[BSeward]

If disadvantaged homes can't afford ebook readers they will read on computers. They will go to the library and get online there and read millions, billions of free things on line, far, far in excess of what is available in a city's second-hand stores. Much is dreck, sure, but those who really hunger for knowledge can find it beyond what a room full of books can offer.

The selection can't be quite as grand as what will be available to people able to pay for ebooks, but the same is true of the author of this piece and being limited to second-hand, very affordable books.

[Hyena]

Because libraries are absolutely brimming with computers. In Los Angeles, the libraries tend to have a clutch of general computers, a significant fraction occupied by the homeless (that's what I'd, can't fault them).

[BSeward]

Well, sure, because they're full of books. But if libraries plan to survive in a future without books then they'll be full of computers.

[Hyena]

I don't see why you'd do this, though. Readers will continue to fall in price and the expense of providing them to the poor is partially offset by using them for textbooks (both that we no longer need to supply them out of "library" budgets and that we reduce textbook costs). It might be possible in major cities to fund readers for the poor out of the liquidation of branch library real estate in favor of wireless access points or whatever.