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Originally Posted by habernac
Better shut down all those public libraries out there.
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Funny you should mention public libraries...if there was, historically, no such thing as the library system and somebody wanted to start the world's first public library in today's age, do you think the book publishers would allow it? Of course they wouldn't. They'd fight the very concept of a public library, saying that it amounts to widespread copyright infringement and free lending of books would kill their industry and anyone who would even propose such a system must be a communist.
This exact idea was discussed on the Freakonomics blog a few months ago.
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.co...art-one-today/
Some choice quotes that are relevant to this discussion:
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The library bought its copy, of course. But let’s say 50 people will read that copy over the life of the book. If the library copy hadn’t existed, surely not all 50 of those people would have bought the book. But imagine that even 10 people would have. That’s 9 additional book sales lost by the writer and the publisher.
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But here’s the point I’m (finally) getting to: if there was no such thing today as the public library and someone like Bill Gates proposed to establish them in cities and towns across the U.S. (much like Andrew Carnegie once did), what would happen?
I am guessing there would be a huge pushback from book publishers. Given the current state of debate about intellectual property, can you imagine modern publishers being willing to sell one copy of a book and then have the owner let an unlimited number of strangers borrow it?
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