alt Hacker NewsLibraries purchase books. One for every book they loan out at a time, digitally or physically.
The most recent noteworthy counter-example is archive.org breaching their "one purchase = one concurrent loan" limit during COVID, and they lost that court battle.
If you're equating libraries to LLMs, then every leading-model company would have purchased ~every book, newspaper, movie, and song in existence at least once. They have not.
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47282847 • yesterday at 6:30 PM
Many national libraries receive copies of “every” book published in the covered country. They don’t have to buy them.
Because libraries predate copyright and publishers and all the industry behind it. If libraries were to be invented nowadays, they won't let them purchase a single physical book to be enjoyed by several different physical persons over the course of time. What the publishing industry would like to have is 1 physical person = 1 or more physical copies, not the other way round.