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Originally Posted by Giggleton
We live in an age where if you can connect to the network you can have access to the entire literary history of our culture.
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This is a whole other subject, but most of the books in a large public library are not available as eBooks. There tends to be a big gap between the public domain era and 1990 or so.
But maybe I have it all wrong. What you mean by "our culture" may not include a lot of what interests me.
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Originally Posted by Giggleton
How is downloading a text via a torrent file theft, and checking out the same text from the library not theft? The answer is it is not. The only thing separating the two is a small fee paid to the creator.
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How much does the author get of the $120 Random House has been charging libraries for a big new non-fiction eBooks? Enough for a decent lunch at Noodles and Company. I'd be pissed if you deprived me of that. I'd even be pissed if I were an editor or agent who could have had a side dish. It's true that Random House doesn't get $120 from each Overdrive download, but they may get a dollar or two, and it adds up.
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Why not figure out how send these fees to the creator per each torrent download, instead of per each library checkout?
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When I check out the book from the library, it is out. Most of the stuff I read lately has a wait list. The longer the wait list, the more likely someone will buy rather than wait. Torrent downloads do not reduce the number of copies available and thus have no such positive sales effect. To fairly compensate for this, my tax money will have to pay a much bigger fee for your torrent download than what I already pay in taxes for library support.
You live in perhaps the one country (USA) least likely to ever do what you propose. In the real world, where government is contracting, not expanding, your choices are to pay, to wait patiently for a library copy, or to go the sticky fingers route.
Now, if you pledge to avoid torrents until your scheme is enacted, our differences are small.