What's preventing a library whose physical premises are closed from saying, "Okay, there are 10 copies of this book that literally nobody can get to, we'll lend out 10 e-books," using the old Controlled Digital Lending model?

That is, what about the lockdown requires moving away from the established (even if not court-tested) one-to-one basis and making a new fair use argument about uncontrolled digital lending?

> What's preventing a library

It's a huge waste of taxpayer money?

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean. It's a huge waste of taxpayer money for a library, which is already closed and which is already in possession of lots of books, to share those books electronically? How is taxpayer money being used here, let alone wasted?

You know exactly how much an SRE makes. That's not what a library should be spending money on. Simply making a copy is thousands of man hours simpler than making a consumer facing online asset tracking system. You wildly misrepresent my obvious intent.

Oh, that wasn't obvious to me at all - I thought you knew that plenty of libraries already have a consumer-facing online asset tracking system already, powered by the Internet Archive, which is why these books got scanned in the first place.