Quote:
Originally Posted by MrsJoseph
Just because you cannot/will not walk more than 2 miles does not mean it isn't within walking distance.
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I can walk two miles. My husband can't. For myself, I'd just have to decide if a library visit were worth the hour's round trip walk (and I have the energy for that) on weekend, because they're not open after I get home from work. For my husband... if it's not accessible by vehicle, he's not going. A two-mile walk would take him about two hours and he'd be exhausted at the end of it.
My teenagers, OTOH, could happily wander off to a library two miles away and get ebooks. Except that Overdrive is for 18-and-up users only, so it doesn't matter if the library's available to them. (I'm sure plenty of parents and probably some libraries ignore this. I have no idea why so many people think it's reasonable to ignore the age limits of the TOS, but not the "no cracking DRM" parts of the TOS.)
While I could see a reasonable argument for "ebooks, like other library resources, must be accessed through the physical library," that's a very different proposal from "demand is too high, so we're taking away an accessibility feature that people have come to rely on, and restricting ebooks to people who can get to the library itself when it's open."
Had library ebooks always been "you must visit the library to check these out" (ostensibly to be able to check ID, or something like that), it could remain that way. But removing access that people already have is different--and it works out as a way to punish the poor, disabled, and overworked people who are most reliant on libraries for access to books.