & ease of use.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if someday, Amazon didn't just start lending ebooks out as well as "licensing" them. They have the infrastructure in place. Or what if B&N came into Chicago, and partnered with the public library here to provide ebook access on some kind of time limit plus fee basis? Could work, I think.