Quote:
Originally Posted by SeaKing
In a lot Socialistic countries especially in the Nordic countries where they have long fed off the fatted calf of the North Sea Oil Reserves (which are now disappearing) they had a lot of these kind of laws to protect (i.e. fatten "artists"). Artists being authors, painters, etc.
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These kinds of policies are different in form - but not in effect, nor even in terms of money spent - from similar policies we have to support the arts in the US.
I mean, if you really want to talk about socialism, the US has a huge library system in which books are bought from artists and stored in air-conditioned rooms, where they can be borrowed by citizens for free.
And there are a lot of other forms of government support for the arts, too, (although generally not directly buying art and storing it away.)
WRT the Swedish E-lib system, I'm not convinced it is as bad of an idea as it seems at first. If a library buys, say, 10,000 e-books up front, they are out that money regardless how many people use the books. Which could be a good or a bad deal. With the Swedish system, they aren't out any money until people check out a book. Again, which could be a good or bad deal. One advantage of the Swedish system is that it permits the library to inexpensively acquire less popular books.
To see whether this is a good idea or not, you need to look at the overall expenses - is the large amount paid for the soccer biography offset by lower amounts paid for less popular biographies, for example.
And it's also relevant that many libraries in the US buy more than one copy (err, license) of/for an e-book that they think will be popular. My library bought 16 licenses for the newest Lee Child novel - that's probably $400 or so, or 130 Swedish checkouts.
Of course, the Swedes may be paying too much for their books (or I may not understand how their system works). But it's not clear that that's the case based on this example.