[ih] borrowing e-books

[John Levine]

In article <82C6B71A-C0D1-4918-9B78-A7CD961AF79F at comcast.net> you write:
>Not really related to this discussion.  The head of the Internet Archive and the head of Boston Public Library were on Boston Public
>Radio last week. They were announcing a cooperation where you can check-out material in the BPL collection through the Internet
>Archive and only one person has access to the material at a time. Just like it was checked out.  What I didn’t hear them talk about
>was when the ‘book’ or whatever is returned, how is it they ensure the borrower doesn’t still have a copy?
>
>Any thoughts?

I think you should look at https://openlibrary.org/ and try it out.
You can check books out and read them on their web site or download a
locked epub or PDF that needs the Adobe Digital Editions app.

Time-limited e-books are nothing new.  I know of several systems that
license books to libraries so they can lend them out to one user at a
time, 3M Cloudlibrary, and Rakuten Overdrive which can lend you Kindle
or their own Kobo format.  There are also locked Adobe PDF and ePub
which as far as I can tell no public libraries use.  Look at your
local public library's web site and they'll likely have a link to some
of them.

The Internet Archive has an extremely aggressive interpretation of
copyright law in which they ship container loads of books to China to
be scanned, then ship them back and just stack up the containers.
Then they lend out the scans on the theory that it's just like lending
out the book.  If this went to court they'd probably lose, but at this
point no publisher wants to be the bad guy.

R's,
John

PS: if you live anywhere in NY State, you can get a NY Public Library
card which gives you access to a stupendous collection of indisputably
legal e-books.