this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
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Say it with me kids, “This is why we pirate digital media from billion dollar corporations”
this is also why i started buying physical books and using my local public library again.
Hell Yeah.
My local library allows borrowing ebooks. It's incredibly useful. I own two kindles and haven't spent a dime at Amazon for ebooks. I do buy physical books now and then from there, but only if I really need it and can't find elsewhere.
How do you return a borrowed ebook..?
It expires after two weeks. You can extend, just like borrowing a physical copy. Or return early, in which case it expires upon return.
I mean, yeah, sure, I guess that's a decent solutions in terms of modern IP shit.
But like, we all know you're not returning anything and if you wanted, you could also copy it for yourself.
I just dislike how it feels like when it was actually books, they had actual reasons to everything. There's a queue because there's limited copies. You need to return it and if you're late there's a fee, because it's from other people's time, etc. Nowadays that all feels like larping just to protect large companies IP's essentially. Because digital copies don't actually get returned.
Like when I was a kid I would've never thought a librarian would say "you're not allowed to read that anymore". Or that I couldn't copy a thing down at home from one of their books. But now as your tokens to ebooks expire, it kinda does feel like that.
My best friend is a librarian, and they've stopped buying ebook licenses because the terms were awful.
The publishers only allowed an ebook to be checked out a few times before the library had to purchase a license extension. The argument was that pylhysical books face wear and tear and eventually have to be replaced, so ebooks should have to be replaced too.
It's true that normal books do experience wear and tear, but looking at what my local library has I'd say that many or most can still least many years before needing to be retired or replaced.
As we're seeing with Amazon, with ebooks it's really the readers that expire over time
I find ebooks from the library to be very useful.
I'm not saying they're not, or that the librarians are any more capitalist than they were in the 90's. I'm just saying it feels like they are.
Big Library is not out to get you. They need to not piss off Big Publisher.
No no, Big Library just isn't Big enough to stick it to Big IP, so that's why it seems like it even though I know librarians are still much the same.
She may dress conservatively and act prim and proper, but behind closed doors librarians can get freaky!