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Originally Posted by JSWolf
I was looking at one of the libraries I belong to. I was looking at their new eBooks and there was a total of 137. Of that 137, all of them were out. This is eBooks bought withing a 7-day period from when I was browsing. I think we are beginning to see longer wait times because of extra users.
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Very true. And it may get worse no matter how large the library selection might be. I read today that with a Seattle library, there are about 25,000 Kindle books available, and 24,000 ePub. I've seen that Salt Lake County libraries have 13,500+ Kindle books and 10,800~ Adobe or ePub books.
The number of Kindle users is now pretty massive and financially-struggling libraries will be unindated with orders for popular books. The libraries buy a title, deliverable in any of 3 formats. Now Kindle users will be taking up copies that would have been available in the past only to ePub users.
How will the libraries handle that? I see librarians interviewed saying how excited they are about all this, but I guess they'll need to buy more title licenses because twice as many people will be requesting book loans in their libraries.
The waiting-time might be helped by several library systems announcing their solution was to go from 21 days to 7 days or 14 days. Some are strict on that, and some are just change the default loan-time to a smaller one.