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Comment by mrt0mat0 | Hacker News Reader

To all the "this is just a 10 dollar library card", I ask you this: if library books are the way to go, why do people buy endless amounts of books from amazon. Amazon became successful by selling books. Audible is another successful company that offers a feature that according to you, can be achieved at a library. Clearly libraries are missing something or else we'd be using them more. Maybe it's one click instant access. Maybe it's the larger selection, or that lack of having to wait. Regardless, it's not the same.

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This of course all depends on which country you live in. Where I am from libraries already offer ebook and audiobooks and university libraries have bought licenses from most academic publishers, so that students can download most of their course material and almost all journal articles free of charge. Also all libraries are a 15 minute bike ride away. All of them combined carry a higher quality selection of books than Amazon with their 600.000 could possibly have. Of course they probably won't have some obscure medieval vampire romance novel.

The only books I ever ordered from Amazon were books in foreign languages and academic books that Amazon apparently prints on demand on behalf of publishers. Books in my mother tongue can only be sold at a fixed price set by the publisher, so there is little incentive of buying from a company that mistreats their warehouse workers.

I'm surprised by all the comments in this thread saying that you have to physically go to your library during their open hours to borrow a book. Most libraries I know offer digital downloads through the Overdrive app.

I regularly borrow audiobooks and ebooks from the library with a couple of taps on my iPhone.

Yes, but they don't allow an unlimited number of patrons to read the book at the same time. You have to get in line. At my library, the wait time for popular ebooks can be more than a month. And once you do get to check out an ebook, you only have it for a couple weeks, then you have to "return" it, and if you want to read it again/more, get back in line.

That's clearly inferior to Amazon's service where you can read any book in their catalog at any time, even if a million other Amazon customers are simultaneously reading it, and you can open it and read it as often as you want, with no waiting.

I borrow ebooks from my library quite often, but I also buy a ton of books for my Kindle, for similar reasons as above, and will most likely subscribe to Kindle Unlimited (depending on the catalog — right now the catalog looks like a few bestsellers I've already read or don't care to read, plus several hundred thousand self-published romance novels).

> Maybe it's one click instant access. Maybe it's the larger selection, or that lack of having to wait.

Yes. Yes. Yes. As well as book condition/cleanliness, and being able to keep books forever.

My local library is also only open from 10am-6pm, and closed sundays, so unless I want to take time off of work, my only time to go to the library is on a Saturday afternoon. Usually when I buy a book via Amazon, it's spontaneous because of a recommendation. I'll have a friend recommend me a book. Click, it's ordered and shipping. I'll see a book recommended several times in the same HN thread, check reviews for it, click, ordered and shipping. I don't really remember the book's info in order to look up later while at a library.

Currently I have no idea how to check if a book is available at my branch or a nearby branch. I tried going to the library website and clicked their "check availability" link, and I was brought to a calendar for conference room reservations. Amazon is just a much more polished experience than my library. So yeah, I'll buy a book instead of getting it free from the library.

It reminds me of when people say that services like Netflix, Spotify, Steam, etc are cutting down on piracy because in many cases, they provide a simpler experience than the piracy does. Amazon and books (hell, Amazon and most products) provides that same simplification over a cheaper/free distributor.

Does your library offer e-books? You can check them out without ever visiting the branch - of course, the selection may be limited, but the convenience factor shouldn't be off by that much - apps like Overdrive and the like are fairly usable once you learn how to use them.

Libraries have fixed locations you must travel to, and limited collections (rarely more than one copy of each book) of aging content (limited range of latest material). If you want something in particular, good chance it's not available.

Amazon will, from the convenience of any computer (mobile devices included), ship you books from a vast & nearly inexhaustible collection at acceptable costs.

Now the Unlimited plan brings you both for $10/mo: beyond-library-scale of practically free books delivered instantly, and bringing you in close proximity to darn near every book ever written available at modest cost in 2 days.

Heck, many subscribers would pay more than $10/mo just in gas driving to the library.

Just to make sure we're all on the same page. Audible is just another piece of Amazon.

> Amazon became successful by selling books.

Licensing, not selling. Unless you were talking about dead-tree versions.

Since Amazon became wildly successful by selling dead-tree versions of books before it even started selling ebooks, yeah, I would assume that selling rather than licensing was what the grandparent post intended, and that it referred to dead-tree rather than electronic books.

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