Hacker News Reader

I live in a small country town. It's decent for its size, but it's very small.

In contrast, Archive.org is an absolutely fantastic library, and we're happy to support them.

Way better than my public library -- especially for hard-to-find media.

Ask about interlibrary loans; our rural library can get almost anything, given time.

Where I live, ILLs do not work for video games because the format identification for video games is “Electronic”, and their software is programmed to suppress the request button for these items because it is interpreted as “no physical media”. I emailed the people who run the system, they said it is a known issue, and as far as I can tell that just means they aren’t going to fix it, since it has been this way for at least three years.

I wonder what the material difference is between borrowing a film from the library (is this DVD? Blu-ray? Streaming?) and downloading it from a peer-to-peer network.

I suppose it's an act of support for your public library. But no one with a financial stake in that particular media is impacted in any way by using either method to obtain the film.

Came here to recommend this. A viable option, at least until Republicans completely defund public libraries.