They will generally have one on reserve that you can only check out for something like 4 hours or something.

My college has used the government covid money to pay for all students' textbooks and we hope to be able to include textbooks in tuition price from now on but they are ebooks only.

Thats fucked. I only bought two text books (30eur and 40eur) for the entire time I was in collage. All else I loaned from the school library for free.

They might have one or several copies, though maybe not the right edition and never enough for an entire cohort of students.

At my university, students who didn't buy the book would simply make photocopies from the library's copy or from a friend's. But then the photocopiers were modified so that they only operated using credits from "copy card" that was tied to the student ID.

I never knew anyone who got into trouble, but heard that you'd be called in if you were making "too many" copies.

edit: an extra word

It's weird because they know how many students they have, they know the text books needed before the course starts, they have a library, seems like the library should provide them.