Above is an alarming story about how one of the largest libraries in the country has been fooled into jumping on the ebook bandwagon. The article says nothing about the limitations and control that the ebook format allows tyrannical publishers. Since the New York Times doesn't see fit to tell you about these things, allow me to quote from someone who does:
From Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Libraries are a threat to the content industries and their plans for a pay-per-view delivery system. Libraries are leaks in the information economy…Because a library can lend a book at no charge, the publisher only makes money once. It can't charge per reading….If books become streams of data rather than objects for sale, they could be metered, rendering libraries superfluous or relegating them to vendor status. There would be nothing "public" about them.
We've got to start informing librarians of this vital issue and steering them away from subscription-based e-journals, proprietary formats, and site-licensed "ebooks." These things are bad, bad, bad. Again I quote from Vaidhyanathan:
Libraries are under incredible pressure to conform to the pay-per-view model. Increasingly, academic journals are coming to libraries in electronic form rather than on paper. So imagine this: An electronic journal is streamed into a library. A library never has it on its shelf, never owns a paper copy, can't archive it for posterity. Its patrons can access the material and maybe print it, maybe not. But if the subscription runs out, if the library loses funding and has to cancel that subscription, or if the company itself goes out of business, all the material is gone. The library has no trace of what it bought: no record, no archive. It's lost entirely. This is not a good model for a library. It defeats the fundamental purpose of a library. You might as well be sitting at a computer terminal in a copy shop.
Best argument for file sharing
Well, that's probably the best argument for file sharing that I can think of.
The ability to download these materials will mean a diversified acquisition system. Rather than having to rely on one or two sources for a copy of Bakhtin's out-of-print Art and Answerability, for example (as I recently had to do -- bought it on ebay; no one wants to part with it and it had been stolen from the local libraries), I would just do a seach for it on a few torrent streams.
Thanks for the argument! Can't wait to read the book -- maybe I can find it on NetLibrary...