I’ve rented a book from internet archive and it gives an option to rent for an hour, and you need to “return” it when you’re done. My hour ran out and it’s given me the option to rent it again, for free. This concept confuses me. If it’s free, wouldn’t they just have it there for anyone to read?
I have a theory but wanted to see if there was a proper explanation!
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> If it’s free, wouldn’t they just have it there for anyone to read?
It is an analogue to real books. Authors write books and publishers create and distribute them, and those people want to be paid. Public libraries collect books and make them available to the public but a traditional library requires actually obtaining those physical books, buying them from the publishers and authors.
With digital copies of books it is conceptually possible to simply duplicate the digital data endlessly, so a single library server could provide the entire world with access to the same copy of a book. Obviously though the author and publisher really don’t want to only sell a single copy of their book so they impose artificial limits on their distribution. For a given digital copy of the book only one person is allowed to view it at a time, mimicking the behavior of a physical book in a library. Different libraries are still required to obtain their own copy of the book in digital form, and when one person checks it out someone else must wait to gain access.
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