With a library, I can't borrow an ebook to my reading device. My country's libraries doesn't really offer ebooks to borrow, my device doesn't support Amazon DRM, and Amazon Unlimited in not available in my region.
Frankly "borrowing an ebook" just does not make sense to me.
After many millennia of humanity striving to preserve knowledge we now have a way to make unlimited perfect copies of books but instead of really making use of it we instead put an unnecessary complicated system in place that makes the book artificially unavailable after some time.
Its like how early cars in Britain had to be preceded by a guy with a flag, really- trying to force and limit a new invention into the existing outdated system.
Or worse it even reminds me of book burning, removing perfectly fine book copies that could make it more likely for the book to survive in the future, like has happened for personal copies of many famous ancient text with the original texts being long lost.
I'm sure every ancient librarian would love to be able to provide books for every human alive - yet we now have the means of doing that, but choose to artificially sabotage it!
Well yeah, at the end of the day, it's just another avenue of rent extraction. I do think that it would be a step up from the current system, where I just can't get ebook, end of story.
> With a library, I can't borrow an ebook to my reading device.
We have this in my little town in USA for over 10yrs now. Movies and music and newspapers too. Only thing that this process doesn't have is microfiche.
Kindle Unlimited is not a good model, though. It is extremely anti-competitive. I'm amazed that it is legal in the EU (no big surprise about the US). You can only enter it as an author if you guarantee that your book is not available anywhere else. If you don't put your book on Kindle Unlimited, however, then Amazon will make discovery way harder and sales will be very low. It's essentially a way to keep books on Amazon only.
On a side note, I once had a book that steadily sold 3-5 copies per month, then ran an ad on Amazon that barely boosted the sales and had negative ROI, and directly afterwards there were 0 sales/month. How do I know Amazon's algorithm hasn't downgraded discovery to make me continue to buy ads? I don't, this is entirely up to Amazon and nobody controls or oversees these kind of things.