Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with publishers

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/libraries-struggle-afford-demand-books-seek-new-state-108035200

by notRobot • 2 years ago

269 175 2 years ago

abcnews.go.com

stop50• 2 years ago

In Germany the price is capped. Everyone has to sell a new book at the price that was set by the author. This also applies to libraries, for the usage libraries have to pay 3-4 cent per lending to an organisation that distributes the money to the authors(the organisation depends on tge type of the print)

rightbyte• 2 years ago

That sounds like a price fix, not a cap?

gandalfian• 2 years ago

Yeah he means fixed. It's a common way to stop bookshops being squeezed out. They abolished it in the UK in the 90s which combined with internet sellers emerging led to the odd effect that book prices didn't really rise for 20 years.

StefanBatory2• 2 years ago

They want to introduce that too in Poland and it's an awful idea.

If you set a price that's obligatory to sell book for, it won't become cheaper, it will go up.

And I just won't buy it. I see exactly zero reasons why I should care for local bookshops. I'm not made out of money and I won't buy stuff from them only to keep them alive.

StefanBatory2• 2 years ago

To clarify myself - for example, when new book releases, it has suggested price of 60 zł.

Online I can get it for 40. In physical shop for 60; if it's there. Because most likely it won't be. And I can't order, none of the bookshops nearby do this.

Why should I be happy at unified price if all it means is that I will pay 1/3 more?

bluish294• 2 years ago

The argument in publishing industry (about papers and textbooks) is that if you cannot afford to buy/rent at the current market value then you still can use a public/university library to get it. This became actually more of a cliché than an argument over time.

Now with a significant portion of textbooks (and books in general) become mainly E-books, the industry limited library capabilities and required pay per lend and restrict number of simultaneous lends. For papers, many universities canceled access contracts because it became too costly. Not to mention that smaller universities couldn't afford most of these subscriptions anyway.

Publishing industry really needs more regulation. Free market hardly work there.

beezlebroxxxxxx• 2 years ago

If I buy an ebook, can I give it "used" to a library? I would like to, but I don't even know if that's a thing.

(Let's assume for the sake of the question that the book I buy is also DRM free.)

CuriousCosmic• 2 years ago

For textbooks? No. And nowadays a lot of them also expire after a year since by then the student likely no longer needs it.

It's a really gross industry

harshreality• 2 years ago

In theory, maybe. In practice, no.

In theory, a publisher could sell you an ebook, declare that you own it and can transfer it (like a digital right of first sale) as long as you don't keep a copy.

In practice, it would be a hassle for libraries to verify that permission, so even if you had such a book, they might say thanks but no thanks. Essentially all ebooks are sold under license that each book is for your use only, and no transfers are allowed. Because ebooks are licensed, and not sold complete with a right of first sale, retailers can set whatever conditions they want depending on who they sell to, and the market can't arbitrage. That's why libraries have to pay more for an ebook they're allowed to lend 10 times than you have to pay for the same ebook on Amazon.

miah_• 2 years ago

Its very rare that "buying" a ebook results in you "owning" the copy you bought, at best its a rental. A physical book though, if you are holding it in your hands, you own it.

JKCalhoun• 2 years ago

Yeah, surprised (not surprised?) to see the used-textbook market seemingly gone now when I was recently visiting my daughter at the University of Kansas.

It used to be a small industry that nonetheless allowed a brick and mortar store to thrive as a secondary bookstore to the university's student union. Never mind the savings for students.

bluish294• 2 years ago

Even with paper textbooks, publishers will now provide online assignments (which is convenient for universities) and other online materials which you will not be able to sell (it will expire) with the book. So they force students to buy new textbook for each class.

beej713• 2 years ago

One of my students told me they all pirate textbooks. I haven't been a student in a university for almost 30 years but I remember what it was like. It was a scam back then.

When I was in college, the internet was relatively young, but that didn't stop us from using it to cut out the bookstore out as the middleman for reselling books. Our local test Usenet group was where all the cool kids hung out and we used that as a place to sell and trade used books for a fraction the cost of the bookstore.

But that mechanism no longer works in the ebook era. So I'm not surprised students found another way.

(Dad was a teacher, too, and he also couldn't bear forcing his students to pay for new editions of a textbook. So he wrote his own. Students could print copies at cost in the print shop (pre-internet). I've continued the tradition of writing my own books and putting them online for free for the students. Greed over educational materials is a poor look. Also, AI is coming.)

llm_trw3• 2 years ago

Free market hardly work there.

You literally have a government granted monopoly on producing books. How can you even bring in the free market into this?

thaumasiotes4• 2 years ago

I mean, the free market is working pretty well.

http://libgen.rs/

The government-granted monopoly, not so much.

harvey93• 2 years ago

On producing specific books. Nothing to stop me writing a novel with the same themes as yours has.

snapplebobapple4• 2 years ago

Its actually an argument for less regulation. Its the regulation causing the market failure. Cut copyright to a less stupid number like what it was originally 14 years. Make maintaining a copyright for those years contingent on having X % of sales available for free in libraries. We are asking the fundamentally wrong question with copyright, we should not be maximizing monopoly for copyright owners, we should be minimizing market disruption to get a chosen amount of extra creative production

ses1984• 2 years ago

Cut copyright to a less stupid number like what it was originally 14 years. Make maintaining a copyright for those years contingent on having X % of sales available for free in libraries

I’m nitpicking but this isn’t less regulation, it’s different regulation. Some would even say it’s more. You’re reducing a number but adding complexity with the percent sales requirement.

AnthonyMouse8• 2 years ago

What you really want here is for ebooks to be subject to First Sale. In general "licensing" should be restricted to the rights of the copyright holder, e.g. giving someone a license to permanently increase the number of copies that exist in the world, as when an author licenses a publisher. If someone has bought a copy, that should be theirs, they should be free to transfer it to other devices and other people as long as there continues to be only as many permanent copies as they've purchased, and the copyright holder can't impose any further restrictions on that, essentially as an anti-trust anti-tying rule because copyright is a monopoly.

Then libraries could buy physical or digital copies and do the thing they've always done.

8note• 2 years ago

In a zero regulation world, you consider either that there's no copyrights, or that copyrights have infinite length

karaterobot• 2 years ago

Now with a significant portion of textbooks (and books in general) become mainly E-books

I don't know about textbooks, but the overall share of publishing industry revenue that comes from ebooks is really low. Something like 7%, and falling steadily. I had assumed it was much larger.

https://wordsrated.com/ebooks-sales-statistics/

AtlasBarfed2• 2 years ago

I've never actually heard that argument, must have been invented by the highway robbery textbook market since I was in college.

Piracy is seemingly the only bulwark against publisher abuses functionally. With that horrid multi-century copyright ruling, there won't be any free market in specific publications within living human lifetimes.

Libraries don't have the political power to do anything. In the video game space, piracy has been responsible for the only preservation done, and arguably enabled the market for remasters and releases on new platforms.

The ebook publishers will probably start encountering AI that is way better at OCR and scan cleanup. Imagine an AI that you simply run on a camera looking at a screen and you fast forward through a book at 10 pages per second: the AI picks it all up, scans it, possibly detecting layout and images.

ghaff12• 2 years ago

There are consumer-priced scanners that are already pretty good at supporting de-warping and OCR. (Glossy pages work less well.) I'm surprised I haven't seen a better iPhone app--at least one without a subscription fee. But we're definitely very close.

Vaslo• 2 years ago

Free market works fine. You are welcome to write and release any book you want at whatever cost you want. Authors require lots of money, support costs to create, illustrate, bundle, bind, and ship books. And they won’t waste their time doing that without a profit. Lots of people work for and support those companies and it’s getting more expensive as minimum wages increase.

You are just reacting to this because “free for me”. What industry do you work in? I want to see you backpeddle or try and explain in your response when I say the same about your “product” needing regulation.

AlotOfReading2• 2 years ago

Why do you bring up the authors like they're the primary ones being harmed? Most aren't making money to begin with because they get such a small piece of the pie. A typical contract might see them get 20-40% of the cut if they do the distribution and marketing themselves. The vast majority of authors are not professional writers as a result, it's just a side gig on top of other jobs. Authors also can't set their own prices (publishers and marketplaces have a big say) and depending on the terms, they may not get any meaningful royalties. This is common in academic publishing for example.

bsdpufferfish• 2 years ago

Free market hardly work there.

This is hardly a free market. Libraries receive a budget to spend _ dollars on books every year. This entire publishing industry exists to capture that cashflow, because consumers aren't buying it with their own money.

The university version is more complex, but the bottom line is you do not have consumers spending their money on products they use.

14• 2 years ago

For now I will teach my kids to pirate. Not the best solution because honestly I did pirate when I was poor then honestly tried to move away from those days and got a Netflix account and Amazon prime account but the amazon movie site is just so horrible. Every movie I click it wants me to buy or rent. I never did figure out a way to filter those from not showing up I don’t know if that has changed but I ditched it. Then Netflix disabled the account sharing and I argue I wasn’t really sharing I bought Netflix for my kids to use and I am divorced so that means at 2 different locations. It worked for a bit but now seems to detect the location change and I just said screw it and canceled. It was much more convenient to just pirate which was and still is so easy even my kids know how to find the shows they want. And when they get to university I imagine I will show them how to access text books and articles for free. Sad state of affairs as I really do want to contribute my fair share but not when it is pay hundreds of dollars for a new revision of a text book that didn’t add any new context but simply rearranged the pages a bit so they can call it an new version. In the end the publishers are the problem no piracy so I do not feel bad one bit.

ozim• 2 years ago

Not trying to throw a straw man argument, but from what I understand in that space is that there is no free market there.

If you want to publish so it is read by anyone you can only go to big ones - if you are not publishing with big ones, good luck no one will read it.

briandear2• 2 years ago

Free market needs to be allowed to work. If enough universities cancel contracts, then publishers will have to adjust right? Why are we going to ask government to regulate publishing? Everything else they regulate/manipulate gets far more expensive. Health care for instance. Housing (especially in rent control cities.) Education. Transportation (note with deregulation of air travel, flying places became significantly more affordable.

EvkoGS• 2 years ago

Free market hardly work there.

Lmao, what? I download most of books and documents from Z-library (donated several times), that's the free market. Btw, FBI seized all of their domains recently.

Most of the time I need that one medicine textbook on a narrow subject, costing $100+, which I'd use just to look something up. I'm not going to buy all these books under any condition.

WalterBright9• 2 years ago

Free market hardly work there.

Buying things with taxpayer funding and legal mandates is not free market.

ta9882• 2 years ago

yep so is buying back bank, mortgage and insurance companies

miki1232114• 2 years ago

Publishing industry really needs more regulation. Free market hardly work there.

Most of these problems wouldn't exist if not for copyright law, which is nothing but regulation.

You can either fix the problems by introducing more regulation for publishers or by lessening the regulatory restrictions on libraries. Make it legal for them to break DRM (and discuss / purchase / commission DRM-breaking tools), offer scans of physical books to more than one person at a time etc, and your problem is gone.

matheusmoreira• 2 years ago

Copyright owners are monopolists. Of course the free market doesn't work: the government grants them a functionally eternal monopoy on what's essentially numbers. Copyright must be abolished or we'll never move forward as a species.

pastage• 2 years ago

When ebooks hit off the public libraries in Stockholm and perhaps all of Sweden starting paying (costs of running all physical libraries)/(number of books borrowed) with some obvious discounts to those values. Not sure how this has changed in the last two decades. "Libraries need to renew their leased e-material." that is impossible this is not how things should work. Libraires should have every book not being bound by publishers. It is clearly the case that you need new negotiators and laws for public libraries.

We should have an international law that allow libraries to lend photocopies of books, like archive.org does, or just a digital copy. There has been a rise in really good digital interactive books were there is no standard way to make an (pirate) archive, so change is comming even if such a law passes.

derbOac2• 2 years ago

I get so frustrated by these games.

Publishers should lose copyright to every work they do not offer in perpetuity with every purchase in every format, and there should be no postsale restrictions on any item beyond what is implied by copyright.

aleph_minus_one4• 2 years ago

Publishers should lose copyright to every work they do not offer in perpetuity with every purchase in every format

If such a law comes, the publisher will set the price to, say, 1 billion USD.

LegibleCrimson2• 2 years ago

Yeah, I keep seeing suggestions like this and I just don't get it. Like the only way people can fathom something being available is if it's for sale. We really need shorter copyright terms more than anything else.

derbOac2• 2 years ago

But they don't do that with physical books.

dangus• 2 years ago

Such a law could easily forbid price gouging.

everdrive• 2 years ago

Because e-books are digital, publishers will use the the technology for increased telemetry, control, and ultimately to extract more resources. Much like music or movies, there's not inherent reason why e-books would need to work this way, but the publishers can't help themselves. For the average consumer, the solution seems obvious. Pay for physical books, and pirate e-books.

Kaibeezy• 2 years ago

I have consulted in this sector, specifically academic publishing and textbooks. My sense is that publishers in the education market are biding their time while old pedagogies wane.

Every new paper book soon becomes a used book, worth zero or even negative revenue, whereas ebooks are sold de novo to every student at nearly full price with much lower fixed costs (print, distribute, stock, return). But publishers are wary of being seen as interfering with academic freedom by pushing to ebooks.

There are a couple of use cases where students overwhelmingly prefer paper. Cost savings with used books is obvious, but also, for example, if a prof -might- allow a paper book on an exam but -wouldn’t- allow laptop ebook access, most students will -never- take the risk of being disadvantaged, even if it’s only in rare cases.

I’d have to think about corresponding forces in the general publishing and public libraries realm, which I’ll assume is more complex but roughly analogous.

Publishers are waiting until there are a few successful targeted solutions and generational overturn, then paper will disappear in a blink and they will get a fat profit boost. Tech to enable this should be a nice little unicorn.

armchairhacker2• 2 years ago

The value of ebooks isn't the content, but that they have specific homework problems or codes which are required to access online assignments. Particularly the latter, giving each student a different code, because otherwise an entire class can share one ebook. Otherwise, most ebooks have pirated online PDFs, and even without those, all the information is readily available in many places online.

mixedmath• 2 years ago

This is an interesting problem. I love my library. And I use both physical and digital books.

On the one hand, it's probably true that more people can read a digital book. Ob the other hand, I have read fewer than 20 pages of a bunch of ebooks - enough to see if I might like them.

Do these count as checkouts? Am I a very expensive library user?

(And I also am happy to have several ebooks that I'll read sometime, casually renewing them until I get to them).

xrd• 2 years ago

This is a very important point. Libraries should fight to legislate analytics on exact usage when checking out an ebook, especially if they are paying for a set number of usages.

codazoda• 2 years ago

I’ve written and self published a few small books, including Publish Your eBook. Maybe we should create an author collaborative where we make our books available to libraries either free or at a more reasonable price. There must be a handful of authors who would be willing to do this and who own enough rights to do so. It sounds like even a few books would help libraries bolster their collections.

1. Publish Your eBook by Joel Dare https://amzn.to/49WjVrn

jonawesomegreen• 2 years ago

I work at a non-profit organization and part of our mission is exactly this. You can find more details here: https://indieauthorproject.com/

Another part of our mission is providing libraries an open source ebook and audiobook reader called Palace. Our project is on GitHub here https://github.com/thepalaceproject.

mark_l_watson• 2 years ago

I hope some fair deal is worked out. I am wealthy and splurging on all the audio books (yeah for Libro.fm) and eBooks (yeah for Kobo) that I want, but I still experiment consuming the fine content my local library network has. Great books are available to easily consume with Libby and interesting movies and video content are available with Kanopy.

Libraries can also be a nexus for social events and on site education. Very well worth the tax money. In a world of dehumanizing digital tech, libraries are a human experience.

747-8F• 2 years ago

This isn't different from the media industry's overall evolution.

Publishers aren't different from Audio media. Authors have mkt reach through digital channels, unlike constraints of bookshelf logistics.

Why aren't they directly publishing their material? Margins are higher, without publisher fees.

dragandj• 2 years ago

Many authors do, but how likely it is that the potential reader finds their books among the millions of books pushed through channels saturated by well-oiled publisher-controlled marketing machine?

beej713• 2 years ago

"They do have a funding problem, but the answer is not to take it out of the pockets of authors and destroy the rights of creators and pass unconstitutional legislation,” said Shelley Husband, senior vice president of government affairs at the Association of American Publishers

I'm guessing Husband's solution is to raise taxes to pay themselves for more expensive books.

The AAP is also suing Internet Archive, incidentally.

toomuchtodo2• 2 years ago

The Internet Archive is participating in the legal process to get to a conclusion that ebooks are the same as physical books, otherwise the concept of libraries is over (except for those who can pirate and the data stores that exist across the internet, Anna’s Archive, Zlib/libgen, etc).

ghaff12• 2 years ago

The concept of libraries, especially those that aren't large research libraries, has already shifted quite a bit. I almost never go down to my small town library to take out a book or read a magazine. Maybe a DVD now and then that catches my eye. Sometimes I discount museum passes. I could go to talks. Their e-book service isn't that compelling.

Other people probably have different behaviors. People I know with younger children in particular use local libraries for children's books quite a lot.

But libraries as a place you checkout books is almost certainly already on the decline. For me, the pirate sites aren't even competition. I only have limited time. I read a lot on the Internet. If there's some new book I want to read, I'll probably just buy it for my Kindle. (Obviously many people are much more price-sensitive but I wonder how many of them are using libraries today.)

beej713• 2 years ago

Even if you disagreed with IA's emergency library thing (which I did), they're providing an amazing service to humanity orders of magnitude larger than anything AAP will ever accomplish. I encourage everyone to support them (which I do).

rabite• 2 years ago

Librarians should just begin directly teaching people how to use Z-Library and Annas-Archive.

ta9882• 2 years ago

That would not work long term because those same libraries are where those books and papers came from in the first place.

habosa• 2 years ago

This sucks but was inevitable. Libraries are such a weird and wonderful thing. Even though books are widely sold, there’s a place where you can go and read them for free instead. And it’s not some weird loophole, it’s a basic unit of our society and an assumed part of every community.

Unfortunately this is America. Nothing can beat out profit motives forever. The libraries really never stood a chance.

armchairhacker2• 2 years ago

Libraries for the purpose of getting information simply don't make sense in the digital age. The internet is far bigger and more accessible than any library, and you can find information on nearly any topic in exclusively ad-free, public domain sites like Wikipedia, the Gutenburg project, and arXiv.

Libraries now exist more as a place for community: somewhere quiet anyone can freely hang out, access resources like 3D printers (or for the very poor, public fountains/restrooms and the internet), and attend workshops. Some libraries like the Boston Public Library are still nice and active even today (https://www.bpl.org/). But unfortunately as you mentioned, people today really don't fund community, and there are a lot of degrading and closing libraries.

zinodaur• 2 years ago

The internet is better for factoids - for learning something, a book is a lot better, if you can get your hands on one.

E.g. for a niche topic there's maybe a 5 page wikipedia article, a thousand useless seo fodder blogs, and a bunch of academic papers on the topic. At the library, I can get a 300 page comprehensive text written by an expert whose motive is to actually teach me the topic.

prepend• 2 years ago

Is this unique to America? It seems the same problem exists for libraries globally, right?

Mindwipe• 2 years ago

Broadly every other system of library lending in the world has mandatory collective licensing, but coupled with a significantly larger state funding to pay for said license.

crotchfire• 2 years ago

By 1919, more than half the libraries in the United States had been built by an unabashedly profit-motivated industrialist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library . Most are still around, including the one I spent a large part of my childhood wandering through.

It's one of those fractal issues. The more you zoom in, the weirder it gets.

vzaliva• 2 years ago

What's worrying about the article is the fact that electronic editions of ebooks expire, meaning libraries can't keep them indefinitely. It's reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster model, where there's only a short window to watch a new movie in theaters. So, while libraries might stock new releases, what happens to the older ones? Could this trend be pushing readers towards newer publications?

thfuran2• 2 years ago

I've found a fair number of series at my library where they only have e-books of, say, #2 and #4, and I've always assumed it's because the rest expired and haven't been re-purchased.

nofollow• 2 years ago

dredmorbius3• 2 years ago

Title/site context: The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries (karawynn.substack.com) 2023-08-04

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36998643>

leotravis102• 2 years ago

The post has moved platforms since it was published, correct link is now here: https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshit...

FloatArtifact• 2 years ago

Digital media costs library much more money than physical media.

In the US in the state of Wisconsin has a statewide digital library last time I was a resident there. That means all libraries share the digital library across the state. My experience was a incredible variety of content at the cost of somewhat longer wait times.

The same cannot be said of Minnesota. When inquiring why Minnesota does not have the same system when chatting with our local library it came down to publishers were no longer willing to have such an agreements. The library would love to have such a system in Minnesota but the publishers are against it. I wish there was a way we could bridge readers with their authors.

As a side note I don't quite understand the downside even with the Wisconsin system. For my understanding it was contracted per book for a length of time and also a fee per read.

https://www.wplc.info/wisconsins-digital-library-faq

briandear2• 2 years ago

How about eliminating libraries and provide vouchers for Kindle Unlimited for the poor? Work with Amazon to create some kind of Amazon library using Kindle as the platform.

People with money don’t need public libraries — you can buy pretty much anything easily. People spend $18 on a McDonalds meal, $9.99 for an ebook is nothing. Big city libraries are mostly homeless shelters at this point.

I’m not going to a public library to use the World Book Encyclopedia like I did 35 years ago. Pretty sure most people aren’t. I’m not going to check out some music CDs — I have Apple Music. Unless it’s some kind of rare collections library for academic research, the average library doesn’t need to exist. It’s a vestige like Blockbuster Video.

It would be cool though if people could buy library access for university digital libraries. Being able to access journal articles is pretty awesome.

cubecul• 2 years ago

I am on the commission overseeing a major public library system. I strongly disagree with your interpretation of what libraries do.

First, the real estate presence of the library is extremely important. Children's storytime is one of the strongest drivers of foot traffic. Some of the buildings act as designated cooling centers during heat waves. They are community centers and gathering spaces for local organizations.

Also, just because you can spend $10 on an ebook does not mean others would choose to do the same! That's important money to many people.

Otherwise, here are some other things I've seen libraries do that I think your comment underestimates:

- supplies reading materials to jailed inmates

- helps new residents navigate city services

- manages the city archives

- provides wifi access for the 10%+ of a big city that does not have wifi at home

- gives free books to build book collections at home

- loans tools and other "maker" equipment

Not all libraries are funded well enough to do the above, and the specific definition of a library in 2024 is very hard to nail down - basically converges on a community center.

All I'm saying is that libraries are making concerted efforts to break out of the traditional definition ("gatekeeper of information") - you should check out your local library to see all that they do!

rahimnathwani2• 2 years ago

My city has a population of 800k.

The library's annual budget is $200MM.

I wonder what proportion of the population uses the library system at all. I can't imagine it's more than 25%. If I'm right, the cost is at least $1,000 per library user per year.

This seems like a lot.

(Of the $200MM, only $22MM is spent on books/ebooks/media aka 'collections'.)

The libraries are generally comfortable and well maintained, but given the cost I wonder whether the major functions (books, space, wifi) could be provided more cheaply by Amazon and Wework.

leotravis102• 2 years ago

Very awful take, Brian.

Don't you realize that libraries are under attack by mostly all fronts (governments, politicians, publishers, copyright cartel, right wing zealots just to name a few) plus they're on the front lines of the country's problems because our government are too corrupt to do anything to help the marginalized and underprivileged. https://www.axios.com/2024/02/18/libraries-ebooks-hoopla-lib... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39474151

Also read here: https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshit... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36998643

WalterBright9• 2 years ago

one hardcover copy of Cook’s latest novel costs the library $18, it costs $55 to lease a digital copy

I buy the used paperback used for $3.

a price that can't be haggled with publishers.

Of course they can haggle. They just don't know how to.

samtho3• 2 years ago

This is a poorly informed assessment. Nearly every single library system is subject to “take it or leave it” pricing and terms by publishers. The libraries need the publishers to purchase materials from, the publisher likely wishes the library was gone so they can think they are selling more product now.

WalterBright9• 2 years ago

The library can buy the stuff used and the publishers make nothing off of such sales.

I buy nearly all my books used.

wolverine876• 2 years ago

The answer may be to change copyright law to allow book owners to freely shift mediums (I forget the term for it, but converting a paper book to PDF by scanning, or vice versa by printing), and to restrict the ability to lease everything - you buy it, you own it (a debate older than this issue, and there's term for that too).

Then I could donate my book to the library, they could scan it (or buy a scanned copy), and as long as they restricted checkouts based on the number of copies, they'd be fine.

The Internet Archive seems to do something similar, though it seems to be an issue in the courts. I wonder if libraries could donate their books to IA and direct patrons there for electronic versions.

margalabargala• 2 years ago

The Internet Archive seems to do something similar, though it seems to be an issue in the courts.

There was a brief period of time at the beginning of COVID when the Internet Archive decided to do away with the "one digital copy per purchase" restriction, essentially arguing that since libraries across the country were closed, this was justified. [0]

The courts disagreed.

[0] https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-em...

Anamon• 2 years ago

See also the lawsuit against the Internet Archive, as some other comment already pointed out. What this also primarily is, is a direct attack by the publishers on the first sale doctrine, a crucial balancing part of copyright law.

Time-limited and self-destructing book copies, as for any (digital) media, is nothing short of a cultural atrocity that only philistines could have come up with. The word "scam" is more than apt for this latest effort by the publishing industry to milk the maximum amount of profit out of something without putting in any additional work or providing any additional value in return. Asking money for doing literally nothing -- I don't think that calling that a scam goes too far. This from an industry who, like many others, keeps claiming that they are acting in the name of protecting the creatives, while having a long and flowery history of fleecing and bleeding dry those very artists.

Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with publishers

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