I don’t understand the numerous interested and enthusiastic links to the LA Times’ story on mechanisms that permit libraries to lend ebooks to patrons.
The LAT calls it “Another Boost for E-Books”, which is fair. But it’s another step in the incremental destruction of libraries.
I just finished reading Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold and was shaken by his portrait of the library community’s embrace of microfilm and digitization — and their destruction of their collections of paper newspapers, magazines and books. Baker had already been pretty hard on librarians, when he took them on for moving from card catalogs to computerized catalogs.
One of Baker’s core ideas is that we’re moving away from a world in which libraries could acquire (or create) information in print and make it available free to patrons until it fell apart from use.
We moving into a world where access to information is metered and where libraries pass the cost on to us. In that world, taxpayers (who don’t want to pay for anything, anyway) are going to resist “subsidizing” the information needs of their fellow citizens. This was the reasoning behind closing the PubScience database (at the insistence of the private database industry).
When libraries start buying ebooks with licenses for a limited number of uses, it’s another step toward becoming retail channels and rent-collection agencies for copyright holders.