Libraries, the places where homeless people, famously, shave and go BM, are seeing an uptick in subscribers thanks to their embrace of ebooks. Our own Brooklyn system has had downloadable ebooks for a few years now and the system is fairly simple: you check out a book to read on your device and then “check it back in” when you’re done. This frees up the download for the next person. The book deletes itself automatically past the due date.
The The Telegraph believes these downloads could help save libraries. Quoth some librarian dude:
Tony Durcan, former president of The Society of Chief Librarians, said: “Book issues have seriously declined in recent years.
“This is an exciting development. These are not going to replace the paper book, they are as well as.”
Exciting development indeed. Now when are they going to clear out all those pesky “paper books” and turn libraries into huge computer clusters?
Why the hell would the ebook need checked out? Furthermore, why in the hell would one person having an electronic copy prevent another from being able to read another copy?
They wonder why a handful of people would rather just pirate the damn ebook. It would sort of piss me off if I went to “check-out” aka rent an ebook to be told that the paperless, infinitely copyable, electronic file is already checked out and I will have to wait until the patron before me either checks it back in or it auto deletes itself from the patrons reader.
The checking in and out of the e-books has to do with licensing and how many “e-copies” of the book the Library is allowed to loan out. Its almost the same as physical copies of the book, limited copies for the public to borrow because of purchase and storage costs (though storing digital copies is far less costly).
I used to work for a library system, and I agree its kind of ridiculous that you have to check out an e-book. Though I guess this just prevents one person from downloading a copy of the latest Harry Potter novel for free and giving it out to everyone they know, while other are paying money for their Hardcover copy, Audiobook, or Kindle versions.
I like that concept.
You can bet publishers are going to put a stop to this – and only the greedy lawyers will benefit from the effort.