Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
That's because the licensing terms are different. When you buy an ebook licence, you're buying a licence for your personal use only. When a library buys an ebook licence, they're buying an licence to lend it to multiple people.
It's not "crazy" at all. The library is simply purchasing a licence for 26 loans.
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Actually, the concept of license verse sale can be fairly fuzzy, especially when it involves the end consumers rather than a contract between an artist and a publisher. Publishers have been asserting that they don't sale with regards to digital content, they license since the 80's starting with computer software. The court decisions have been mixed and seem to depend more on archaic legal hair splitting rather than any obvious dividing line.
For the most part, when a consumer buys an ebook, it's not just a license, but rather a sale, so they can't restrict the number of times you can read the ebook, or any such thing limitation that would be valid if it was a license. The question of the use of DRM to restrict the reading to a specific reading technology is a different issue.
My guess is that this particular situation is a license verse a sale won't be determined unless someone takes them to court (i.e. expensive) and even then it will be very dependent on how the judge involved in the case views it rather than any hard and fast legal doctrine.