Amazon Kindle

i don't have a kindle, nor do i want one. i don't read books for pleasure. i read constantly, just not "books". so i have no idea about how the kindle works and how you gets books onto them.

however, my mom has a kindle and loves it. she was telling me that she needed to check out more books from her favorite author, and was hoping they were available. and that phrase: hoping they were available, rather puzzled and baffled me. it's a digital copy, how could you possibly run out of stock on anything digital.

so my mom showed me the whole process. she logs into our public library system, finds the books she wants, specifies the kindle format, selects them, clicks checkout, and she is taken to her amazon account where she can then select download to kindle.

for me, i guess, the baffling part is the public library system. we went through pages and pages of books that could be checked out electronically, for kindle, ipad, etc. and all the books listed had an availability notation. available / not available, and something like 1 of 1 copy available, or 0 of 1 copy not available... and this is what baffles me. i don't understand why our public library system is limited to only one copy of any book in an electronic download format.

i guess i'm paranoid and conspiracy minded, since that's the only way my mind can make sense of that.

toodles,
hmmm, maybe major geeks resident librarian knows why.
thanks in advance

 

ha, so it is a conspiracy ( and greed ).
actually, thank you for the answer.
as i was going to sleep last night, it dawned on me that it was probably a licensing thing.
good thing that libraries don't have to buy hammers, they would be a hundred bucks each.

 

As well they should be, since that's an entirely new factor that was never an issue with printed books. After all, no physical book has EVER been stolen, lost, or so damaged that the library was forced to replace it with a new copy. Never!

(I borrow the ePub files that OverDrive lets you download, so I can put them on my non-kindle reader. It must not have occurred to the publishers of these books that a dishonest person could strip the DRM from these books after download and just never return them... like so many other digital content business models, they've not really thought this out.)

 

I had an account with Barns And Noble. I downloaded all my selections to my laptop.

 

This is probably the reason why libraries pay more for ebooks. The more people who have access to any protected file, the more likely someone will remove or bypass that protection and then (illegally) make that file available to potentially thousands of users.