Or when you have to get several different all-you-can-read memberships to access all the authors you like. So what do you do when an Amazon Prime membership is required to access most contemporary books? Anything else is anti-consumer at this point. > One subscription for access to ALL the content is the way to beat piracy. This is a better option than the status quo, where libraries have to pay highly marked up licensing fees for ebooks. I actually don't mind maintaining the artificial scarcity and pretending that digital assets are like physical assets, because: (1) it's no worse than the system we have in place now with physical books (2) it doesn't require us to entirely revamp copyright law and (3) it allows libraries to make the argument that once they buy a digital asset outright, they can 'lend' it just as they do with physical books, under a set of principles commonly called Controlled Digital Lending. Is it really 'borrowing' under the reforms you propose? And to take your argument a step further, why should there be a due date? If your borrowing a book doesn't prevent anyone else from borrowing it, then why should you need to 'return' it at an appointed time? Boiled down, your proposal is really just a license to read the book, paid for by the library.
But to pretend that there are only a few copies of this book we can borrow is asinine.
