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It's lucky we have a public library system at all.

If it wasn't grandfathered in and someone suggested it today there is no chance in hell that it would fly. Profit maximization is the only thing publishers care about, and public institutions aren't going to stand up for the public interest.

On the other hand, book are simply not as important as they were when libraries were created. Now we have multiple free, high-quality sources of information that are far easier to access than libraries ever were, for example, Wikipedia or the many sites where people share their literary works for free. This is not an attempt to belittle books or libraries - both are still important resources. They are simply not the only show in town anymore, so if they weren't grandfathered in and someone tried to create libraries today, there would be obvious arguments against doing so, besides pure profit.

(Some) libraries are to books what archive.org is to the internet.

I also don't think you realize how lacking the the digitization and public availability of older publications and books in academia is. You can count yourself lucky if there's at least a barely legible and badly scanned PDF. Usually your only choice is hitting your universities' library.

This is also true for a lot of general literature that is just old enough to still be copyrighted but already too old to still be sold anywhere. There are thousands upon thousands of such books which you will be hard pressed to find anywhere but in a library. An example I recently encountered would be most works by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon. Out of his 80 published works maybe 10-20 are still easily accessible and purchasable somewhere. Soon he would be a forgotten author, and stupidly long copyright terms would have played a role in that.

Thank god we have libraries preserving at least some of our history.

Most of the local history here requires either talking to someone or looking in a physical book. I was surprised to realize how much isn't available online.

Even books that might of been scanned by google books but are unavailable to look at?

They're just not in Google Books and not available online period. Try finding a copy of "Castella, California : the last one hundred years 1900-2000".

It's a real book, but if you're limited to the Internet you might not even realize it exists.

Even better, try finding any version of Joaquin Miller's The Battle of Castle Crags.

One thing I love about the libraries at least in Toronto, is that many of them have private collections, and some of them are entirely one subject or genre.

I have a deep interest in magic and mentalism, and found a library here that has books on the subject that are so old they're not even in modern English (or German as is the case for some of the books they have). Luckily the illustrations are detailed and verbose.

Also in Toronto we have the Reference Library which is a gold mine, and probably is even more archive.org-like than most libraries. I honed my Assembly Language skills there in the 90's, and did enormous amounts of research on Artificial Life and that sort of thing. They have some of the best stacks, so you have to use the CueCat or whatever they call it to summon up all the good stuff they dare not leave on the shelves.

Nowadays a lot of material is available on the Internet. Yet most books are so very much better than a current blog or online "tutorial." Even the older books. So there is that.

PS: I always buy the e-books that I like. Paper copies if they're available, since I prefer them. You can tell a great book by how dog-eared it gets over time. You don't get that metric with ebooks.

> Now we have multiple free, high-quality sources of information that are far easier to access than libraries ever were, for example, Wikipedia or the many sites where people share their literary works for free.

You are vastly understating the problems of bitrot, linkrot, and the amount of quality information available at your local library, and are massively overstating the amount of quality information available on the internet. (And much of that quality information is gated behind proprietary walled gardens, or is monetized through adware and spyware.)

Not to mention the modern trend of burying five bits of useful information in an 8 minute video, the first two minutes of which are pointless small talk and requests to like/subscribe/follow, and the other six are an unsearchable morass that takes way too long to get to the point.

The internet does two things better - searchability, and multimedia. The rest is a hot mess of largely superficial depth, and dubious quality.

> burying five bits of useful information in an 8 minute video

Videos are often even ~10:10 minutes long for a while already now. I think it's a monetization thing on YouTube.

If you know keywords, you can search for them using your browser's search function in the time stamped transcript that might be available from the three-dot-menu below the video.

Increasing playback speed also helps.

I often feel the same about documentaries made for TV or DVD/Bluray. Even ones from National Geographic. While the production quality is excellent, I can perfectly live without dramatizing background music or sound effects.

I often thought about some 45 to 60 minutes piece that they could have done that in 5 to 10 minutes without wasting my time.

That Mitchell and Webb Look "Gift Shop" sketch:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc

Drum roll...: Head -> Desk -> ad infinitum!

> You are vastly understating the problems of bitrot, linkrot

This is an important point too. If it's something I'd like to keep for later use and on a single page, I almost inevitably print the page into a PDF (from reader mode).

The low average quality of online information does not undermine the parent’s point that the internet substantially reduces the marginal value of (physical) libraries. Free online resources like Wikipedia provide more comprehensive, current and accessible reference material than small local libraries, and non-free academic research databases provide more accessible, and arguably more comprehensive and current, reference material than any single physical library. As the parent recognised, there are still many books that haven’t been digitised, but it is not fair to compare the set of freely available online resources to the set of all copyrighted works you could eventually get your hands on via an inter-library loan. The fact that libraries need to pay for these books, and readers need to return them after a short time, makes them much less “accessible” than online alternatives.

Where I live we have a good public central library with a very broad selection, which also is offering electronic media. If you happen to be downtown you can get your stuff there, and then casually drop that into one of the many (much smaller) branches in the suburbs. Furthermore you can extend your loan easily and online if you need to (where the standard loan time is one month). I can live with that. Though haven't used it since March for obvious reasons.

I think it depends from where and when you look at it. While for someone living "out there" the online stuff is an enrichment, for someone used to live metropolitan or at least some university town, it's only so so and not really overwhelming.

The same is true for (good) book stores dealing with dead wood. The haptics are simply different. You can stroll along there and find something interesting widening your horizon by random chance/serendipity.

The recommendations from sites like Amazon or Goodreads don't offer that, even if they are trying to emulate that.

Not the same, more like tunnel vision, and if something like "surprise me!" is offered, it's different from walking into some rarely or never visited part, quickly scanning a few pages and "seeing" how it's like.

The same applies to reading "on-screen", no matter which device, size, and display technology. The haptics are mostly WORSE.

Not having experienced the good parts of "dead wood" it may be excused, because not knowing it any better. Nonetheless there were and still are many good parts about "dead wood", and the ecosystem surrounding that. Just not everywhere.

/endrant

> On the other hand, book are simply not as important as they were when libraries were created. Now we have multiple free, high-quality sources of information that are far easier to access than libraries ever were, for example, Wikipedia or the many sites where people share their literary works for free.

Oh, yeah? Try finding out how to do something in Visual Basic 6 or try finding out how jeweler's used to cut accurate screw threads.

Knowledge prior to 1996 was in books. Many of those books have been discarded because they "don't circulate". I have even tried to pull some of these things via interlibrary loan programs--the books simply do not exist.

This knowledge is no longer available to someone without significant resource. It's not online; the books are gone; old periodicals may be online but are behind a paywall. You might be able to purchase one of these books if someone with an extensive personal library dies--but the book will be expensive.

As a child, I could walk into my local university library and pull car repair, machining, Popular Electronics, etc. off the shelves and simply read them. Free of charge! No library card required (even though my parents paid for one for me). This certainly contributed to what I am today.

Libraries no longer attempt to serve as a resource for the broader public. And that's a terrible, terrible loss to society.

Here, some information I found on the first page of google:

https://www.vbtutor.net/lesson2.html

https://www.appropedia.org/Cutting_screw_threads

If you have any books and want to make them last forever, you should get them scanned and uploaded on libgen for maximum reach and robust archiving. Local libraries are a nice idea, but they can't have the same reach.

Sure, but that VB6 is for beginners. All the advanced stuff is only in books (networking, sockets, concurrency (which is an absolute nightmare in VB6), etc.). And, note, the primary purpose of that website is to sell a book.

And, as for screw threads, tap and die simply aren't accurate enough for stuff like watchmaking (although with modern technology--carbide cutters, titanium materials, CNC machines, etc.--they might be).

The screw thread question wasn't hypothetical. I actually asked at a fairly big machinist's meetup how to do that on a jeweler's lathe. Nobody knew how.

The answer, it turns out, is that they would build a custom power feed. This is documented on p62-76 of "Practical Benchwork for Horologists." This is such an important concept that the book devotes more than 10% of the "Tools and their Uses" section to it and it's the only thing in the book with actual plans.

Yet nobody now knows. And I had to figure out where the answer might lie with very little guidance. And I had to buy the book blind to figure that out. I got lucky and the book was $20 (it's normally about $200) so I took a flyer (It's a wonderful look at the art of machining. As I explained to my wife why I found a nearly 100 year old book so entertaining--"It's engineering porn. You're not supposed to understand.")

I couldn't request it via interlibrary loan from any library in my purview. I couldn't find the knowledge online.

And this wasn't a terribly rare book. Sure, it wasn't a bestseller, but it went through 7 or 8 editions over about 70 years. There is zero reason for it to be gone other than the libraries threw it out.

I believe books and libraries are more important than they ever have been in recent times. Whenever you go and read a book from your library, you librarian doesn't keep a profile of who you are and judges your value based on what books you read. Books are still the best way to expose yourselves to new ideas and libraries are still the cheapest ways you could discover those ideas because your library is not earning by showing you an ad for each book you read and hence, its not in their interest to trap you in a bubble that echoes your own bias.

> Whenever you go and read a book from your library, you librarian doesn't keep a profile of who you are and judges your value based on what books you read.

Are you sure about that? If you're not in a super-large library with full anonymity, your librarians will definitely know when you're reading a lot of books that suggest some ideology. They may not keep a profile written down, but they definitely will remember. And they do keep a list of books you took home, at least our local library does.

Regarding new ideas: might be different in other places of the world, but public libraries over here aren't that well stocked and feel like they primarily offer what the librarians value (which will largely mirror the mainstream opinion of the general population, as they're state employees). That's different for university libraries, which do keep a more diverse collection.

The local library here makes a point of never keeping a history of what books you’ve checked out. It’s actually been a problem for me when trying to remember something I read a few years back. They’re pretty big proponents of privacy.

> My own opinion is that Controlled Digital Lending should become the norm, because it closely mirrors the way we already deal with lended print materials.

This seems like a band aid solution. Like hacking old code to run on a new machine, totally disregarding why we build the new machine in the first place. I personally don't know what should be a good model for digital lending but it can be different from how we do it with physical books. This kind of band aid thinking will just cause more legacy issues in the future and may also detract from really taking advantage of the new format.

Actually can you explain why you think the licensing model will work for some books and not others? How will volume of demand impact this?

For books that are in high demand, let's say you pay $25 to buy the book outright, but you can then lend it as many times as you want. Assuming it's always checked out for two weeks, that's 26 readers a year who benefit, at a cost of less than $1 per reader per year.

But in a typical library, most books in the catalog are checked out infrequently. It might not make financial sense to purchase those books outright. But if a library can pay a licensing fee on a per-checkout basis, then it can expand its offerings.

Licensing should make sense for all books, it just requires a reasonable per lend fee. It shouldn't really be in the publisher's interest to prevent libraries from lending more copies. They'd just be limiting their own customer base.

That's the capitalist ideal though, there's plenty of reasons why it's not currently happening. Most publishers still seem to think they can continue pricing digital and physical books the same and turn the significant savings in printing costs into pure profit. And they might have some second thoughts about this whole 'lending books' thing.

CDL is interesting here because it is in essence a threat that failing to provide a fair digital alternative will just lead to libraries digitizing the books for themselves, and in the worst case cooperate so you can lend a copy of the book provided any (statewide, countrywide, worldwide) library still has an unlent copy.

"We already know that the lending model for print works just fine, and I see it as no more than a threat than that."

The article addresses that. There's much less friction/effort to borrow and return a physical book, than there is to borrow and return a digital version of the same book.

So, all other things being equal, the # sales displaced by one ebook under CDL is going to be higher than that of a physical book, assuming both have the same shelf life and there are no restrictions on lending except for one-at-a-time.