alt Hacker NewsThey do, but under a completely different system than the way that they do for print books. When a library buys a print book, they can keep it in circulation for as long as they want and it's physically durable, but for digital, they're paying either per circulation or for an amount of time. They never own anything, they pay for temporary licenses, just like you never own the digital media you purchase in most cases.
The point that the person you're replying to is making is that this totally breaks the way libraries have always worked, and that it takes a lot of power away from the buyers (whether that's you or your local library) and puts way more in the hand of the publishers.
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>just like you never own the digital media you purchase in most cases.
Any digital asset that's on a hard drive I own, in my own home, is more owned than any most other kinds of properties that there are. The government may not protect my ownership of it, but the government doesn't even know about it... nor does anyone else.
People who are truly worried about this issue shouldn't sit around whining that they don't own their digital purchases, they should instead go out and own everything, whether they purchase it or not.
What made libraries not work is that you stopped wanting to own things. With no one wanting to own things, people and the governments stopped worrying about whether anyone could. And once they stopped doing that, libraries too found out they couldn't own anything either. Without meaning to, maybe, you all did this.
Is there really a meaningful distinction between how libraries treat digital book licenses and physical books when you actually hit reality? My knowledge of how libraries work is very shallow, but I've always understood that they treat physical books as essentially consumable and have fairly high standards for what a "lendable" copy of a book is.
A purely assumptive example, but if a library pays for a 2 year license to lend a digital book, and the average shelf-life of a physical book is ~2 years, what's the difference?