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Originally Posted by MGlitch
The one isn't censorship, the library still has access to the material just in limited quantity.
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Is censorship purely absolute, or is there a functional level?
My library system has around 280k active users (defined by them as having been 'seen' in the last two years).
Is providing a single copy of a book to 280k people functionally different than proving no copies? In either case the vast majority of the people will not be able to read the book.
If libraries didn't show the number of copies they had, just a simple flag of whether the book was currently available to read or not, there would be no effective difference between having 0 and 1 copies available, as far as the vast majority of users could tell.
With two week load periods, 6 or 7 people would be able to read the book, or 0.0023% of the library membership. Even if everyone read it in a single day and returned it, it would still be unavailable to 99.97% of the library membership.
If <insert restrictive society of your choice here> didn't ban reading <contentious book of your choice, eg. the Bible> absolutely in their country, but instead allowed only a single copy to exist, and prevented any method of duplicating it, would than not be censorship of any form?
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Further, the library does not "need" multiple copies, they want multiple copies. They are perfectly capable of lending out a single copy, as is evidenced by the fact they've done it with physical books for ages.
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That seems an ... odd argument, seeing as libraries can buy as many physical copies as they wish. They can only lend out one physical copy at a time, as they can only lend out one eBook licence at a time. But they can have many physical copies, but are only allowed to have one eBook licence.