[tedunangst]

Physical books impose a natural limit on the number of simultaneous checkouts. If a book is very popular, the library will buy more copies to accommodate demand. If a PDF is popular, the publisher expects the library to buy more copies.

It's artificial scarcity, but this is hardly new. The number of books in a library was never limited by the cost of paper.

[antihero]

Artificial scarcity is possibly one of the most perverse things to come out capitalism.

[stcredzero]

The particular 1 bits he took were of unusually high quality.