What I want to know is how we came to be in a world where e-books are a lot more expensive than physical books, so much so that the libraries are increasingly unable to afford them? "Librarians sometimes pay hundreds of dollars to circulate one copy of an e-book for a two-year period, a number that could theoretically add up to thousands for one book over decades." It's because of the way e-books are priced: you don't own them, the way you would a regular book, you lease them, and these agreements increase the cost of the book each time it is read. The problem is that publishers fundamentally disagree with the core purpose of libraries, which is to make books available for people to read without paying for them. And to me, this means they disagree with a core building block of a a free, open and democratic society. And that's a problem.
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