Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
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.
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 copying it, would than not be censorship of any form?
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This would hold water if 1) all those 280k people wanted to read the book which is doubtful at best 2) they only had 90 days to read it which is again doubtful at best.
Your example with a library not displaying how many copies would also mean they don't allow you to place holds, and enter in ebooks to their database that they do not have. Since they do allow holds, and don't enter books they don't have displaying copies is irrelevant to the end user anyway, and only serves to ease things on the libraries end. To further clarify, lets say a library has 4 licenses, the minimum wait time is 1 week remaining, that's all they
need to display to inform the patron when the book will become available, the rest are superfluous. Likewise if they had only 1 they'd simply display the wait time for that. Finally if they were so wasteful with their time to enter books they had no copies of the wait time would be infinite.
But again, that's not how they display information. And it's in their own interest to keep displaying information in the way they do. So postulating them changing it is irrelevant.
Your final example is also flawed since the limitation on copies is itself limited. And limited in such a way that given the vast time after it it's an insignificant amount.
Yes the publisher is restricting the number of copies the library can have, the same way Apple restricts the number of iPhones you can buy on the day they release (or at least they have in the past), and then relax as time goes on and demand eases up. I'll grant not an apples to apples situation since we're dealing with digital goods vs physical, but Apple is hardly censoring the iPhone. Nor is the publisher censoring their ebook.
However the publisher also makes their ebook available to everyone and you can buy as many copies as you wish.