That's true of most books, yet people still seem to buy them.

I remember reading a study that suggested that having a mobile library with onboard printer to print your request instead of a paper loan, would work out cheaper. Each library loan approximately worked out to be about £6. Libraries aren't really free.

Now I'd personally prefer any book or text over the wire, to spending over £4 getting to my local library, where the seating is crap, and I can't hold a cup of coffee.

> Most of these books are available through your local library for free.

All inter-library loans in my library board cost 1 UKP ( c. $1.40 ) which quickly mounts-up when there's very little on the shelf in the local branch.

I could read 'Excel 2003 for Dummies' again, I suppose, but I'm a bit bored of it to be honest...

In the US, many libraries have a system called Overdrive that offers ebooks (and audiobooks) for borrowing. It's essentially a free version of this service, but with better selection.

Hoopla as well.

Actually I doubt that, 50% are probably automatically generated rubbish that is (luckily) not available in a local library.

But yeah, this is probably just "renting". I doubt you could download them all but I would love to try doing exactly that.

Actually, I bet most of these books are published by Amazon and are Kindle exclusives. Then they manually add in a few hundred or thousand well-known books to make it look like a grand selection.

Let's see, got to my local library or just tap the kindle app? Hmmmmmm