E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

In my view, the primary reason public libraries were created was to provide the public with free access to informational and culturally-relevant media (books, newspapers, movies, audio, etc). Previously, a library's effectiveness in fulfilling that mission was naturally limited by the need for the library to acquire physical copies of every article of media they provided access to, and by the natural geographical restrictions imposed by the need for members to physically travel to the library to view, check out, and return those articles. These limitations made it relatively easy for libraries to coexist with copyright law, as libraries would never be able to compete with the convenience of personal ownership of a physical copy of media.

With modern, digital media, such physical limitations are no longer present. Were it not for copyright law preventing digital media from being acquired and loaned out the same way that physical media are, it would be rather easy to build a public library system which would fulfill its mission so efficiently and with such convenience that it would supplant the need for personal ownership of media for the vast majority of people.

Imagine a national library purchasing 100 copies of a movie, then instantly "checking it out" to you when you stream it to your phone, and "checking it in" as soon as the movie finishes playing or you pause it for more than a minute or two. Such a system could be many orders of magnitude cheaper than our current public library system, while at the same time being far more convenient. They could put Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Disney+ out of business overnight. Now apply the same system to books, music, magazines, etc. Why would any significant number of people bother buying any of those forms media ever again?

No, it provides more.

Actually your brain maps physical properties of the book to actual content, creating an overlay map over the story or the content (and our brain is really good at mentally mapping things). This is that map that is being used to know where in the book a particular piece of information is.

Reading on e-reader is more linear than reading a paper book. See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-scr... https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.236/ and https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb...

Besides, no e-reader today can let your riffle through pages as fast as paper book.

When you are in a novel, or in a manual, you have some kinetic and touch feedback to build memories of where's what. The book becomes an extension (à la proprioception) with much less friction than an e-read for which you have to wait for visual feedback (screen refreshing).

With paper books things are at the tip of your fingers.

E-reader have more friction.

That's a reason why I only read novels on e-reader and jot notes in a notepad for non-fiction books.

If I had the budget I'd only have physical books.

> All of those services are also primary-content creators.

Right, so they would remain in business only by distributing exclusive content that's not available in public libraries by virtue of the fact that copies of those media can never be purchased, only streamed directly from their original creator.

Thinking about where that would lead in a world where that business model suddenly becomes extremely profitable compared to selling copies of your movie... it almost seems kinda dystopian.