That seems horrendous. Don't many community/government libraries do this? Seems like a huge blow to freedom of information and sharing.
Those books are licensed to the libraries by the publishers. The introduction of the opinion here explains how it works:
> This dispute concerns the way libraries lend ebooks. Public and academic libraries in the United States spend billions of dollars each year obtaining print books and ebooks for their patrons to borrow for free. Pls.’ 56.1 ¶ 113. Libraries usually buy their print books from publishers or wholesalers. Id. ¶ 114. Copies of ebooks, however, are typically not bought but licensed to libraries from publishers through distributors called “aggregators.” Id. ¶ 117. The Publishers task aggregators with ensuring that a library lends its ebooks only to the library’s members. Id. ¶¶ 123, 125. The Publishers also require aggregators to employ approved “digital rights management” (“DRM”) software and other security measures to prevent unauthorized copying or distribution of ebook files. Id. ¶ 126.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53..., page 3 (emphasis added).
If I rightly own a copy of a book, I don’t think any court within the bounds of absurdity would say I can’t make a digital copy for myself because that’s how I prefer to consume it. Being allowed to lend one finite form but not another equivalent one is definitely something law or license might specify, but that doesn’t mean it makes any kind of sense.
"myself" being the operative word here.
you can make 100 copies for yourself. what you can't do is make a copy that you give to someone else while simultaneously retaining access to the original (or another copy).
the way libraries work is by relinquishing posession, which replication would circumvent.
I’m pretty sure I can do that.
> the way libraries work is by relinquishing posession
I almost included that I could shred my copy, keeping only the digital equivalent, and still retain the same rights to the work and lending it.
Any individual in IA’s position could do this without fear of legal scrutiny. An organization doing it is under scrutiny not because there’s actual, meaningful copyright violation happening but because they systemized a thing no reasonable person would object to individuals doing.
Not legally.
> I almost included that I could shred my copy, keeping only the digital equivalent, and still retain the same rights to the work and lending it.
This is the part that is not true. For example, you are free to transcribe a book onto a parchement and read it that way, and store the parchment separately from the book for archival purposes, and keep the parchement even if the original book gets destroyed.
However, this is a limited exception to copyright. You are not in fact allowed, at any point before or after the original copy is destroyed, to lend or re-sell the parchment you created. That parchment will forever be an unauthorized copy, but one that you are allowed to use in certain limited ways.
The only wrinkle is that, at least in the EU, when you acquire an authorized digital copy of a work, you are allowed to lend or sell that copy as long as you don't retain access to it during the lending/after the sale. This is allowed even though technically you are technically creating a new copy of the digital work and destroying your own afterwards, but this is an exception specific to digital realms, it can't be extended to digital copies you make of a phyisical work.
Inspired by the fact that my emulation of Link's Awakening to play on a screen I could see is technically legal since we had a cartridge stuffed away in a drawer. But for 10-15 years that cartridge lived in a limbo land of 'we used to have that, it might still be around somewhere...'
Basically, the only thing you are legally allowed to sell is the exact copy you bought of a physical representation of a work, assuming it was created by an authorized entity. You do not legally own an abstract copy of the idealized work, you own a physical object which happens to represent a copy of that work.
Note that this is in fact very much how most people would think of copyright. If I buy a book and someone steals it from me, or it is there in my house and it burns down, I don't have some right to now obtain another physical representation of that novel free of charge, or to obtain a copy made by a friend with a xerox. My sole right was to that one physical copy I bought, and that no longer exists.
I thought Kindle/Nook/Apple books/etc completely dominated that market. Reading PDFs on computers/tablets for long form stuff never made much sense to me. I'm curious if local libraries get much traction from their digital libraries.
I could see audiobooks getting locked down being a big hit though. Audible has a monopoly on that harder than ebooks ever experienced.
Did you mean 2020? Or did they spike before the pandemic really started?
I also occasionally let him have a little bit of Libby or scratch time (which I deem "educational") before going to school or before bed. (Everything is contingent on behavior.)
Aside from minecraft/pokemon stuff, he typically reads a mix of kids graphic novels and books. Including Tristan Strong, Artimis Fowl, Wings of Fire, Dogman. He's also read Harry Potter, some Terry Pratchett, and Tolkien. He first read the Lord of the Rings in the summer between first and second grade, which blew my mind (it was middle or high school or me). So I don't really worry about stuff like the ratio of graphic novels to textual books.