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Comment by Mindless2112 | Hacker News Reader

I'm more concerned for the libraries. They lose their ebooks after 2 years or 26/52 checkouts? Physical books can last for decades and innumerable checkouts if you have respectful patrons -- long enough that libraries eventually sell off old books to get shelf space for new ones.

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For a public library that traffics almost exclusively in popular materials (genre fiction and non-fiction written for a general audience) print books are bought with the understanding that they will be “weeded” after a couple of years anyway.

So? Imagine if we didn’t need to rebuy bullshit romance novels every few years as they’re stained with god knows what. Imagine how much further that money can go for the common good.

Hey, let's get rid of something I don't like. It's for the "common good".

The local public library's contents look mostly like what you'd expect in a K-12 school library. I suppose they know who their customers are.

Most public libraries offer Inter Library Loans that afford access to a far wider range of content.

Mostly, but not entirely. While libraries may acquire multiple copies of popular materials that have a very short shelf life, there are many circumstances when they will maintain a copy over an extended period. The shelf life also varies considerably according to the type of book. While genre fiction may only be around for a couple of years, non-fiction seems to stick around for a decade or more.

Every public library I've been in had lots of books that were older than a couple of years.

Do you have a reference for that?

My previous experience working at a library and a brief web search leads me to believe 26 checkouts is significantly above average for a hardback lifespan.

I don't have any statistics on physical books, but anecdotally the physical books I check out from the library happen to be much older than 2 years and still in good condition -- perhaps survivorship bias combined with my preference in books.

For ebooks there's this:

> Macmillan’s claim of only making $1.15 per book is incredibly misleading, Potash argued. “Seventy-nine percent expired and were removed from library catalogs because the two-year limit occurred first—not because they were checked out 52 times,” he said. In reality, the average is about 11.5 lends. According to Potash, the cost to the library is $6.07 every time someone borrows a Macmillan book.[1]

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa78wv/one-of-americas-large...

I don't know about today, but judging from the old checkout cards my library used to use when I was a kid books could be checked out quite a bit more than 26 times. The average would be quite a bit lower because many books are only rarely checked out.

One thing I dislike about library ebooks is how thin the selection is. It should be trivial for the publisher to offer every ebook ever published. It's insane that they felt the need to port the concept of scarcity to the digital world. ebooks should have something like the compulsory licensing system used for songs.

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