It looks to me that, if the 26-lend limit is adopted by all publishers, library budgets will dry up with the looming, ongoing economic crisis and they will soon run out of eBook credits for popular books unless they ante up more dollars to renew. Budgets being what they are, and being cut as they are now and most certainly will be in the foreseeable future, I suspect this artificial lending limit will soon cause a decrease in eBook availability in library listings. Hopefully that loss of revenue will trickle back to the publishers and force them to realize that there never was a lend-limit on pBooks. Alas, short term profits trump long term planning.
My own little local county library was able to afford an online subscription service only because of a generous benefactor who was able to pay the fee for the current year. Next year may well be different and we could lose the service. It's not cheap, and it's not in the budget.
I wonder if publishers are trying to make it inconvenient, costly and difficult to market eBooks because it deprives them of their huge profits in the pBook market. I've noted an increase in activity on book catalog and review sites such as Goodreads and LibraryThing where users are offering pBooks to other readers online in an exchange format. Aside from a bit of shipping, this is an excellent way to share pBooks and avoid having to purchase a DRM'd eBook for each title you want to read.
The process of sharing with DRM'd eBooks is illegal, of course. Consequently I have purchased more pBooks, against my will and better judgement in aiding and abetting the publishers, and have begun to create a few networks for trading pBooks. This effectively reduces my eBook purchases due to the inability to share them with non-family friends, the so-called Amazon "lending" procedure notwithstanding.
As money becomes tighter and library budgets are slashed (i.e. "let 'em go buy a book if they want to read"), consumers will gravitate to the least costly alternative - sharing. These are the things that drive the illegal removal of DRM, and place library patrons in a bind. The pBook sharing networks seem to be growing as library eShelves are shrinking. Given budget woes, what library would pay for online services that keep patrons out of the library when they can maintain an adequate shelf of pBooks that retain customer contact and can be loaned indefinitely? And what library wouldn't gladly accept hardback gifts of pBooks for free from patrons when eBooks can never be transferred?
