[smcphile]

> I don't understand how so many people here are commenting as if giving out books for free was a good idea.

I'm not sure how many people are thinking that. Some must be, but not necessarily many.

There's a difference between "giving" and "lending". The IA have never given away copyrighted books.

I've used the IA's lending library in the past and the copyrighted ebooks were protected by Adobe DRM. You were allowed to take out a few books for a few weeks (like in a real library). You were required to return the books before a given date. And if you didn't, the ADOBE software wouldn't let you read the book anymore (because of the DRM).

According to the article, until recently, the IA would scan a book and would lend out the created ebook only to a limited number of people at a time, based on how many copies of the physical book that they had.

What changed recently is that they began lending out to a potentially unlimited number of people at a time. But, you still didn't get to keep the book for more than two or three weeks (I forget the exact number).

[enitihas]

I don't think anyone has any problem with the original lending scheme. That was totally fair.

> What changed recently is that they began lending out to a potentially unlimited number of people at a time. But, you still didn't get to keep the book for more than two or three weeks (I forget the exact number).

This is the relevant part, and what has prompted the publisher lawsuit. Do you think people should be allowed to take out any software they want for free for 2-3 weeks for a "National Software Emergency Library". If not, why books.

[smcphile]

> Do you think people should be allowed to take out any software they want for free for 2-3 weeks for a "National Software Emergency Library". If not, why books.

I'm not sure what the IA was thinking when they made that modification. Perhaps they thought that during the pandemic such a change would be found temporarily acceptable.

I agree with your point that programmers, software publishers, authors and publishers should all be able to make money and get paid for their work. I'm not sure though what are the best business models for making that happen.

What I've settled on myself, for the moment, is buying physical (paper) books, buying ebooks without DRM, downloading old ebooks in the public domain for free (or buying them cheaply from sites that do a good job on the markup) and taking out books from my local library.

My wife buys Kindle ebooks (with DRM) from Amazon, because she requires a very large font size, and the Amazon solution was the best that I found (biggest selection of books of the type that my wife reads).