And then there's print-on-demand. You don't need a library for that. That's awesome that you personally love reading on a physical page, but that's not a reason to warehouse hundreds of millions of physical books that get checked out once a decade.
That loss may or may not be economically required -- but it's still a loss either way.
> It's always going to be cheaper for a library to lend internet/devices for reading
The economics of this may differ depending on where you are, but I'm 99% sure that this isn't the case where I am.
And I think you may be severly underestimating the cost of maintaining library-sized collections of books, in labor and utilities and maintenance and real estate. Consumer digital devices, especially things like e-ink readers, cost almost nothing compared to that.
The expense wouldn't be in the communications. It would be in replacing the broken devices. And with the program I'm familiar with, there was no communications involved anyway. You get the ebook preloaded on the device.
> I think you may be severly underestimating the cost of maintaining library-sized collections of books, in labor and utilities and maintenance and real estate.
I'm very familiar with these costs in the library system where I live, and I am privy to the figures it was looking at when developing their own ebook program.
I know they vary a lot depending on where you are, though, so it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that there are areas where it pencils out very differently.
However, as I've said, even if the ebook program saved big money, something important is still lost without physical books.
It doesn't have to be that way. If I was an ereader developer, there are a lot of things easily done to make it more physical book-like:
1. use scanned images, rather than reflowable text
2. render fonts that have subtle differences from one 'a' to the next 'a'
3. don't line the text up perfectly on the line
4. add an ink blotch here and there, and maybe a coffee ring
5. scan a blank page of real paper and use that as a background
6. scan a couple dozen of (5) and randomly use them
7. make the reader the size and shape of a pocketbook. I'm amazed that nobody does this. After all, they are "pocket" books, and ereaders don't fit in a pocket.
8. use a high res screen. While you don't really notice it consciously, a retina image of text is much easier on the eyes
9. make the ereader easily held and manipulated with one hand. Amazon's used to be like this, but then their "improved" models turned left and went over the embankment. The Kindle3 is the pinnacle of their ereaders
10. make an ereader display two facing pages at once. You know, like a book
11. make a larger ereader for the usual size of larger, non-pocketbook books
12. add the scent of paper to it. P.S. Some printed books smell like vomit. Don't emulate that.
13. have a "stack" of previous pages visited. So I can flip to another page, and reliably flip back to where I was
14. have a way to flip through the book, i.e. show pages sequentially, lingering on each for a second or so. Maybe have the flip speed sensitive to how hard you press the button
As for the other issue, which types of screens have you tried? In particular, what e-ink tablets have you tried?
It sounds like you don't find ordinary physical books to be valuable. I am of the opposite opinion. Having them digitized and available online is a good thing, but losing access to the physical copies is a real loss to a number of people. The two primary things I can think of at the moment are...
People who don't have access to the internet or have machines on which they can read electronic books. There are lots of such people.
People who find that reading a physical book is simply a better reading experience than reading on the screen. I am one of those. Reading on a computer or tablet is fine for consulting reference material, but if I want to actually read, quite a lot is lost by reading it on the screen. I've tried reading on screens, and it's just so uncomfortable that I can't do it and be happy about it. Which means that if I didn't have a physical copy, I'd probably just not read the book.