[namekyd]

My wife and I are voracious readers, it would be a very expensive habit to have off we were buying everything for kindle. We are members of 2 local libraries with listings on overdrive/libby and rent the majority of our ebooks there.

I suppose it depends on your library’s offering and how many books you go through

[ghaff]

To be fair, I don't go through anything like the number of books I used to. I have a ton of unread stuff on my Kindle--some of which is admittedly large collections of classics which I got for $1 or $2 each.

[toomuchtodo]

What about people who cannot afford a Kindle, or cannot afford to buy e-books?

[dredmorbius]

A new Kindle runs less than $100 in the US (it's largely subsidised by Amazon, they want you to buy books). You can find used models for as little as $20 on Craigslist currently.

Other eBook readers from firms such as Kobo or Onyx start at about $100 to $200, and again may be found used for a small fraction of that price.

That's still a hurdle, but roughly the cost of a new trade-paper volume with the capability to hold many hundreds or thousands of books.

Depending on what you're looking for, there are ebooks which can be found, legally, free of charge from sources such as Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, the Internet Archive (both to check out or to download with no limitations), and other libraries. The US Library of Congress has been expanding its own offerings (I'm not up on the latest, though am given to understand it's generous), and many large-city libraries (Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Kansas City, etc.) have extensive digital lending programmes.

That's without leaning on book liberation sites such as ZLib, LibGen, or Anna's Archive, though those have quite extensive holdings.

[srndsnd]

This also assumes that Amazon never gives up the ghost and finds ways to make sideloading books onto Kindle more difficult than it currently is.

I've always been surprised that they haven't cracked down on it, given the relative ease with which you can circumvent the necessity of the Kindle store for the majority of popular titles. Simply load up Calibre, pop almost any file type into your library, and away you go. We're really living in the Limewire age for e-book piracy, even if we don't realize it.

My guess is, someone has run the math and figured out that it's better to keep people on a Kindle device and occasionally spending a few dollars, in exchange for the slow death of physical media and legitimate alternatives. When those become less readily available, then perhaps you can begin to boil the frog.

You can be sure I won't buy a kindle if I can't sideload onto it. I buy at least 5/6 new hardcover books a year from local independent retailers to support authors I like. I wish more authors would allow an e-book copy to be distributed with hardcovers they sell. Do what vinyl did.

[ghaff]

There are a ton of free books, many even out of copyright, online. I also fully expect libraries will continue to have physical books including recent releases. I'm not advocating for libraries de-emphasizing this aspect of their mission. But I think it will probably naturally happen over time.

[j_maffe]

The detriment to society due to the lack of proper access of the lower class to knowledge is too much to take this lightly