The notion of 'borrowing' an e-book, which has no intrinsic limit to number of times it can be checked out or when it must be returned, is a joke.

My library service has an e-book loan system. When I go to get an item - if they have it - it is often "unavailable to borrow". Ridiculous.

The apps are beyond janky compared to free PDFs and epubs delivered in seconds from libgen with no login.

Long live libgen - one of my favourite places on the ‘net.

Those are missing many books because they only work at the whim of the publishers. Also they cost extra money to run which further limits them.

Ah yes. The amazing service where you have to wait for someone else to finish reading an ebook before you are allowed to "borrow" it ... because reasons. Because obviously reading an ebook is not thread-safe.

As opposed to freely being able to download a PDF on-demand regardless of who else is reading it.

I don't need to use any janky apps to borrow a physical book though.