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Comment by CodeTheInternet | Hacker News Reader

My library has the option of "checking out" ebooks. They will "purchase" them and have a set "number of copies". I put all of these things in quotes as I'm not sure how its handled for essentially a digital file vs a physical paper book, or how the author/publisher/etc makes money in this deal.

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Penguin Random House charges libraries $35, $45, or $55 for each "copy" and then expires them after two years. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l... Hachette also expires their e-books after 2 years. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l... See also the drama about "Controlled Digital Lending", where a library makes their own scan of a book and lends it out.

That's plain naked rentseeking. I'd get them charging a nominal sum to prevent abuse (like "why I'd buy any books if I can just check out everything for free in the library" - virtually nobody ever says that but maybe they're afraid of it) but $55 is way over the cost of an average book, let alone ebook, and expiring them makes zero sense since popular book stops bringing substantial income quite soon so they literally lose nothing allowing the library to keep it.

Wow that is repulsively scummy.

It's surely competitive with physical books, including the cost of storing and handling them, otherwise libraries wouldn't buy them. A random on the internet says about library books: "Very popular hardcover books have a lifespan of around 20 circulations, which is around a year or less, depending on how well bound they are and how well the patrons treat them." Other books are regularly thrown away because they're not popular enough. So I presume publishers account for the short life of a library book in their pricing, and if they actually lasted forever, they'd cost more.

Having seen some of the contracts -- there are publishers which sell them with a lifetime measured in reads, and others with a lifetime measured in years (and you buy N copies), and a very very few who don't impose a lifetime.

In all cases the author gets paid through whatever royalty arrangements they made with the publisher -- but that might contain a lower or zero payment for library and/or educational purchases.

The idea is that a physical book has a lifetime before it has to be discarded due to wear, so they want the e-book to be the same. I think that's dumb, and don't feel we need to be tied to the durability of paper books, but that's their justification.

By that logic we could have made every maker happy by selling a buggywhip with every automobile.

I think mine also allows you to watch movies online, but I never tried it yet.

I think most libraries offering this are doing it through Hoopla. It works fine though you can only play them in a browser and the video quality is roughly at the level of a DVD.

As I understand it, the number of copies is enforced using DRM (which isn’t the best, of course), but the books are free and there’s usually a pretty wide selection.

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