> “The point of a library is to preserve, and in order to preserve, a library must own,” Bustillos wrote. When I asked Potash about libraries and their growing digital budgets, he argued that “digital will always be better value,” but he acknowledged that, if current trends continue, “Yes, there is a challenge.”

I'm of two minds about this, because on one hand seeing public libraries give up control and move toward a subscribed model feels wrong, shortsighted, lazy, and a bunch of other bad things. But on the other hand the primary purpose of a public library is not to preserve materials, it's to provide access to them.

These electronic subscription services sure are a handy way to provide access to the most requested materials, so in the short term they're a great option.

But they're a deal with the devil. It's not hard to predict the future here: libraries will become more and more dependent on the subscriptions, which will go up and up in price. Eventually the public library system becomes an inefficient way to redistribute taxes to publishers and distributors.

That's different from today, when, due to the special status libraries have with respect to physical media, they're actually pretty inefficient from the publisher's perspective, but great from the reader's.

The "challenge" will be to get those same protections in place for digital resources before it's too late.