Quote:
Originally Posted by QuantumIguana
The word fungible doesn't mean what you think it means. It does not mean that there exists no other substitutes. It is about the degree interchangeability. It's not an either/or situation. A bushel of corn is highly fungible, because it is interchangeable with any other bushel of corn. If someone can't get a copy of Twilight, there are other books that they might reasonably select, but that doesn't make it non-fungible. It isn't generally interchangeable - not just any book will do.
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We had a rather lengthy exchange on the matter in the copyright thread. My understanding is that a set of items are fungible if they can be freely exchanged for one another. The basis of such an exchange is a common function that the items serve, or a value that is placed on all of the items. For example, if I wanted to start a fire, most books would be fungible. Thus fungibility considers not only a set of items, but also the function that they are serving.
I think that it fairly clear that there are circumstances in which books are fungible. Moreover, I think that there are many circumstances in which a particular set of books are fungible with one another.
Getting back to the Twilight example, if the book could be exchanged with another book in a given circumstance, then those books in that circumstance are fungible.
I think we are just getting caught up in applying the term in a more general sense.