But everybody knows what a library is and grassroots booksharing (aka drop off your old paperbacks in an agreed upon public place) is already a thing, so maybe not a dystopia?
Also, buying books second hand is incredibly easy and cheap. And buying a license for an ebook is incredibly convenient and also tends to be rather cheap.
Why do you think ebook licensing is cheap? The big 5 all have "metered" licensing, where licenses expire and require repurchase after either a certain period of time or a certain number of checkouts. These are usually set up so that every ebook will have to be repurchased every 1-2 years. Furthermore, ebook prices are usually between 1x-3x the physical list price depending on publisher, date of publication, and popularity.
Interesting. It's more like 0.5x to 1x of the paperback in my experience, buying mostly English books on Amazon Germany. Sometimes considerably less, especially for older books, eg I just bought a fantasy trilogy from the 80s for like 2 bucks. And, like I said, real convenient.
Also I'm talking about "buying" an ebook as a consumer, the licensing model for libraries might be terrible for all I know. It's certainly still pretty terrible for most library members. I imagine digital lending is terrifying for the publishers.
Some physical books cost 3 bucks, new, others are 30, some textbooks 150 USD. Distribution costs have little to do with it. Not that I'm defending predatory textbook pricing, I totally support copying those 150 USD textbooks, whether it's digital or, old school, photocopier copies.
I wish they would have done a bit more research and explanation here. Book lending it not new, but the focus on best sellers is rather recent. Libraries spend a majority of their ebook budget on best sellers which is unfortunate.
>I think if people feel the need to explain the concept of a library and this is some shadowy samizdat notion now we might as well give up all pretense like we aren't in a dystopia.
The author is being sarcastic. He knows very well that everyone knows what a (book) library is. How can you not tell that by "a few hundred years old already"?
A "library" simply refers to a collection of materials.[1]
For example in the tech world, the second "L" in DLL stands for Dynamic Link Library, a modular collection of code.[2]
There is no implication of lending in the word or concept of a "library" by itself. An explicit example of this are private libraries, libraries held and used by individuals.
A public library is a library owned by and operated for the public, aka the people, and as a library of the people the people can take (and must return) books from the public library. This is where the common concept of "borrowing books from the library" comes from.
Private membership libraries predated public libraries in most places bt by well over two centuries and often loaned. It was actually more common for people to share a library and borrow from than to accrue their own, as the cost of books was considerable.
