[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by DNSB

A rather interesting claim. If an ebook and a pbook cost the library the same, the cost of the ebook would be a fraction of the pbook price? What is the basis for that statement? The cost of library staff is going to decline? The cost of their physical plant is going to shrink?

Unless we take a short-term POV, of course it is. Does your union have a contract that says staffing can ever never decline, even by attrition, when their jobs are automated by Overdrive? Or that branches with reduced numbers of patrons will never consolidate? That seems to me politically impossible.

Originally Posted by DNSB

You may also have noticed that today's libraries do much more than warehouse and loan books though that is a major portion of their raison d'être.

It depends on the library. It may be that libraries in Queens NY are more the modern equivalent of immigrant settlement houses than they are book warehouses. Maybe narrative book support, in a Queens library, only takes a third of its mission and staff. But where I am it is much more. I'll therefore stick to my rough implied estimate, in the third paragraph of #75, that 2/3 of physical library costs are attributable to pbook warehousing and lending support.

Originally Posted by DNSB

One item from the IFLA and Sharon Day from the Edmonton Public Library can be found here: Libraries Can't Get Enough eBooks.

Very interesting.

I see some contradictory ideas in this link.

-- There needs to be a balance between needs of libraries and publishers

-- There's no need for a balance because book publishers are irrationally fearful

-- We realize that if what we want happens non-fiction publishing will be so devestated as to requre direct government suppor.

My bullet item immediately above is the only sense I can make of how this next passage fits the rest of the article:

In the meanwhile , the Canadian Urban Libraries Council (CULC) has encouraged the Government of Canada to seek opportunities beyond the Copyright Act to support the creation and sharing of Canadian stories and ideas.

Here's my modest proposal. Canada should pass the kind of copyright changes implied by your link. Then we'll see what happens to the creation and sharing of Canadian ideas over the next couple of decades. My prediction is that books about whomever is your current Prime Minister will become almost unreadable. But if I'm wrong -- if it really looks like there are at least as many wonderful books about Canada's past and present published before and after -- only then should other western countries consider said proposed destruction of the big five model.