I recently posted asking if Kindle Unlimited is a good value for SF because I was reading a lot and it was expensive. Some of you suggested I try the library instead. I’m in Los Angeles, so I got a digital library card for the Los Angeles Public Library.
I had noticed that a lot of the books I had already read were on KU, but not many of the ones on my list to read were. That sort of makes sense because I read a number of series books (mostly trilogies) and KU seems to mostly cover older things but not more recent popular works. Unfortunately my reading list is now mostly up to recent popular stuff.
The library has a similar issue: they have the recent/popular stuff, but there’s usually a waiting list for it. I reserved three books that had different wait times, the longest being two months out, but the shortest came up available the next day.
It works nice. When you get the book, you can read it on their web interface or app, but you also have them send it to your Kindle app, which is what I did. It shows up like an Amazon purchase, but with no cost, and then pops up in your Kindle library. You can have up to 30 books on hold (in your queue, waiting to be available) at a time, so depending on how fast you read, you can reserve a bunch so you’re in line while you’re reading others.
I think this will work good for me. It’s all completely free, and I had spent over $200 on books in the last few months, so it’s a giant savings of I keep this up. Thanks again.
It just feels weird to me that digital version of a book is treated as having limited amount…
It’s just bytes in some computer.
Why would user A need to wait until user B is finished with the book, before being able to read it?
Because if it was actually legitimately unlimited, nobody would pay for books. There’s Hoopla that my library also supports that has instant borrows of anything, but it’s capped at 6 per month.
There are authors who make decent money, but there are a lot more who don’t.
I understand the rationale, but that only means the author’s contracts should be adjusted so that their revenue is function of the reads, not the sales. (Or some other metric)
Libraries are (generally) not for profit. There’s not really the revenue stream to strike deals like that. Publishers are likely only getting a pittance from licensing to libraries, hell for most publishers they likely only do it as a PR move, and if they start charging per read… well, libraries may as well not bother with ebook licensing at that point and just put a book scanner in the library.
And how do they get paid if everyone is reading from the library, who’s allowed unlimited loans? Unless you raise their cost per title, which they can’t afford.
I read 25 books some months, but some are 50, and some are more. Do you really want your library to pay for every book I read if they get charged per read?
If they don’t, even the handful of authors who are making money now are in trouble. If that best seller is free without restriction from the library, what are the chances that even they sell enough to survive?
It’s just the cost model. The authors usually write as their primary source of income, so they’re selling each book. If they just sold one and everyone copied it, it would either have to be tremendously expensive or it wouldn’t pay their bills. I brought my kids up not to pirate music and movies for the same reason - it doesn’t support the artists. I’m actually a bit uncomfortable using the library for the same reason since I can afford the books if I just reprioritize a bit.
The same happens with movies in theater. When we switched to digital, a decades ago, they was like “everyone can have the movies at the same time, not like with limited physical copies”.
It was a lie. Sure, everyone can have a copy on the release day, but not everyone will have the time-key for delock it from X days since Y date. So some theaters will have it first weeks, others only the third ones.
