[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).