Technically libraries don’t give away books for free, they lend them out but they also pay for them. There’s a reason publishers are more than happy to sell books to libraries, but hate Internet Archive, and that’s because a library can only lend out however many copies of the book they have at a time, but Internet Archive lent out hundreds of generated copies.
Technically libraries don’t give away books for free, they lend them out but they also pay for them. There’s a reason publishers are more than happy to sell books to libraries, but hate Internet Archive, and that’s because a library can only lend out however many copies of the book they have at a time, but Internet Archive lent out hundreds of generated copies.
Even for ebooks, libraries are limited to how many they can lend out, plus the ebook has an imposed end of life.
I’ve read claims that ebooks are more expensive for libraries than physical books, because of those limitations
Yeah. I think most of them have a lifespan of like 20-30 uses per license.