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"school district can give those to every student"

How cool would that be! My library finally got the overdrive support so I wanted to check out an e-book (an audiobook) to try out on my kindle/iphone. And found a nice book that I wanted to read and the page says, "available copies : 0, library copies : 1, No. of patrons in waiting list : 23, Click here to add yourself to the waiting list".

File this under w.t.f.

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Yeah, its a weird (and stupid) system. Libraries are toeing a fine line between getting sued vs not. They only got agreement for 'lending' ebooks if they set up a system like real books where if its out, you can't borrow it. This from the head librarian at the Sunnyvale Library at least.

I agree that it's silly from a technological point of view, but the libraries are at the mercy of publishers, and what else can the publishers do, really? If they let libraries "lend" out unlimited copies of books, who would buy them?

As someone said recently, if libraries didn't already exist, publishers would be doing their best to stop them happening.

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